More Ocarina of Time Commentary and Reviews! 🧚 | Ep. 151

What's up and welcome to me, you, and Switch 2. I am me, Tom Tate, and you are you.

So let's talk about Switch 2. This is the latest and greatest Nintendo Switch 2 news brought to you every Tuesday and Friday in snackable five to 10-minute episodes. Today happens to be Tuesday. It is November 10th.

It's 7.52 a.m. on the East Coast. This is episode 151.

Hope that you had a great weekend. I had a very action-packed weekend.

Our whole family went to a college women's volleyball game,

Just to check out kind of how intense it is at that level.

My younger daughter, she just got into volleyball for the first time this year.

She's great. She's really taken to the sport. So it was fun to show her kind of how far it can go with some hard work.

The team we went to go see, they lost, but it was still super inspiring.

And then on Saturday night, my son and I went to a Philadelphia Union game, which is our Philadelphia soccer team.

We went with a few of his friends and their parents. They did win, and it was a really good time. My first union game, a lot of energy in that stadium. They had fireworks every time there was a goal.

They have a fan section that is absolutely going crazy throughout the whole game.

And it was really, really nice to just leave the house.

It's always nice to leave the house. But secretly, I was trying to log as much time with The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time as possible and leaving the house cut into my time. But that's okay. That's okay. I love my family and I love spending time with my family.

But I did get a little bit of play time in.

I'm enjoying the game a ton. So if I had to rank this game, it would probably be in my top five Zelda games of all time.

I'm enjoying this just as much, if not more, than the many times I've played

The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time on 3DS and Nintendo 64.

If I had to give it a rating, I would probably give it a 10 out of 10.

I've read a lot of reviews that were 9 out of 10. I would give this a 10 out of 10.

Obviously, I haven't finished the game yet. I'm just after you unlock Adult

Link. That's not a spoiler because everyone knows Adult Link is in this game.

But just to give you some context on where I'm at.

So I'm not too far, but I spent a lot of time in this world.

I did a few dungeons. I explored the many nooks and crannies in each area.

I'm hunting for all the extra things that you can collect, just having a really great time.

So today I wanted to just read a few quotes from real reviews and share some

Zelda and non-Zelda headlines. If you are digging the game, let me know your feedback. You can reach me at switch2pod, that's switch with the number two pod on BlueSky.

And if you're not on blue sky you can find me on instagram send me a direct message there too, okay ollie reynolds uh over at nintendo life dedicated a lot of his review to talk about the quality of life improvements like you know mapping certain items to the d-pad buttons which has been really convenient i won't lie, i don't disagree with a lot of his his points uh there are so many great changes to just make this game more fluid and playable the jump button is really nice Really enjoying that.

The sprint button is really nice as well. So I...

Also read, like he references the ability to use your voice or instruments to play the ocarina tunes.

I have not done that yet. I've been playing with an 8-bit Do controller that does not have a microphone input, right?

So I haven't tested this yet, but it is very cool that you can do this.

And obviously I'm seeing videos of people using the actual, you know, the Hori ocarina accessory that they've been selling.

All cool stuff. Here's a quote from Ollie. he wrote Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 is a stellar reimagining of the original one that completely revamps the experience with stunning visuals modernized gameplay and vastly improved audio, despite some minor blemishes this is comfortably, the most visually stunning work Nintendo has ever put out and it's unquestionably the best way to play one of the most seminal games of all time,

So before I read Ollie's joys and cons, I was texting with a few of my friends.

We've been texting a lot about this game. And two things that I wrote that kind of mirrors what I've read from Ollie is I think this is the best looking Nintendo game I have ever played.

It is just absolutely incredible.

The amount of detail that they put into this world. I know they tapped a lot of third-party developers to help support this.

Uh monolith soft i think bandai namco also helped with this one too but it just looks absolutely incredible and the other thing that i shared too uh.

And you know i i try not to include too much of my opinions in these podcast episodes this is a news show uh but i'm just falling in love with this game so i'm going to share this i think that donkey kong bonanza and the legend of zelda Ocarina of Time, are the two best games that Nintendo has ever produced, ever developed. And I.

I say that not to say that they're my favorite Nintendo games, but I think structurally, gameplay-wise, graphically, music, storytelling, these are the best games I've ever seen from Nintendo. These two games that they produced.

So all that to say, I think that we are experiencing peak Nintendo.

Now, I know we all want an original Mario title. We all want an original Zelda title.

Uh all that stuff i agree with that and i can't wait until we get it because i just feel like nintendo you know first party titles like they are operating, at their peak the core team the core team i know yoshi was like okay.

Uh and we get some like you know minor games like star fox was fine right but like if you think about the teams that produce your mainline zeldas and your mainline Mario's, the team that produced Donkey Kong Bonanza, like they are, operating at their peak. Okay, enough of my rant.

Okay, the joys and cons from Ali's review. Joys.

A 28-year-old game feels new again. Stunning visuals across the board.

Modernized gameplay feels awesome. Fun Ocarina microphone gimmicks.

Hall of Fallen Foes is a neat little bonus and easily the best way to play Ocarina of Time. Cons.

Veterans will find very little challenge and the lack of master quest is a sore point.

Distant visuals look overly smooth with some shimmering and only one manual save file.

I did notice that. So that is definitely a con if you're trying to play multiple games, but you could always create multiple profiles. I know that's not ideal.

He gave it a 9 out of 10. Kyle Hilliard at Game Informer gave it a 9.25 out of 10.

I loved his final line of his review. For many like me, the original Ocarina of Time is an impactful adventure that arrived at a time in their lives when magic still felt real.

Playing the game again 28 years later and appreciating the care taken to maintain and improve that original vision was the ultimate surprise of the whole experience.

I didn't expect to be so moved.

Logan Plant at IGN has both a written review and a very polished 20-minute video review that I recommend.

If you like watching video reviews, they did a fantastic job at IGN.

Logan Plant and his team, to produce this 20-minute review.

I listened to his conversation with Brian Shea on the All Things Nintendo podcast over the weekend. It was a good listen, no real spoilers.

They dug very deep into the game. He talked about, on the podcast, he was talking about how he was very much evaluating this as its own thing like this isn't just like ocarina of time remake like this is its own game, uh and it needs to be measured in in in that lens right and not just in strict comparison to the original, so he wrote in his review two eras intertwine in the legend of zelda ocarina of times remake nintendo skillfully melds the world and dungeon design of classic zeldas with the movement and presentation of its most recent games creating both a beautiful retelling of a legend and a rich adventure that stands on its own.

There are other really positive reviews, but I wanted to go back to the Nintendo

Life review and read one more line.

I'm probably going to get into some light spoiler territory.

So if you don't want spoilers at all, fast forward just a bit, maybe 60 seconds or so.

Ollie Reynolds in his final line of his review at Nintendo Life, he wrote, that said, it is a very safe remake.

Despite lots of minor changes throughout, it's still essentially the same game you've likely already played.

And so you might find it offers little challenge if you're familiar with the

N64 original or 3DS remake.

This makes the lack of MasterQuest or really any kind of hard mode particularly glaring, but I'm hopeful it'll be added in the future.

I don't disagree with everything that he says. So after this was written, there were a bunch of articles that came out that shared that data miners found evidence in the code for MasterQuest and possibly some Majora's Mask content.

So MasterQuest was a mode...

Released with the GameCube release of Ocarina of Time.

So there was a GameCube disc that included Ocarina of Time, the N64 version, and it had this master quest where dungeons were remixed, and the world was mirrored and there was some additional, I think, hard mode type stuff added to it.

It turns out the remixed dungeons and mirrored world exists in some of the Nintendo

Switch 2 code, but it's behind this flag.

That checks to see if dlc is owned so if you pass that check all of this code unlocks so we will wait to see if the master quest is indeed going to be dlc or behind some amiibo or something like that and then there's some majora's mask kind of like easter eggy stuff in the code.

I don't know if that points to a full remake of majora's mask although that would certainly make sense since they have all the assets built, it would be a shame if they didn't just program Majora's Mask and build that out because they have so much of it already done because Majora's Mask very much took place in the same world as Ocarina of Time.

Another great article that I'll link to is an interview with John Batiste.

He is an incredible musician. If you haven't heard his music, definitely check him out. He is apparently a big fan of games and game music.

I saw some content with him earlier this year with the main composer from the

Final Fantasy series, and he was involved in the press activity for Ocarina of Time.

In the GoNintendo article that I'll link to in the notes, he geeks out on the underlying music theory behind some of the songs that Koji Kondo composed.

And he talks about his history with gaming and he talks about some other games that he played, some other music that he really enjoyed from different games. It's a good article.

And there's a few articles with him that you can find on the internet, but I'll link to just one.

That's gonna be it for today. I'm over the 10 minute mark. So thank you so much for your time and your attention. If you've got an additional 10 seconds,

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I do wanna shout out a five-star review from a user on Apple Podcasts called Cook E-Cut.

And this is actually from July 17th, 2026, but the origin country is Greece.

Uh, so I only typically check a few sites, uh, to understand where ratings are coming from.

The U S one is the most obvious, but occasionally I'll check like Canada or the UK just to see kind of who's leaving reviews. So I can recognize you.

Um, I never check Greece. Uh, so cookie cut wrote great with an exclamation point, five-star review to the point, no hot takes, no nonsense, quick updates, well-delivered, much needed full thumbs up.

So I want to thank you, Cookie Cut, for your review back in July.

I know it's been a while, but I would love to recognize you on the show.

You can find everything at switch2pod.com. That's switch with the number 2pod.com.

I'm on Blue Sky Instagram, same handle. I'll be back on Friday with the latest and greatest news.

Until then, I'm going to be playing a lot of Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time in my spare time.

Early mornings, late nights. I'm just enjoying the game so much.

Much love. Now go play some games.