What ‘Legend of Zelda’ Superfan Jon Batiste Thinks of ‘Ocarina of Time’ Remake and the Game’s Iconic Score

Hey! Listen! “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” remake is out, and the initial response from critics is overwhelmingly positive. And while it’s still too early to tell exactly what gamers will make of the reimagined title, which released Thursday, musician Jon Batiste has offered up a teaser review as one of the lucky few superfans who got early access from Nintendo.

“I’ve gotten to play the new one, and I haven’t finished it, but you can sense that there may be some twists, some surprises that are welcome, but it’s not gonna be completely different. And that’s to its credit,” Batiste told Variety during an interview at Nintendo’s “Ocarina of Time” launch event held at the Nintendo store in New York Wednesday night. “That’s the way a melody or a musical movement, it inspires that generation and you pass it on to the next generation and they take it and take the essence of what resonates for them, but then it’s also got some other things that make it really of the now.”

Built exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2, “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” remake is based on the game released in 1998 for Nintendo 64. As in the original “Ocarina of Time” game, the remake follows Link, who must become the Hero of Time and protect the kingdom of Hyrule from the evil Ganondorf, who is plotting to steal the mythical Triforce from the Sacred Realm in hopes of ultimately taking over the world.

“That one opened my whole perception of what a game could be, and I think it did that for a lot of us,” Batiste says of playing the original 1998 release. “It feels like you’re in a universe all its own, and there’s this sort of open world that it blends things that I loved about games that I played before. Like, I love ‘Street Fighter 2’ and we love to play that because my sister and my cousins, we could have competitions and all of us could play together. But then there’s this sort of open-world RPG, but not, but action-adventure that ‘Ocarina of Time’ introduces to the canon and it makes you realize that you can blend this sort of gameplay and more.”

As a musician, Batiste naturally has an affinity for the music of “The Legend of Zelda” franchise and says he has a special fondness for the “Ocarina of Time” soundtrack from composer Koji Kondo.

“Then there’s the score,” Batiste says. “One of the things that I loved about many of the games that we played was the scores. And I started to even play those scores on instruments when I was getting to the age of us really getting into music. So this was the game that opened my mind to the possibility of what peak gameplay could be, and then you could see sort of from that point on in my choices of what I would play and what I would immerse myself in. It’s like, oh yeah, I’m trying to find that feeling again. That’s the vibe, and now it’s coming back. If it doesn’t change anything and it just captures that essence and reintroduces that to the world 20 years later, it would already be an amazing achievement.”