Nintendo Shares Ocarina of Time Switch 2 Design Sketches

The latest Ask the Разработчик interviews are packed with interesting details about the making of Ocarina of Time on Switch 2. One such story concerns the game’s reimagined visuals, which Nintendo was even kind enough to share some initial sketches of.

According to Art Director Aya Shida, the team was consciously fighting a battle between making the game more realistic with the improved power of the Switch 2, and retaining the spirit of the original — a somewhat dark world, filled with weird characters. She therefore relied on phrases like “a puppet-show feel” and “the analogue feel of practical effects films” during development to reflect the goal: “both create a convincing sense that the characters truly exist within their respective fantasy worlds”.

When it came to these characters, the team wanted to preserve their “familiar presence” first and foremost, before adding “designs unique to this game” on top. Hence, we end up with a recognisable Child Link, but with far more costume bells and whistles attached.

Here’s a handful of the design sketches themselves, so you can see how the characters were initially conceptualised:

The same can be said for the game’s iconic maps. “We didn’t want to change the feel of each location or the way the locations connected with one another,” Director HokWai Ng says in the interview, “both of which are so characteristic of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”. The team therefore went back to one of the artists who had worked on illustrations for the N64 original, and asked them to draw a new map for the game.

We even get to see this very sketch, too:

Such an approach resulted in the style we see today, which, we must say, has grown on us over the last few months — it really is quite the looker, eh?

One thing that is already rubbing some people up the wrong way, mind you, is how the game seemingly opts for SMAA over DLSS for its upscaling and anti-aliasing tech. Footage of the game’s preloaded intellectual property notice has been doing the rounds on social media, where AMD FSR 1.0 and SMAA are listed under third-party technologies over Nvidia’s DLSS. The same approach was taken on Donkey Kong Bananza, we should point out.

Based on everything that we’ve seen of the game so far, the DLSS departure doesn’t seem to have had all that much negative impact on the finished result, but it’s still a shame to see even Nintendo’s biggest games missing out — particularly after all the DLSS hype in the console’s reveal.

What do you make of these design sketches? Let us know in the comments.