Image: Nintendo Life
Nintendo has today shared even more insights into the development of Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 in the latest chapters of its Ask the Ontwikkelaar series. One such story is all about the new voice cast, which apparently features some familiar pipes.
Series Producer Eiji Aonuma and game Director HokWai Ng explain that the team didn’t want to “mess with established perceptions of how certain characters sound based on the original,” so Nintendo conducted blind auditions to really focus on matching the voice to the role.
“We deliberately hid the voice actors’ names during the Japanese auditions to force ourselves to decide based solely on which voices most closely resembled those of the original,” Aonuma-san explains.
As luck would have it, such an approach led Nintendo to select an actor who had previously appeared in the N64 original — voicing the same character, no less! “None of us saw that coming,” Aonuma-san notes.
In true Nintendo hush-hush fashion, the interview doesn’t mention the voice actor or character by name, but there is already a fair amount of speculation out there that Kaori Mizuhashi (the actor who voiced Navi in the original) might be returning to voice the fairy again this time around.
We won’t know for sure until we get to play the game ourselves — and even then, we have to imagine that Mizuhashi would only be handling the Japanese version — but what a neat little bit of luck on Nintendo’s part. Hey, you’re unlikely to find anyone who sounds more like the N64 original.
What do you make of this approach to voice casting? Let us know in the comments.
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