BODY: Eiji Aonuma asked his team to add warp points to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Then he made them take all of them out again.
That reversal is the centerpiece of Nintendo's 24th "Ask the Developer" interview, published November 2 ahead of the Switch 2 full remake's November 5 release. Aonuma, who has worked on every Zelda title since the 1998 original, admitted he was bothered by a quirk veterans know well: on Hyrule Field, the fastest way to travel is to roll, because the spin-attack lunge is marginally quicker than running. After Breath of the Wild trained players to expect fast travel everywhere, shortcuts seemed like an obvious fix. "But once we actually played with the warp points, you stopped noticing the things that make you pause and ask 'wait, what's that?'" he said. "So I had them pull out all of the warp points I'd proposed myself."
Co-producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi — director of Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and a Zelda developer since the Game Boy Color Oracle games — said his main instruction to the team was procedural, not creative: decide up front what changes and what doesn't, especially where the Switch 2 controller differs from the N64 pad.
Both producers deliberately stood back. Aonuma says he told staff to change whatever they wanted, because the point of the project was partly internal: this year marks 40 years since the first Legend of Zelda, and much of his current team has only shipped recent entries. He wanted them to reinterpret Ocarina and find out for themselves why it matters. "I thought they'd change more," he said. "They cared about the original far more than we'd imagined."
The interview also yields a new Koji Kondo story. With the final boss fight finished at the deadline wire, Kondo delivered an upbeat, brisk track. Aonuma nervously told him, "It's very good, but something isn't right." Kondo replied, "Got it, I'll change it" — and produced the now-famous version the next day, so fast the team still jokes he had both ready.
The insider take
"Ask the Developer" is Nintendo's most controlled PR channel, and the shape of this installment is telling. Japanese coverage has latched onto the warp-point confession rather than any technical detail, because it answers the anxiety circulating on Hatena and 5ch since the remake was announced: that a 2026 Zelda team would smooth Ocarina into a modern open-world convenience machine. Aonuma killing his own quality-of-life feature is exactly the reassurance Kyoto wanted in print three days before launch. Note also what the piece avoids — no mention of pricing, performance modes, or the 3DS version's extras. Part two, subtitled "The look changes, the experience doesn't," goes up today, which is where those specifics will likely land.
Originally reported by はてなブックマーク (Japanese).