BODY: The desert is back, and the Gerudo are still not happy to see you.
Nintendo has published new footage from the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, this time spotlighting Gerudo Fortress โ the sandstone stronghold of the all-female Gerudo tribe, described in Nintendo's own copy as "a fortress built in a vast desert, home to the all-female Gerudo tribe."
The clip shows an adult Link, Master Sword and Hylian Shield in hand, moving through the fortress's stacked walkways and canvas awnings under a sharply upgraded lighting model. The geometry is recognizably the 1998 layout, but the textures, shadows and draw distance are doing work the Nintendo 64 could only imply. Crucially for the faithful: the music is untouched.
The video is part of a daily cadence Nintendo has settled into ahead of launch, each entry taking a single location on tour. Gerudo Fortress follows the previous day's look at Hyrule Castle Town, and the sequence is tracking roughly the order players encounter these places in game โ which means Nintendo has several more marquee reveals in reserve.
The remake arrives November 5 on Nintendo Switch 2, priced at ยฅ8,980 for the physical edition and ยฅ7,980 for the download version โ the now-familiar Nintendo split that quietly rewards buying digital, and a premium tier above the company's older Switch pricing.
The insider take
Gerudo Fortress is the one stop on this tour that Japanese fans have been actively waiting to see, and not only for the thieving guards. The original Japanese N64 cartridge carried a Gerudo crest that resembled an Islamic star-and-crescent, plus Arabic-script elements in the Spirit Temple's architecture; Nintendo swapped both out in later releases. Japanese fan accounts on X have already started freeze-framing this footage looking for which version of those assets made the cut โ a small detail, but one that locals read as a signal of how literally Nintendo is treating "remake" versus "remaster." The footage so far suggests a studio aiming for reverence with a new coat of paint, not reinterpretation.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).