After 28 long years, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is finally getting a jump button in the Switch 2 remake because Nintendo knew it'd feel "jarring" without one, even if the decision threw some devs from the OG since it was such a "convenient" design choice previously.
Speaking in a new installment of Nintendo's Ask the Developer interview, Ocarina of Time remake program director Hiroki Taguchi – who first joined the Zelda team to work on Breath of the Wild – notes that certain "adjustments" have been made "so that people who've played titles from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild onward won't find the experience jarring as they make their way through the adventure."
Director HokWai Ng adds to this, specifying that "that's also one of the reasons we removed auto-jump." Previously, Link couldn't jump on command – if push came to shove, he could muster up a hop if you pushed the control stick forward in specific places, and as Ng says, "the places where jumping was possible and where it wasn't were clearly defined."
Even so, that may not cut it for players who've gotten used to the more modern Zelda adventures where they can jump around as much as they please.
"So, for Link's jump, we carried over the controls from more recent titles in the series and made it possible to jump anywhere with a single button press," Ng adds.
Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma reckons that this addition "makes exploration much more exciting," but adding it was no small feat.
"Since there were places where we preferred players not to jump, the auto-jump system was, in some ways, convenient from a development standpoint," he admits.
"If you remove that restriction and make it possible to jump anywhere, you need to anticipate all kinds of player behavior and make corresponding adjustments to the environment. So, at first, we were like, 'Are we sure about this?'" he laughs. "So, even a single change can instantly increase the number of things that need to be reviewed."
The new jump ability was something that Nintendo had to consider when it came to all the terrain in the game – and how both Young and Adult versions of Link would traverse it.
Art director Aya Shida notes that since "the distance they can jump differs slightly between the two," it meant that "even when designing a single piece of terrain, it was challenging to find the right balance in terms of making gaps just the right distance to jump across."
This also meant a change to Ocarina of Time's returning Jump Attack. Taguchi notes that in the OG game, you could launch a Jump Attack using just one button, whereas the Switch 2 remake uses a Breath of the Wild-style "two-step approach." However, this didn't sit quite right with Aonuma.
"Trouble was, I was so used to the original game's controls that I just couldn't get the hang of it," Aonuma laughs. "When I told the team, 'This just doesn't feel as satisfying as the original Jump Attack,' they added a way to perform it with a single button press."
The devs are aware this is a matter of personal preference, though – fellow producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi notes that he was "more used to jumping first and then attacking," and that "in the end, we implemented both control schemes so that fans of the original game, as well as those who've played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild but not The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, could have a comfortable experience. That said, neither control scheme gets in the way of the other."
It's a more flexible approach to modern improvements than the devs took with a different – now scrapped –quality-of-life improvement, though.
Aonuma noted how he first requested the devs to add Breath of the Wild-style warp points, but later asked them to be removed after he realized that they ruined the "important" moments of discovery during the exploration of the world.
