When the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake was first revealed, one of the most common knee-jerk reactions I saw on the internet was in response to the game’s overall visual style. And everyone seemed to be focusing on one thing in particular: Link’s clothes.
Basically, Link’s clothes have a ridiculous amount of detail. They appear to be hand woven from some sort of fiber and you can see every stitch. There is fringe around the bottom and wider points where the sleeves attach and where her hat meets. On his tunic he wears a sort of leather armor with swirling leaf patterns. Adult Link’s boots have similar engravings. It doesn’t all look hyperrealistic or anything, but it certainly contains excess complexity that the Nintendo 64 Link could never have dreamed of.
There was, however, some debate as to whether this was a good thing or not. Some people have compared it to the look of Unreal Engine fan games, which were often mocked for lacking the simplistic charm of typical Nintendo games. Many people thought Link stood out from his surroundings, especially when he stood next to other NPCs with less detail, like some people in Castle Town. But others really liked the tunic and its details, and noted how well it spoke to Link’s origins as a child of the forest.
Well, according to the game’s developers, that story is exactly what they were exploiting with the complex tunic look. In an interview with the developer today, art director Aya Shida and producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi explained how the tunic (and the rest of the art style) came to be. Shida begins by saying that the team did not take changing the designs lightly and began by making sketches of the characters to place side by side with the old designs, as well as a 3D model of the Great Deku Tree. “We wanted characters like these to blend naturally into a world like this.”
The sketches made by the team do not appear any more realistic than the old drawings. But the original designs had significant limitations imposed by the Nintendo 64’s technology, as Fujibayashi explains:
Back when games were being developed for the Nintendo 64, there were limits to what could be expressed in-game. Keeping these limitations in mind, the developers chose to exaggerate the characters’ movements and features so that their distinctive qualities would stand out. But if we recreated all of this precisely with today’s technology, it might seem a little scary. (Laughs) I imagine it was quite a challenge to find the right balance while preserving the individuality of each character.
Fujibayashi ends by noting that in the new game, a lot of attention has been paid to clothing textures now that those limitations have been removed. As an example, Shida offers Young Link’s outfit.
If the fabric looked too neat, like it was machine-woven, it wouldn’t look like something the children living in the forest had made themselves. It just wouldn’t seem credible.
So we started by wondering what kind of fabric these children could actually weave and wear. We looked at materials in museums and even experimented with making our own fabric from thread to get a better idea of what it should look like. For this game, the hardware allowed us to represent this level of detail, but it also meant we had to do our research until we had a clear idea of what we wanted to create. As a design team, we often talked about imagining the story behind each item in the game as we created it.
So essentially, while Link’s smooth tunic suited the Nintendo 64’s capabilities, on the upgraded Switch 2, a smooth tunic might have looked ridiculous on him and the other Kokiri given what we know of their history. Instead, the team did a bunch of (frankly really cool) research to figure out what kind of clothes would make sense for him and his brothers, clothes that would naturally be very different from what everyone else outside the forest wore.
The rest of the interview is pretty cool and worth reading, but if you’re just looking for highlights, you can read very quickly about Eiji Aonuma adding, then removing, faster travel points to the game. A second part of the interview will be released tomorrow, and the remake of Ocarina of time comes out later this week, on November 5.
Gn tech
