Zelda: Ocarina of Time Unfortunately Borrows Breath of the Wild’s Worst Feature

The best thing about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s fantastic new Switch 2 remake is that Nintendo didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Everything that made the original Nintendo 64 classic special is preserved in a focused game that fights the urge to modernize a timeless experience that still stands on its own today. You won’t find that Hyrule Field has turned into an enormous open world filled with busy work, thank God. You will, unfortunately, find that Breath of the Wild’s worst feature did manage to creep its way in.

Yes, it’s exactly what you fear: that pesky horizontal item menu that keeps creeping its way into every Zelda game! Oh, did you think I was going to say weapon degradation? Not unless you count the shoddily-crafted Giant’s Knife.

While you can file this one under pet peeve, hear me out for a moment. In Zelda games, items can be a hassle to juggle. Dungeons often require Link to use multiple tools from his arsenal to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. There simply aren’t enough buttons on a standard video game controller to map every item to a button, so Zelda games have historically forced you to hop in and out of menus to change up your shortcuts. This was one of the few pain points of the original Ocarina of Time especially. You spend so much time in menus juggling your ocarina, arrows, lens of truth, masks, and more fundamental items as you work through the adventure.

The remake offered an opportunity to address that problem, and the solution largely works. For starters, you have some key items like your ocarina, masks, and boots mapped to your D-pad for quick access. Excellent! The rest of your items, though, all compete for one open button spot. That’s not ideal, considering just how many useful items there are in Ocarina of Time, but Nintendo is wise to implement a pop-up menu for easy swapping. Also excellent!

There’s a catch, though: the remake takes notes from Breath of the Wild to get the job done. With Zelda’s open-world pivot in 2017, Nintendo found that it needed a more elegant way to let players juggle their arsenal of breakable weapons on the fly. The head-scratching solution was a pop-up menu that displayed every single weapon in Link’s arsenal in one scrollable, straight line. Want to equip a weapon at the very end of your weapon list? Get ready to scroll through 30 other weapons, one by one, to get there! It was an annoying choice, but, at the time, it was easy to forgive as a first draft of a solution in a very complicated game. Surely Nintendo would get it right next time.

Bzzzt, nope! Though Tears of the Kingdom would utilize a radial pop-up menu for some key abilities, the dreaded horizontal line remained for everything else. In fact, the problem only got worse with the introduction of building mechanics like fusing and Ultrahand. Now, you also had to scroll through a metric crapton of resources and Zonai parts thrown into one line. It was easier to go into the pause menu at that point, defeating the purpose of a shortcut menu. Thankfully, that UI felt like it only existed to solve a problem in a pair of big open-world games. Surely we wouldn’t see it in a traditional Zel—

Bad news, bucko! Nintendo would go back to line hell for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, a top-down adventure from a completely different development studio. As if mandated by Nintendo, Princess Zelda’s menu of summonable echoes was laid out as — you guessed it — a straight line. It was a ludicrous decision considering that the game features 127 echoes. Developer Grezzo tried to ease the burden by adding filters, but there was no salvaging it. I found myself just reusing the same few echoes that appeared at the front of the line every time to avoid the dreaded scroll.

That UI nightmare has now poisoned Ocarina of Time, putting a minor blemish on an otherwise immaculate remake. All of Link’s items, magic spells, and bottles now appear in one disorganized “quick” menu. It’s far more manageable this time around, but it’s still an annoyance. Looking for your Megaton Hammer during a tense fight? Just scroll past your five empty bottles, each of which occupies its own square. It’s arguably a worse solution to Ocarina of Time’s three-button setup, even if the D-pad alleviates some of the pain. As is the case with the past few Zelda games, it often feels just as quick to open the pause menu and manually equip items the old-fashioned way.

Look, I know that this is a supreme nitpick, but we can’t let this madness continue! Would it kill Nintendo to embrace the radial menu? It previously utilized one for Twilight Princess, letting players see all of Link’s items in one handy, round menu. Why not go that route for Ocarina of Time, too? Picture Nintendo’s inevitable Majora’s Mask remake, which we’re sure to get next. I, for one, refuse to sort through 24 masks in a line. Worse, I shudder at the possibility that those could be lumped in with items and bottles. We need to draw the line somewhere on a persistent terror that we’ve already let get too far out of hand. Death to the horizontal line! Viva la wheel!

Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter

A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later.

Sign up free

Free. Unsubscribe anytime.