Ocarina of Time Remake Reworks the Water Temple

Nintendo has confirmed that the Water Temple, the dungeon many players remember as the low point of the 1998 original, is changed in the Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which launches on Thursday 5 November 2026. In part 3 of its Ask the Developer interview, published on 3 November (US date), producer Eiji Aonuma and director HokWai Ng say item switching is "much easier" and some walls are now see-through lattices. The remake unlocks at 12:00 a.m. ET (05:00 UTC) in North America, according to our pre-load guide.

What Nintendo says changed in the Water Temple

Asked whether the dungeons were altered, Ng first gives the general answer: the team "basically retained the dungeon mechanisms from the original game" but placed objects "in such a way that players intuitively figure out which direction to go", so some layouts differ slightly. Aonuma then raises the Water Temple himself: "I had some overdue homework: I wanted to do something about the Water Temple I created 28 years ago."

He names the two problems. The dungeon's "complex structure and a lot of item toggling" meant players had to open the menu repeatedly, "making it hard to keep track of where you were and which way you were facing". Ng gives the fixes: "we've made item toggling much easier", and "we also changed some of the walls that made it easy to lose your sense of direction to lattice-style structures, making it possible to see the rooms beyond them".

What Nintendo did not say

Nintendo's interview does not say which button handles the Iron Boots. Nintendo Life and Polygon both report that item swapping now sits on the D-pad; Nintendo's own wording is only "much easier". It also does not say how many walls changed, whether any puzzle solutions moved, or how the Iron Boots interact with swimming, which Kotaku flags as the open question. We will check these once the game is out, and until then they are unconfirmed. The same goes for the difficulty: Ng's quote is about clarity, and Nintendo does not claim the dungeon is shorter or easier.

Why it matters for the remake

This is not the first time Nintendo has softened the dungeon. As Nintendo Life notes, the 3DS version mapped the Iron Boots to the touchscreen and added directional lines to the water-level switches. The Switch 2 version has a bigger problem to solve, because Ng's part of the interview says the camera is now freely controllable and "there are more things that players need to work out for themselves". A dungeon built around fixed camera angles and a wall of menus would be harder to read in that setting, and the lattice walls are a direct response.

Other changes confirmed in the same interview

The same part of the interview covers more than the Water Temple. Ng says auto-jump was removed because players used to recent Zelda games would ask why Link can jump in one place but not another, so jumping is now one button anywhere. Fujibayashi says both the original single-button jump attack and the two-step jump-then-attack from Breath of the Wild are supported. Holding the roll button now dashes, while repeated rolls still work for crossing Hyrule Field. Taguchi says the team rebuilt the game from scratch rather than porting the original code, and that the first boss, Gohma, now raises its arms over its weak point whenever it cannot be hurt, which fixes the original's unclear attack timing. Nintendo also describes a new Threads of Time feature that shows your story progress and next objective.

Price, release time and where to start

The game is a Switch 2 exclusive. Nintendo's US store lists the digital edition at $59.99 and an estimated 27 GB download, so check your storage first with our Switch 2 microSD Express guide. Our pre-order and pre-load guide has the unlock time and payment dates, and the release time, price and history guide compares the editions. If the console misbehaves on launch day, see our Switch 2 troubleshooting guide. The game page collects everything we have published, and the Switch 2 console page lists the hardware.

For readers in India: Nintendo has no official India eShop, so there is no rupee price. If the North American unlock applies to your account region, 05:00 UTC is 10:30 a.m. IST on 5 November.

How this was made: drafted with AI assistance from the Nintendo pages and press reports listed below, with every quote checked against Nintendo's published interview on 4 November 2026 (IST). We have not played the remake yet, so nothing here describes how the Water Temple plays.