The embargo broke and the roundup filled in fast. Metacritic's page for the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time sits at 96 from 80 critic reviews, with every one of them positive. OpenCritic has it at 95 from 27. Between the two aggregators that is 108 reviews, and Famitsu's 37/40, published a day early, was the first signal rather than an outlier.

The praise is close to unanimous in substance. Daily Star calls it a must-buy that keeps the playability, feel and character of the original. CGMagazine says it was a masterpiece in 1998 and still is, and calls it the best entry point into the series. Multiplayer.it goes further and names it the definitive version of the greatest video game of all time. ElDesmarque credits the visuals, tone and gameplay improvements while saying the level design and puzzles hold up 28 years on.

The disagreement is narrower and more interesting than the scores suggest. IGN, at 90, calls it an exceptional remake and a rich adventure in its own right, then says the dungeons' somewhat streamlined design has slightly dulled the special feeling that comes from solving them. RPG Site, at 80, reads the whole thing as designed for new players first and says it succeeds at that, which is a different compliment from the one the 100s are paying.

That is the argument worth having about this remake. Nintendo rebuilt the camera, the movement, the cutscenes and the score, and cut fast travel after Eiji Aonuma decided warp points removed the moments of discovery. The interface can be switched off entirely. Every one of those changes makes the game easier to move through. Whether easier is better is exactly where the 80s and the 100s part company.

For context on the bar: the 1998 original holds a 99 Metacritic average from 22 critic reviews and a 9.1 user score from 14,752 ratings. The 2011 3DS version sits at 94 from 85 critics. Famitsu gave the N64 release a perfect 40/40, the first game ever to manage it there. A 96 for the remake is a remarkable result against that history, and it is still two points below the thing it is being compared to.

One number is missing. Neither aggregator has a user score for the remake yet, because user reviews open with the launch on November 5. That matters here more than usual: players weight 60% of PWNWIRE's score, and the 1998 user score of 9.1 is the highest in this whole comparison. Until those ratings exist, the score on this page is critics only, and it is marked as pending for that reason.

We will update this page when player ratings arrive, and when the outlets that tend to disagree with the consensus publish.