OoT's Dungeons Bored Miyamoto. Now He's Remaking Them.

"Is it still fun to spend all that time plotting your way through them? And the conclusion we came to is no, it's not really that much fun."

That's Shigeru Miyamoto talking about Zelda dungeons. Not in some offhand remark at a recent press event, but in a 1999 interview translated by Shmuplations, given shortly after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shipped. The same Ocarina of Time that Nintendo announced as a full Switch 2 remake during its June 2026 Direct, with a launch window later this year.

The irony here is almost too perfect. The game whose dungeons Miyamoto grew tired of making is now the game Nintendo has chosen to rebuild from the ground up for its newest hardware. Forest Temple, Water Temple, Spirit Temple, all of it. The very design philosophy he was ready to move past nearly three decades ago is about to get a fresh coat of paint and, presumably, a full-price tag.

What Miyamoto Actually Said

In that 1999 interview, Miyamoto described how Ocarina of Time represented a deliberate shift away from what he called "Dungeon Supremacy," the philosophy that had driven the series since the original Legend of Zelda on NES. "In every Zelda development, the dungeons take a huge amount of time to make," he explained. "I can't tell you how many times they end up having to be remade and revised, while the team is on the verge of tears."

He went further, questioning whether maze-like dungeons "linked in a linear fashion" were even appropriate for 3D games. He singled out Gerudo's Fortress and the Forest Temple as examples of traditional mazes that he didn't think fit the format. Instead, Miyamoto argued that Zelda should pursue "emotional immediacy" and a "sense of dread" over mapping and route-plotting. The seeds were planted in 1999.

And yet here we are, with Nintendo betting that players want to go back to exactly the structure Miyamoto wanted to leave behind. I think he was wrong then, and I think Nintendo quietly knows it now.

Ocarina of Time's dungeons are the reason people still talk about the game. The Water Temple alone has generated more discourse than entire Zelda titles. It's frustrating, yes, and the iron boots were clunky even by 1998 standards, but the puzzle design in those dungeons forced you to hold the entire space in your head at once. Breath of the Wild's shrines never asked that of you. They were clever in isolation but disposable by design. Ocarina's temples were places you got lost in, places that stuck with you precisely because they demanded your full attention.

Nintendo revealed almost nothing about the remake during the Direct. We got a snippet of footage and a 2026 window. No details on whether this will be a ground-up reimagining or something closer to the 3DS remaster with a visual overhaul. Fan speculation has been running hot since the announcement, with some commenters on Nintendo Everything noting that the CGI-only reveal was a "big miss" that left more questions than answers.

The big question is whether Nintendo will actually preserve the dungeon designs or "modernize" them into something unrecognizable. I'm firmly in the camp that wants them left structurally intact. Smooth out the iron boots, sure. Make the Water Temple's water-level indicators clearer if you must. But the layouts, the spatial reasoning, the way each room connects to the next; that's what makes these dungeons work. If you flatten the difficulty curve or break them into bite-sized chunks, you've lost the entire point.

What makes this remake so fascinating is the tension between what Nintendo's creative lead believed about game design and what fans actually want. Miyamoto spent the last 27 years steering Zelda away from traditional dungeons, and the series thrived because of it. Breath of the Wild is one of the best-reviewed games ever made. But the announcement of an Ocarina of Time remake generated a reaction that no shrine compilation ever could. Players want those dungeons back, even the ones that made them miserable.

Nintendo hasn't confirmed a specific release date beyond the 2026 launch window, and the lack of gameplay footage means we're still guessing at the scope of the project. Given how little was shown, I wouldn't be surprised if the game slips into late 2026 or beyond. For now, the remake exists as a promise and a contradiction: Miyamoto's least favorite part of Zelda, rebuilt for a new generation on hardware he helped design.