the redead of the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time scared more than necessary at some point in development. Producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi has told him in an interview with GameSpot, where he acknowledges that the team reached a point where the scare ate part of the experience they wanted to keep.
The Redead are those zombie-looking creatures that stay still until Link gets too close and then they go for him. In the original Ocarina of Time they were already uncomfortable; In the remake, with more technical resources, they became much more scary.
The graphic jump was also noticed in sound and movement
Fujibayashi points out that the visual improvement of the remake affected all the fronts of these creatures: the look, the sounds and the animation. It was that ensemble that triggered the feeling of threat, not an isolated detail.
The team worked with the idea that this terror was at the service of a good gaming experience, that is, that it added tension without getting in the way. Even so, when reviewing the result with perspective, in Nintendo they saw that they had gone too far and they chose to go back: “Perhaps we had passed a step, so we are going to lower it.”
Fidelity to the original adventure as a limit
The criterion that the company applied was not to soften by softening, but to protect what made the original recognizable. With the remake going on, the question was which parts of the experience should not be touched under any circumstances.
That’s where the decision to moderate the intensity came from. The Redeads are still disturbing in the final version, but not to the point of altering the feeling of the game or turning the set into something else.
The balance is delicate. A more terrifying enemy can add tension, although it can also break the tone of an adventure that was never a horror game. That pulse between technical improvement and respect for the starting material is just what the producer describes as the center of the adjustment.
The question remains as to whether the brake was correct. The redead of the original already left a bad body to those who were too close, and the remake aims to maintain that discomfort without crossing the line.
