Koji Kondo Explains Why Ocarina of Time 3D Didn’t Feature “Remade” Music

If there was one aspect of Ocarina of Time 3D most fans can agree was a slight let down, it was that the music itself didn’t get the same “remade” treatment the game did. Some felt maybe Grezzo was being lazy or possibly that the budget didn’t exist to take care of it. Whatever the case may be, folks generally wished it happened. Koji Kondo has finally spoken up on why it didn’t occur, as it appears it was entirely his own decision to not do it:

“IGN: Thanks for playing! For my last question, I read in an interview that for Ocarina of Time 3D, you had requested for the development team to stay faithful to the original N64 sound. Why did you think that was important? Why not remaster the music, similar to the way a game company would remaster graphics?

Kondo: As far as cleaning up the quality of the sound itself, of course that’s something we wanted to do. We did have them go through and make sure we took out miscellaneous impurities in the sound. But the way the gameplay and the music were tied together through tempo was something we really took a lot of time adjusting and making just right in the original.

I was worried that when they were doing the 3DS version, with the increased processing power, that the game might play a bit differently, and we didn’t want the music to be sped up even slightly, or slowed down even slightly, based on the technology they were using. All I asked was that they paid a lot of attention to how the music interacted with the game, and that the tempo had the same balance. We didn’t want to lose the way that worked in the original game. I just asked that they stayed true to that. For instance, the transition between music and sound effects.

As you know, a lot of times music is about not just what’s playing, but when it’s not playing, and how that silence impacts the time when there is sound. That’s just one area where, again, the tempo had a huge role in how the game felt when being played.”

It appears Koji Kondo was worried about how the music interacted with the game, since a lot of fine tuning went into the original release. As he noted, a few missteps were cleaned up, but generally speaking they used the original tracks as they were in 1998. This probably is a telling sign that the music won’t be retouched in Majora’s Mask 3D either, which releases early in 2015.

Source: IGN