Walk into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Kokiri Forest, and it feels like you’re walking into a picture book. Especially in the remake, everything is moss-green and dappled with light. Fairies flit about. Kokiri children are rhythmically attending to their tasks. Everyone is friendly, everything is beautiful, and the world both feels safe and makes sense. Then you walk into the Great Deku Tree and spiders start falling from the ceiling. My daughter screamed. I jumped, too, and I knew they were coming.
Since Zelda: Ocarina of Time returned Nov. 5 with its splashy Switch 2 remake, parents on Reddit have argued over how scary (read: appropriate for kids) it is. Some players say the new graphics make the spiders and the ReDeads worse. Others played at age eight and turned out fine. A few parents are playing with their kids, but skipping whole dungeons in an effort to save their children some nightmares. All fair strategies, and they raise the question: Can a game with a screaming zombie in an underground mausoleum be a kid’s first Nintendo game? Parents of kids as young as 4 and 5 are asking, despite the game’s official E10+ rating.
I’ve played the three child-era dungeons with my 4-year-old. Fear is quite present in this game. But so are the tools for fighting it. Which makes Ocarina of Time — The Legend of Zelda’s fairy tale — the perfect way to introduce kids to Nintendo.
Parents are bracing for the grown-up half of the game
The ReDead’s paralyzing scream, Dead Hand reaching up through the floor of the Well, the long walk through the Shadow Temple: Parents who grew up with the N64 Ocarina of Time tend to have the same laundry list of nightmares. Most of these live in the later dungeons, though, and there’s a fair chance that nearly three decades of remembering these seminal gaming experiences have amplified the dread.
Parents of kids playing for the first time in 2026 report smaller, easier-to-navigate fears: 4-year-olds who panicked at the first boss and lit up at the second, spiders that terrified them until they learned to hit back.
Good fairy tales have always been a little scary. G.K. Chesterton wrote that a baby has known the dragon “intimately ever since he had an imagination,” and that what the fairy tale supplies is “a St. George to kill the dragon.” Here, we have a tiny Link — a peer to my child — facing something scary and fighting back, with appropriate tools to deal with the fun-sized dangers at hand. The child-era half of the game is there for a reason: It’s not not scary, but kids are largely good with it.
Nintendo made the remake a bit scary, but mostly very charming
Eiji Aonuma describes Hyrule as a world with a bright side and a dark side. Link comes from the bright part, Aonuma told one interviewer, and Ganon from the part with “a lot of scary things.” The remake’s tools could make something “very, very scary” if the team tried, he said, but the game is “supposed to be for all kinds of players.”
Art director Aya Shida wanted a Hyrule convincing enough to believe in without being literal about it. Her team reached for puppet shows and practical-effects films because both make fantasy characters feel real without reproducing reality exactly. The setting “feels somewhat dark,” she said, and the colorful, quirky characters who live in it give the game its “mysterious, almost dreamlike charm.”
In a world built that way, the dark stays a fairy tale’s dark: frightening enough to feel real, and charming enough to keep playing. You’re running away from the spiders, but running toward the opportunity to free a squawking chicken from a wooden box. (How did it get in there? My kid wants to know. So does Navi.)
The scarier parts of Ocarina of Time will be there for kids when they’re ready
After Link pulls the Master Sword from the stone and ages seven years, the game does get darker. Parents of young children have come up with strategies to match. Some are holding the Well and the Shadow Temple back, and commenters in some Reddit threads suggest waiting until kids are 8 or 9 before starting at all. Others report a 4-year-old who lit up when Link grew up and a 15-year-old who cried at the ending. (I find this deeply relatable; same on both counts.) Reading comes up constantly, with parents reading the dialogue aloud for the youngest kids and some crediting the game with teaching their kids to read.
Whether any individual child is ready for this game is, of course, an individual decision, one that every parent will make based on their knowledge of their unique kid. But, for me, experiencing the remake along with my child made the sense of wonder Child Link feels as he steps out into this world palpable — and it gave me a new appreciation for the honestly very kid-friendly framing of the first half. The Great Deku Tree hands Link a mission with stakes he can understand and provides tools he can wield. By the time he meets bigger perils, he’s ready.
That’s all I can hope for my kid when she, too, is ready. We’re still in the first half on our playthrough. She cheers “fight, mommy, fight!” when a Skulltula descends, thinks Jabu-Jabu’s Belly is gross — correct — and has fallen for Young Princess Ruto. She laughed at me when I did a belly-flop into Kokiri Forest’s lake the first time I tried the dedicated jump button. She immediately clocked that the Keaton Mask looks like her beloved Pikachu, which is going to make following this game up with Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Pokémon: Let’s Go! so, so easy. I’ve gone on to play the Forest Temple without her, and, yes, it’s scarier, but it’s also longer and has more backtracking than she’d have patience for. That temple and the grown-up half of the game will be there when she’s ready for it. I can’t wait to watch her grow into it, even if I’ll miss the days when only the child world had her full attention.
