Zelda: Ocarina Of Time might not be the highest rated video game ever

Ahead of the Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake for Nintendo Switch 2, the original game’s near perfect Metacritic score has been called into question.

You’ll struggle to find many people, particularly those who were gaming during the 90s, who will argue that The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time for the Nintendo 64 isn’t one of the greatest video games ever made.

It’s currently the highest rated game on Metacritic and the only one to receive a near perfect score of 99 out of 100; a feat that earned it a Guinness World Record last year as the most critically acclaimed video game ever.

However, a recent YouTube video has questioned the methodology behind the Metacritic score, even if there’s no doubt that the game is still critically acclaimed.

YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming was conducting research for a retrospective of Ocarina Of Time’s launch, ahead of the Nintendo Switch 2 remake, when it came across discrepancies with Metacritic’s curation of official reviews.

At the time of writing, the original Ocarina Of Time has only 22 critic reviews; all of which are positive. Most of them give the game a perfect score of 100, with even the lowest scoring review still being 90.

Metacritic didn’t exist until 2001, three years after Ocarina Of Time’s launch, so it had to go back and search through old magazines and newspapers, as well as websites, to find reviews of the game.

DidYouKnowGaming noticed that some reviews from magazines and websites that Metacritic usually quotes have been omitted, such as Nintendo Power, which gave the game a score of 95.

And while the Metacritic of today is multinational, with reviews from all around the world, the ones listed for Zelda are almost entirely US-only – with no UK magazines sources, such as the famous 10/10 from Edge.

Some of the perfect reviews also technically never gave the game a score, with Metacritic only interpreting the score as 100 (all review aggregate sites do this to some degree, with reviews that don’t give a score).

While DidYouKnowGaming doesn’t dispute that Ocarina Of Time is a great game, it suggests that some cherry-picking has gone on to artificially inflate the game’s Metacritic score.

As such, it did its own calculations and argues the game’s score should be knocked all the way down from 99 to… 98. Obviously, that’s not that much of a drop, but it would mean it would have to share its top-rated game of all time spot with three other games.

Those games are 1999’s SoulCalibur, 2008’s Grand Theft Auto 4, and 2010’s Super Mario Galaxy 2. Coincidentally enough, it was recently discovered that Super Mario Galaxy 2’s Metacritic score was bumped from 97 to 98 at some point, although why this happened is unclear.

When will the Ocarina Of Time Switch 2 remake be shown again?

It’s going to be interesting to see if the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina Of Time is received as favourably when it launches later this year, but at the moment we know almost nothing about it.

Nintendo hasn’t made it clear if it will be a completely faithful remake or if it will make major changes to the structure and gameplay, but it’s going to be very difficult for it to match the original’s 99 or 98 Metacritic score.

That’s because there will be far more critic reviews included this time, which means there’ll be a higher chance for lower scores to drag the average score down. You’ll notice that all the 98 review scores, for example, are from games that are more than 15 years old.

This can be seen with the 3DS remake of Ocarina Of Time from 2011. While it’s really more of a straight remaster, it has 85 reviews compared to the original’s 22 and while plenty of those are perfect 100 scores, it also saw scores lower than 90, with the lowest being a 75 – resulting in an average score of 94.

Considering how little Nintendo shared of the remake at its last Nintendo Direct, it’s safe to assume the game will see its own dedicated showcase in the near future.

Since it’s launching before the end of the year, and Nintendo will want enough of a grace period to rack up pre-orders, it’s likely that a dedicated Zelda Direct will air later this month or in September, with the remake then launching in November or December.

A recent theory based on amiibo listings points to November, which would make sense as it’s otherwise a very quiet month, since every other publisher is keen to avoid releasing games near GTA 6.

While there’s certainly some audience crossover between GTA 6 and an Ocarina Of Time remake, they are fundamentally different games. And if any publisher is going to dare to go head-to-head with Rockstar Games it’d be Nintendo.

Plus, Ocarina Of Time is a Switch 2 exclusive, while GTA 6 is only for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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