Nintendo has confirmed that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake’s cutscenes are fully voiced. In its Ask the Developer interview, the company explains that casting was guided by a desire to preserve established perceptions of how certain characters sounded in the original game.
The team conducted blind auditions for each character. For the Japanese auditions, actors’ names were hidden so selections would be based solely on which voices most closely resembled those in the original. That makes the casting approach particularly interesting: Nintendo was looking for familiar-sounding performances, rather than choosing on the strength of an actor’s name.
That process produced a surprise for Nintendo’s staff. One selected actor had already voiced the same character in the Nintendo 64 version of Ocarina of Time — something the team had not anticipated when making its choice.
The remake’s audio work also extends to music for its new scenes. In Nintendo’s interview, as relayed by Kotaku, sound director and music lead Masato Ohashi said the team composed new music for many of the remake’s new cutscenes, bringing the total number of background-music pieces to more than 150.
