Ocarina of Time Solved Fast Travel in 1998. The Remake Just Relearned How.

Run across Hyrule Field at night as a child and you'll hear the music change before you see anything. Then the ground cracks. Then the Stalchildren come up out of it, one after another, and you're a kid with a Deku Shield and a fairy yelling at you, and you have to decide whether to fight or sprint for the drawbridge.

That's what fast travel deletes. Not the walking. The being somewhere.

So when I read that Nintendo built fast travel into the Ocarina of Time remake and then took it back out, my first reaction wasn't admiration for their restraint. It was: of course they did. The 1998 game already had fast travel. Six pieces of it. They were wearing costumes.

Prelude of Light. Minuet of Forest. Bolero of Fire. Serenade of Water. Nocturne of Shadow. Requiem of Spirit. Six warp songs, and every one of them is something Sheik teaches you in a specific room after a specific dungeon, standing in front of a specific wall. You don't unlock fast travel from a menu. You learn it from a person, on an instrument, one note at a time.

And the Requiem of Spirit is the one I keep coming back to. You learn it as a child in the Desert Colossus, past the Haunted Wasteland, past the guides who walk a path you have to follow exactly. It's the only way back to the Spirit Temple as an adult the first time. The fast travel isn't a convenience in that moment. It's a key, and you had to earn the key before the lock was ever shown to you.

Here's the connection I keep drawing, and I've never seen anyone else draw it quite this way: Breath of the Wild's Sheikah Slate is the same system with the ritual amputated. Shrine to shrine, map to map, instant. I love it. I've put three hundred hours into that game and I've never once resented a teleport. But I also couldn't tell you which direction Hyrule Castle sits from Hateno without checking, and I can still walk you from Kokiri Forest to the castle town drawbridge in my head, twenty-five-plus years later, because the game made me do it on foot first.

Elden Ring is the purest version of this and I'll say so plainly. The map teleport is generous, frictionless, and correct for that game. I have no memory of Limgrave's geography. I have total memory of Hyrule Field's four corners and what comes out of the ground at night at each of them.

That's the real argument, and it isn't sentiment. The warp songs were gated, which means the map opened in the order you learned music. Which means you spent the first third of the game walking everywhere, learning the shape of the place, getting ambushed in the dark by things that wanted your rupees. By the time Sheik hands you the ability to skip the walk, you've already paid for the right to skip it.

But I want to be careful here, because "quality of life" is a phrase that hides a value judgment, and cutting it is not automatically noble. Inconvenience isn't design. Plenty of games use long walks to pad runtime, and calling that discovery would be dishonest. Skyrim's fast travel is fine. Every open world I've loved in the last decade has it. The distinction isn't whether the teleport exists — it's whether the world was built for the walk or built for the teleport. Hyrule Field was built for the walk. The Stalchildren are the proof.

So yes, the devs were right. But I don't think they cut a convenience. I think they noticed they'd have been adding a second fast travel system to a game that already had the good version, and the good version came with a song attached.

A loading screen is a promise that wherever you're leaving wasn't worth the walk back. The ocarina never made that promise. It just asked you to play something first, and then it took you where you asked, and it let you feel like you'd earned the trip.

I'll be walking across Hyrule Field at night in the remake. Letting the Stalchildren come up. Dying to them at least once, probably, because I'm out of practice and the moon is bright and I still don't carry enough hearts.