A remake of Ocarina of Time in 2011 roused Kondo, like a great gatekeeper awoken by a sense of duty. He preached the necessity of continuity, giving employees strict instructions to stick as closely as possible to the original, watching out for fractional differences in tempo and timing that would ruin the malleability of the score. Tampering with the leitmotifs twinned with environments and characters was a cardinal sin: nothing could be worse than jeopardizing fond memories. Even basic SFX had to be recreated to transmit the feel of the N64 era on the handheld 3DS, despite the newer hardware being wired completely differently. Heads were scratched over a revamped "Title Theme" that Kondo kept rejecting, before his young team clocked that the N64's characteristic reverb, used to mask the harsh compression, had been scrubbed. The opening ocarina no longer drifted into view from a far-off forest, but was front-loaded and far too clean in the mix. Once derided, the N64's drawbacks were now cherished, imperfections to stimulate a flutter of butterflies in the gut.
