Somewhere in a recording booth in Japan, an actor read lines for a small, insistent fairy companion — and won the role she had already played 28 years ago. Nobody at Nintendo saw it coming, least of least her. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Switch 2 remake has quietly reunited the series with the original voice of Navi, entirely by accident.
The story emerged from the latest instalment of Nintendo’s Ask the Developer blog, where series director Eiji Aonuma and game director HokWai Ng discussed the delicate business of adding full voice acting to a game first released on the Nintendo 64 in 1998. The remake replaces the grunts, murmurs and hyahs of the original with properly voiced cutscenes — but the team was determined that the voices should feel like the ones players remember.
Blind auditions and a happy accident
To protect against name recognition skewing the process, Nintendo deliberately hid the voice actors’ identities during the Japanese auditions. Casting decisions, Aonuma explained, were made “based solely on which voices most closely resembled those of the original”. Then fate intervened: one of the actors selected had voiced the very same character in the N64 version. “None of us saw that coming,” Aonuma admitted.
Neither Nintendo nor Eurogamer names the actor outright, but fan speculation has long pointed to Kaori Mizuhashi — the voice of Navi in the original Japanese release — and a leaked video of the remake’s credits appears to confirm she is back. It is, as the saying goes, only fitting that the person who most closely resembles Navi is Navi.
Key point: The casting applies to the Japanese language version. Nintendo has not detailed whether the English cast features any returning original performers.
Why Navi’s “Listen!” had to survive
The auditions were not mere nostalgia bait. Ng explained that once the graphics received such a dramatic overhaul, the cutscenes “needed to be fully voiced to match” — but some sounds are simply untouchable. “Navi’s ‘Listen!’ is one example. Even someone who’s never played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time may have heard it before,” he said. “We absolutely didn’t want to change anything as iconic as that.”
It is a fair point. Few sound effects in gaming history are as recognisable — or as memed — as Navi’s interruptions during Link’s journey through Hyrule. The blind audition process was designed to recreate the “feel of the original game”, and in Navi’s case it produced something better than recreation: continuity.
A five-star homecoming
Early verdicts suggest the care extended well beyond the voice booth. Eurogamer’s Chris Donlan called the Switch 2 version an “astonishing remake” in his five-star review, and the project has become a flagship showpiece for Nintendo’s current console.
For the actor who walked into an anonymous audition and walked out as Navi — twice — the story is a small piece of gaming magic. In an industry of remakes that routinely recast beloved roles, Ocarina of Time has managed something rarer: letting the past voice its own return.
