MJF

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 19 – The One About An Ocarina of Time Remake

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

To be honest, this one is going to be more about games than books or wrestling. More hits than misses, leaker Natthehate shared a lot of Nintendo’s 2026 plans with Video Games Chronicle, backing it up with confirmation from their own sources. One of those plans includes a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and now that the info is spreading around, the people with sources seem to imply it is a robust remake far beyond what the 3DS version did.

Sources: Nintendo is planning a new Star Fox and a major Zelda remake this year, but no 3D Mario

Ocarina of Time isn’t even my favorite Zelda game (it’s my fourth), but it might be the most important Zelda game in my life. A Link to the Past introduced me to fantasy as a genre, and it was my first RPG, even if it was an Action RPG. Following that and getting a Nintendo 64 in 1996, Ocarina of Time was the first game that I ever followed the news about its release, both in magazines like Nintendo Power and on the internet in message boards on America Online. Back then, the idea of a game taking three years to come out was crazy, and each time Nintendo Power introduced a new delay to the game, it drove my childhood best friend and me crazy.

It was the first game I ever bought with my own saved-up money, not for my birthday, not for Christmas, or any other occasion. I don’t remember what kind of tree, it was either a Douglas Fir or a Norway Spruce, but we had it in our backyard near our pool, near my treehouse, so I’d often climb in it. The same year Ocarina of Time came out, the tree got very sick. It was already shading our pools, so my parents wanted to be rid of it anyway, but my dad didn’t want to hire someone to cut it down. When he did, he needed someone to help cut branches off it, and I needed the money for Zelda, so he generously offered me $10 for every hour I helped. I don’t think he expected me to make it very long, but I kept at it until I earned at least forty to fifty dollars. I got my dad to take me to Toy’R’Us and preorder the game, which involved grabbing a ticket off the wall where the title was and putting a payment of ten dollars down. If you pre-ordered the game, you’d get a special gold cartridge, but I had school the day it came out. Ocarina of Time was also the first time I can remember vocalizing being angry with my sister and my mother, who brought home a regular cartridge even though I had pre-ordered the game with my own money. I was the only one among my friends who didn’t have the gold cartridge. I can’t remember exactly what my mother said, but I remember she was exasperated with my disapointment as if I was lucky enough she had picked it up from the store for me because the store was swamped, and she didn’t think it was a big deal. I was lucky, but it was a big deal to me. I have more memories tied to Ocarina of Time, but I’ll save those for a later date. Here’s books and wrestling.

Books – Green and Deadly Things by Jenn Lyons

Green & Deadly Things by Jenn Lyons slipped through my fingers. For some reason, maybe it’s because most of the Advance Reader Copies of books I actually am super invested in all come out in May I had assumed this also came out in May, as Jenn Lyons is one of my favorite authors currently. Nope! This came out March 3rd, and I had barely read the first chapter. Now, I’m halfway through, and you can expect this book to be covered on No Page Unturned soon enough. When I started it, I was comparing Mathaiik to Kihrin from A Chorus of Dragons, but he’s really more of a Brother Qown-like. My one criticism of the books I’ll share here is that I wish it were a multi-POV book rather than just Math the whole time. Math’s inability to accept that not everything Idallik Knights have taught is true, still halfway through the book, is a little annoying, and Kaiataris’s point-of-view, who is from a thousand years ago and seeing a new world born from her own world, would have been a breath of fresh air. It’s still a great book so far, but that’s just my two cents.

Wrestling – AEW Bullet Points

Just some quick bullet points on my current thoughts going on in AEW

  • If Kenny Omega beats MJF at Dynasty to become AEW Men’s World Champion, and only if then will I buy tickets for Double or Nothing in New York.
  • I used to say if only MJF wrestled as much as he took up time talking in segments on AEW television, I would like him more, but I don’t even like his wrestling anymore. He does way too much goofy shit in every match of his when he used to, if rarely ever wrestling, actually try. I feel like I’m watching Triple H in his prime, and I hated the way Triple H wrestled, even when he was good. I feel like this entire championship run has been carried by AEW having the best roster on the planet as his opponents. Bandido, Brody King, Hangman Page, Kevin Knight, and Speedball Mike Bailey have all done tremendous jobs to make him look good. If he’s beating Kenny and someone like Darby Allin, who feels very stale right now, is going to be his Double or Nothing opponent, then let’s see how that goes because I’m not feeling confident.
  • This Jon Moxley v. Will Ospreay feud isn’t really working for me, mostly due to how aimless and pointless I feel the Mox and the Death Rider’s story has become, cemented by how dumb Moxley beating Takeshita was.
  • Jack Perry, being a white-meat babyface right now, is really working for me, and so is his current wrestling style.
  • Some of you are weird about Kenny Omega’s enthusiasm, projecting a lot of your own feelings on a dude you don’t actually know.
  • I thought I’d be more annoyed that Chris Jericho is back, but I actually don’t care all that much until he actually does something. I’d rather see Chris Jericho than Adam Copeland.
  • Speaking of him, if it wasn’t for Christian Cage, Cope would be entirely intolerable.

Games – What I would like to see in an Ocarina of Time remake.

When the news first broke on this remake, I wasn’t quite sure what I would change about the game, but I have had almost a week to stew on it, so I have some ideas. The big one is Hyrule Field. Often in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, you can see NPCs walking from one place to another, taking paths on foot or horseback to different places, making it feel more lived in despite the Calamity and Upheaval. That is something I’d like to see in Hyrule Field when you’re young Link. It would make a drastic change when you become Adult Link, and Hyrule Field is now not just Stalchilds attacking you at night, but soldiers and monsters aligned with Ganondorf attacking you, and even maybe hunting you down like guards loyal to Agahnim in A Link to the Past hunted you down in that overworld.

A lot of what else I’d add is just a little more details on a lot of information that is given in this game. After you finish the Forest Temple as Adult Link, the Deku Tree Sprout reveals Link’s mother escaping the chaos of the Hyrulean Civil War. She flees into the forest with Link as a baby and gives him to the Deku Tree to care for. Give me a face to that mother and more about the Hyrulean Civil War that Deku Tree Sprout mentions. Likewise, we see Ganondorf for the first time kneeling to the King of Hyrule as Zelda and Link spy on him through a window. Give me a face to that King of Hyrule and maybe even a name. The game is littered with things like that. I would like just a little more detail on. The Shadow Temple and the well in Kakariko Village are another example. The Shadow Temple served as a place for the Sheikah to torture enemies of the royal family of Hyrule for information, and one day Impa, one of the few remaining Sheikah, sealed the Shadow Temple boss, Bongo Bongo, beneath the well before it escaped in Ocarina of Time. Give me more details about what links the bottom of the well, which has its own undead and torture chambers with the Shadow Temple, and how Bongo Bongo relates to all this tortured history of Hyrule’s imprisoned enemies. Honestly, just give me more about the Sheikah in general. The bosses of the Spirit Temple, Kotake and Koume are said to be hundreds of years old and have been leading the Gerudo tribe in secret, and also served as the surrogate mothers to Gandondorf. Give me more details on that! That’s just the lore I can remember. Now, like I said, just give me a little more. Don’t go crazy with it. Oh, I just thought of a big one I’d like to see more details of: Ganondorf’s betrayal and attack. I missed it so many times as a kid, but when you head back to Hyrule Town after getting all the Sacred Stones, you get that wonderful scene of Zelda and Impa escaping, Zelda throwing the Ocarina of Time into the moat, and your first confrontation with Ganondorf. At this time, Ganondorf has presumably killed the King of Hyrule and the royal soldiers with his own force. The part I missed the first of many times I’ve played it is the soldier in the back alley of Hyrule Town who warns of Ganondorf’s treachery before succumbing to their injuries. I want more details on that, even if it means exploring Hyrule Castle again.

Speaking of lore, back when Ocarina of Time came out, the developers said this was to serve as the earliest point in the Zelda timeline at the time. Since then, Skyward Sword is now the earliest game in the timeline. Maybe give some nods to that, like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom did with the Master Sword healing itself, making the same noises Fi did. Just like a hint of Hylian once living above the clouds or something. One thing I believe they are one hundred percent going to lean into is the Goddess Hylia having a more prominent mention in the story, especially in the telling of Hyrule’s creation as told by the Deku Tree to Link, which details how the three golden goddesses created the world. Right after he tells Link how the Triforce was creted Nintendo can just add in the line about how the Goddess Hylia was entrusted to protect the Triforce, which was evil, and Zelda’s family line is connected to that.

Skyward Sword, you know, the origin story of the Master Sword, has me thinking, let’s finally give the Master Sword something more. It doesn’t have to shoot a beam at full hearts like it did in A Link to the Past, but there should be something special about the Master Sword when you get it, beyond just doing more damage. Even if it’s a new quest to add some kind of ability to it, let me do something extra cool with the sword that is evil’s bane. On the subject of gameplay, let me use the boomerang as an adult. You get the boomerang, defeat the boss in Jabu-Jabu’s belly, then if you follow the story, you’ll end up at the Temple of Time and an adult fairly shortly, giving you barely any time with the boomerang. Sure, you get the hookshot shortly after that, but let me use the boomerang as an adult. Also, since we’re remaking the game, give a more important role to some items, specifically the fire and ice arrows. Make them important to the game rather than just extra items of some convenience against enemies and certain puzzles.

I wonder if they’ll give Link some kind of parry ability like in the two Switch Zelda games. What if young Link can do the reaction attack like Link in Breath of the Wild, but adult Link, facing stronger enemies, can shield parry like Link from Breath of the Wild? If we’re adding things, I’d like there to be Sheik fight after you do three temples as adult Link, just for fun. Sheik comes on all like “I’m here to test what you’ve learned if you’re really worthy of being the Hero of Time, and maybe hint at the reveal that happens later, both the Zelda one and the Triforce of Courage one. If they want to expand upon Zelda/Sheik’s character and role in this game, I wouldn’t mind that at all. I’ve loved what they’ve done with Zelda as a character in Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom, so I welcome getting more Princess Zelda. I also wouldn’t mind Ganondorf getting different hair, maybe.

The biggest change I’d like to see to the game is a bigger impact to the areas Link brings hope back to as an adult when he rescues/reveals/revives the Sages in the different temples. Biggest of all, Zora’s Domain must finally melt and bring the Zoras back besides the king but do this in all the other regions also. I want to see these places in despair thanks to Ganondorf’s rule and then see the light, and hope brought back to the same places once Link is done with them. I want Mido to acknowledge that Adult Link is the Link that he knew and see the Kokiri change as a result of the birth of the Deku Tree Sprout. I want to see Daruna’s son Link take Daruna’s place as leader of the gorons and, like his father become a sworn brother to Link. Maybe introduce a new NPC in the Geurdo Tribe that becomes their leader, with Kotake, Koume, and Nabooru all gone. I’d like to see the carpenters that appear in the game slowly change Kakariko Village as the game progresses, even more so after you’ve completed the Shadow Temple, maybe even Gerudo’s Fortress too, as the carpenters eventually go that way.

I’m not sure what style the game should look like, but I’d know what the wrong choice was if I saw it. It shouldn’t look like any other Zelda game to be perfectly clear. I don’t think it necessarily needs a new style, but it should look beautiful with as many frames-per-second as the Switch 2 can do. The music has to be fully orchestrated as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has some of the most iconic music of all time in a video game. In a way, though, this is like fantasy booking wrestling. If you do too much of it and it doesn’t happen, you can end up disappointing yourself when you didn’t need to. With Ocarina of Time widely available on NSO, 3DS, and other means, it seems like a good opportunity if you’re going to remake it to give a little bit more beyond what the Nintendo 64 was capable of. One last thing, though.

It was just for a demo of what was called Zelda 64 at the time, but it shows Link opening a weird blue chest and the full Triforce being revealed. On the message board, it was rumored this would finally come to fruition in a quest after the main quest of the game for the 64DD, an add-on to the Nintendo 64 that came out in Japan, failed, and never came to the United States. In this new quest, you’d go to the Sacred Realm and take on new challenges that eventually led to seeing the full Triforce together. This later turned out to be nonsense and the Master Quest, a remixed, harder version of the game you’d get if you preordered The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, is what was originally planned for the 64DD. Now, however, is your chance Nintendo. I don’t care about a quest after the main quest of anything else I just want to be able to unlock in some way Link, the Hero of Time, finally getting a chance to make a wish on the full Triforce.

Maybe this is how you fix the timeline of Zelda. This brings up a good question of whether Nintendo will change the ending. Adult Zelda sends Adult Link back in time to when he was a kid again. Then that young Link, after supposedly meeting with young Zelda, saving Hyrule in the original time by revealing Ganondorf’s plot, grows up to find the Triforce and wishes for the timeline he is no longer in to be saved. There I go, fantasy booking again. I’ll just have to wait and see.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 16 – Lords, Links, and Lulls

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I haven’t written on here in awhile and the format in draft form is all wonky now. I have no idea what is going on. If it looks weird, font and size-wise, it’s not my fault.

Wrestling – Truckin’ along.

Here’s the thing. I thought MJF as World Champion was going to eat up a lot of time on TV and have a lot of edgelord bullshit that made me not want to watch the show. Instead, he has, ultimately, been super boring, and the least interesting part of any feud has been in it. Surely he has something else right beside the two poles of problematic and boring, right?

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about what is going on in the world of wrestling at the moment. Tanahashi’s retirement match against Okada was very emotional. I’m happier that Yota Tsuji has brought back the V4 IWGP Heavyweight Championship than I am the fact that he is champion. I think he’s good, but his matches don’t quite excite me as much as bringing back my favorite championship of all time. I’m still watching AEW and enjoying it, but it’s like, just my little show I watch every week with friends. I am excited about Kenny Omega wrestling more singles matches and going after the AEW World Championship, but I think I’d have more to yell about it if I thought he had any chance of winning. All the stuff involving Hangamn, Swerve, Andrade, and him is fun. It feels like the ranking system back without actually showing the rankings on screen (I will always wish we still had the rankings and AEW used them better for storytelling). That’s just sometimes how it goes.

Books – The Boys (Fellowship) are back in town.

So, I don’t know how it started, but my friends and I started watching The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movies, and I was giving little commentary about information that is in the books but isn’t in the movies at their request. I think I wrote on here that around December, I used to start Fellowship a lot because Christmas Day is the date the Fellowship takes off from Rivendell. Well, I did start it last year, but didn’t commit. Now I’m committed as I’ve already finished Fellowship and moved on to The Two Towers. I even broke out my pocket editions, which I usually keep in my car. It’s a nice feeling when you have a niche interest in something, and your friends are like, “Yes, let’s hear it. We want to hear it.”

This is just an aside, but I prefer volumes of The Lord of the Rings to be three separate books rather than just one large volume. In hardcover form, that is few and far between, but still, that is my preference.

Games – A Bundle of Swords

All the jumble of games I’ve been playing feel sword themed. I put in a lot of hours into the remastered Oblivion, completing all of the Thieves’ Guild, the Mage’s Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood. All I have left is the Main Questline and the Fighter’s Guild before I go to the Shivering Isles. I’ve finished all of Silksong Act 2 for the second time, and I’m trying to beat Grandmother Silk while cursed for probably the last achievement I’m going to go for in this game. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is available on the Nintendo Switch Online service for the Switch 2, and I’ve been surprised how well that game’s look has held up. Whatever upscaling they’re doing, if they’re doing any, makes the game look amazing on my Switch 2. However, I’ve never played the Wii U’s HD remake of that game and, in fact, have barely seen it. I wonder how that looks?

A Keyblade is a kind of sword, and I’ve set up a Steam Deck Dock near my treadmill and have been going through Kingdom Hearts 1 while I walk. There was a game I started on Steam Deck on the treadmill that I had to stop because I wanted to play on my good PC, Lies of P, a game I bought on sale but have had on my backlog for a while. I think I’m past the point where it’s like, emulating Bloodborne too much and has become its own thing. The last sword game I’ve been playing is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on my PC which, man, that game looks a lot better on PC than my PS5, especially the faces, where sometimes on the PS5 the lighting made their faces look weird. I get people being mad about some of the open-world aspects, but I love this game. The battle system is definitely my favorite of the new non-turn-based battle systems Square has tried to use recently in FF games.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 1 – Noodles, Knights, and NJPW

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’m not going to give a long explanation yet to what this is or why I’m writing, because before I know it, I’ll have a thousand words, and that’ll be this entire post before I get to the point of the thing. To sum it up, I want to write about what I like in a shorter format than my book reviews on Geeklyinc.com or on No Page Unturned. I love books, I love video games, and I love wrestling, hence Book, Games, Wrestling. I hear the Aesop Rock song Food, Clothes, Medicine when I say it, but here we go before I get off track again.

Book – Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

My review will be up soon enough, but I have to say, my reading habits this summer have been such a mess. My To-Be-Read pile has grown too tall this summer, yet my reading habits have been subpar. Fall and Winter are such better reading seasons for me as someone who doesn’t do well in the heat.

Automatic Noodle, though, has been a book I’ve been thinking about since I first heard about it. The premise is essentially set in an unidentified future, where robots want to, for once, serve good food to their patrons and are given an opportunity, out of sheer luck, to open their own noodle shop. It’s labelled as cozy, but there is definitely a cloud of desperation hanging over most of the plot, both from the bots, the humans, and the overall world that is in the vibe of a dystopian future run by megacorporations that we seem to be getting a lot of, gee, wonder why? The feeling of dread and oppression is not what I would call cozy, but I’d still recommend it regardless.

I mean, just because it’s marketed as cozy but doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting read. The oppression of sentient robots is a subject I’m sure will be explored more as technology advances and more rights get taken away in the United States and beyond. I will admit I’m holding back for my review, pretty sure, but I really enjoy how Newitz makes each of the bots distinct.

Game – Hollow Knight – Team Cherry

Silksong is real and will be out as of this post in a little over a week. I’ve done everything but the Godmaster DLC on the Switch edition of Hollow Knight because by the time it was out, I was already finished with Hollow Knight, at over 100%. Plus, in 2018, on the Nintendo Switch, I remember being kind of insane, as well as my life at the time being kind of insane. When I bought a Steam Deck last August, Hollow Knight was one of the first games I bought during the next Steam sale because, quite honestly, though it had been six years since I played it, I still felt it was one of the greatest games of all time or at least one of my greatest games of all time.

Now that Silksong is coming out, I felt it was time to play it on PC/Steam Deck. It was like riding a bike again to be honest, and I was aiming to get that achievement of beating the game at 100% under 20 hours. I got very close at about 20 hours and 23 minutes, so annoyingly close. I do not remember there being achievements on the Switch edition; it probably had in-game quests as the equivalent, but it’s not quite the same. Take or leave achievements, I do often find them fun, even if Steam achievements feel lesser than other platforms. I’ve left just enough time between Hollow Knight playthroughs that the challenge remains thrilling, yet not so much that the backtracking feels tedious, while retaining enough memory to avoid repetition. I’ve already beaten it, and once I did, I thought to myself, “Oh shit, it’s still not September 4th.” I started a new file, intending to hopefully get that achievement this time, and also to leave Zote to die, the ungrateful little shit that he is.

Wrestling – AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025

The build to Forbidden Door was messy, it’s always messy, and to be quite honest, even with the mess I still do find it fun. However, a lot of MJF’s creative ideas I do not find fun, and it felt like, with the stipulations he had forced Hangman to agree to under the pretense that he was going to light Mark Briscoe on fire, that I’m being forced to watch Triple H from the early and mid 2000s reborn. In 2023, I was annoyed with MJF, but in 2025, I’m just tired of it. His promos to all his opponents feel the same; his nicknames for his opponents are all terrible, not in a fun way, but in a way that makes me want to look at my Steam Deck and continue playing Hollow Knight. It just feels all the same. But Josh, you might ask, isn’t that just what heels do? Well, I’m not sick of what Kyle Fletcher and the Don Callis family are doing, nor since All In am I sick of what Jon Moxley and the Death Riders are doing. Ricochet with the Gates of Agony is quite interesting, and Christian Cage, who often has the same edgelord shtick as MJF, quite frankly does it better because he’ll do enough to at least give me the illusion of changing it up. Except for Christian, the difference between a lot of those heels and MJF is that they actually wrestle quite frequently. Maybe if MJF took up so much TV time wrestling as well as promos and segments I might feel different but as of right now, I’m quite tired of MJF.

This isn’t about MJF, though; it’s about Forbidden Door, and despite Max’s terribly convoluted idea for a finish, yes, I am one hundred percent sure it was his idea because it reminded me of the era of WWE I know he loves. Hangman’s world title defense against him, I thought, was excellent before that. It’s how I felt about the pay-per-view overall, quite good overall. Hiromu Takahashi looked great against Kyle Fletcher. Toni Storm defeated Athena in what I thought was a very good match, but I thought they might be holding back for a future rematch. I took a break during the beginning of the tag title match and came back just in time to see some mysterious masked men drive the Hurt Syndicate back to the airport before Bandido could even get the pin on whichever member of FTR was pinned (I think Dax? Don’t correct me, I do not care.). Bozilla, Persephone, and Alex Windsor all showed out for the four-way against Mercedes Mone for the TBS Title, impressing me with ideas I don’t think I’ve seen in four-ways before, and it felt like Mercedes made sure to make them all look good in defeat. Swerve versus Okada might have bee my match of the night. Say what you want about Okada’s efforts I felt he really put his all or at the very least 90% into his defense of the Unified Title against Swerve. The main event lights-out cage match, was both fun and intense, and if this is the last we see from Ospreay and Swerve in a while, it was a great showing by both of them.

Was it my favorite Forbidden Door? No. Was it the best Forbidden Door? I don’t think so either but I felt happy watching it, and when it was over, I was more curious about what was going to happen next rather than worried about the direction AEW was going.