"Why is Yoshi there?" That's the question producer Eiji Aonuma imagines a player asking in Hyrule Castle, and it's why Yoshi isn't there anymore.
In a Game Informer interview with Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, the interviewer noted that the original game's portraits of Mario, Yoshi and more in Zelda's courtyard have been removed from the remake. Aonuma's answer comes down to immersion. Nintendo's store page for the Switch 2 version says the remake features "reimagined visuals, a refreshed soundtrack and modernised gameplay".
A more carefree time
Aonuma told Game Informer the team didn't think much of the portraits back then.
"Certainly, at the time, when we put those there, I don't think anybody thought it was too big a deal," he said. "Maybe there was a more carefree or comfortable approach to that sort of thing."
Looking at it now, he said, a player might "look up and they think, 'Why is Yoshi there?' We don't want that moment to interrupt their experience of the world in that way. So we're feeling a little bit differently about it this time."
Skyward Sword got the same treatment
The 3DS version's hidden *Skyward Sword* art is gone too. Aonuma recalled that the 3DS designers were keen on Easter eggs like that, and that the timing of *Skyward Sword*'s release made it a good fit.
This time, the same logic won out. "You don't want to interrupt the player's experience by seeing something that's unrelated to what they're currently doing in the game," he said.
Fujibayashi, who directed *Skyward Sword*, didn't sound wounded when Game Informer asked if the removal stung. "There was an underlying concept in what we were going for, so no hard feelings there," he said.
Bowser gets a pass
The cut doesn't apply to everything with a Mario connection. Aonuma himself brought up Talon, who keeps a design element with Bowser on it.
"That's part of the original design of the character," Aonuma said. "So we didn't change that. That stays as is."
Nintendo Life, which highlighted the comments on 6 November, noted that certain Mario references remain because they're part of character designs. It also pointed out that Nintendo has recently been dropping Star Fox and even Pikmin into the Super Mario universe.
No timeline winks either
The restraint also applied to the series timeline, which Game Informer raised using *The Wind Waker* as its example. Aonuma said staff sometimes asked about adding nods to the timeline or to other games, and that he turned them down.
"No, let's focus on this game. Let's make this the best version of Ocarina of Time that we can," he recalled saying.
Not every original quirk was smoothed away, though. Asked why a Skulltula reward is a disappointing batch of Bombchus, Aonuma said that feeling is part of the original experience, and that the team tried to keep it, "slight moments of disappointment" included.
Riley's take: I love that the rule has a loophole shaped like Bowser. Yoshi in a window gets cut for breaking the spell, while Bowser stays on Talon because he was part of the design all along. It's a neat bit of logic, and a sweet reminder that Hyrule's Mario connection never fully went away.
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