Is Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manga, 18 chapters, 2 volumes
Run	2000–2000 · completed
Community score	AniList 7.2
Where to read	VIZ — official

Overview

Adapting a video game into a manga is a strange job, since games like Ocarina of Time are built around exploration and puzzle-solving rather than a tightly plotted story. Akira Himekawa (the pen name for a two-person art and writing duo) doesn't try to force a game's structure onto the page. Instead, this manga takes the broad strokes — Link's journey through time, Zelda's role as the hidden princess, Ganondorf's rise — and reshapes them into an actual narrative with cause and effect, character motivation, and a clear arc from beginning to end.

What it does well

The biggest strength here is that Himekawa treats the source material as a starting point rather than a script to transcribe. Ganondorf gets more interiority than the game ever gave him, and the relationship between Link and Zelda develops with actual beats instead of cutscene exposition. The action is where the manga earns its keep visually — boss fights and the climactic confrontations are drawn with real momentum and get more room to breathe than seven years of in-game dungeon crawling would allow on the page. For a story that covers an entire generation-spanning game, it moves at a brisk pace without feeling like it's skipping the important parts.

The manga also isn't afraid to add its own material — new minor characters, extra scenes, and small worldbuilding touches that reward readers who already know the game inside and out, since none of it contradicts what they remember, it just fills in gaps the game left open.

Where it falls short

The tradeoff for that narrative focus is that almost all of the actual gameplay — the dungeon puzzles, the item progression, the sprawling overworld exploration — gets compressed into a handful of pages or cut outright. If what you loved about Ocarina of Time was solving the Water Temple or finding every Piece of Heart, none of that survives the adaptation in any meaningful way. A few fan-favorite side characters and moments get trimmed for pacing too, and the character designs are different enough from Nintendo's official art that it took some longtime fans a minute to get used to.

Verdict

This isn't a page-by-page walkthrough of the game, and it shouldn't be judged as one. Judged as its own story — a fantasy adventure that happens to share its cast and world with one of the most beloved games ever made — it's a solid, fast-moving read that gives Ganondorf and Zelda more depth than the source material had room for.