Understands that the true Dark World is adulthood and that Time will mold us all into adults, whether we want it to or not. Collect your spiritual trinkets if you want some illusion of choice, but those in charge are pulling up the strings of your playpen from the shadows. Seven years will pass and the apocalypse will arrive with droughts and flames and frozen wastes, the leaders and heroes of youth rendered useless against the unstoppable forces of evil, leaving you to pick up the pieces. Masterpiece. You had to be there. Each playthrough allows you to see your past gaming selves as Young Link; you now naively see yourself as the more capable and wise Adult Link who is too embarrassed to use the boomerang. A Nintendo game that forces you to grapple with mortality and innocence and the cycle of fathers and sons in ways that grim Atlus JRPGs about demons could only dream of. Godlike!!! Majora's Mask stans will talk about their little stories that they write down in their little bomberman notebook or whatever, but it was all in here too - you just didn't have a checklist or trinkets to reward you for engaging with the material. Gameplay is still rock solid (on Nintendo's first try!!), but you come to this thing for mood, atmosphere, text, subtext. OCARINA OF TIME BABY

"o fluxo do tempo é sempre cruel... sua velocidade parece diferente para cada pessoa, mas ninguém pode mudá-la..."

tive muitos pensamentos ao finalizar Ocarina of Time, a transição do jovem Link para o herói adulto é extremamente triste, pois ele é lançado em um futuro sombrio e sem esperança, onde Hyrule está em ruínas e as forças do mal dominam. não há espaço para a infância florescer. entendo isso como uma metáfora para a vida real onde muitas vezes somos privados da oportunidade de experimentar uma infância antes de sermos lançados ao mundo adulto, temos que ser nossos próprios heróis. meu primeiro contato com o jogo foi nesse ano e me arrependo de não ter tentado antes, é uma obra prima.

To appreciate Ocarina of Time as a new player is to appreciate a game as the sum of its parts. No individual element will blow you away as "the greatest of all time" because everything ever since Ocarina has outclassed it in individual ways, but it might just be the most solid game you can get when looked at as a whole. As a follow-up to a Link to the Past it does pretty much everything right in steering the series in a new direction; better dungeons, better progression and structure, and more interesting items for the 3D space it now utilizes. Each dungeon has a great gimmick to it with extremely memorable setpieces compared to prior games which often repeated themselves aesthetically to a tiring degree. The game lacks the overall charm and mystique of prior Zelda's on a surface level but maintains a large degree of weird shit (seriously, what is a Dead Hand) and a genuinely solid coming-of-age story under the surface, with an emotional hook to it with how far the journey will take you. This isn't to say it's flawless, far from it; the overworld frankly sucks, combat relies too much on waiting, there's still occasional directional crypticism that involves fucking around and finding out and Ganon's Castle was largely underwhelming. But as far as a game goes, that's a sum of its parts, that sells you the idea of a classical Hero's Journey so thematically powerful you can taste it in the gameplay? Ocarina of Time knocks it out of the park.

Overtime I came to see this game as overrated, but after replaying it I realize it was far from it. I’ve forgotten about my love for this beautiful game. Sure I know where to go, it’s easy and simple when you dissect the game to its core. However that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to play through. The music, sound effects, atmosphere, and world are plenty of good reasons for me to return to this in the future. For the first time a Zelda game was 3D, this was the result; A game that truly gives you a sense of progression. You have to appreciate Nintendo for laying down that foundation of what a 3D game could be like.

Maybe one day I will write a proper review of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. A lot has already been said about this game as well though so for now I’m just going to leave these ramblings.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the most important games ever and is considered the best of all time by many for good reason. I think it might be one of the greatest hero’s journeys humans have ever created. It’s also a great coming of age/facing adulthood experience too. There’s a reason why, even if you have never played it before, if you play it today for the first time ever it will still feel nostalgic.

The gameplay and controls were an important breakthrough and a stand out for the time. It left an influence that can still be seen today, I think pretty much all 3D action/adventure games since owe this game. It still holds up too and is great to play now. It’s great game design and ridiculously impressive when you remember it was Nintendo’s first go at a 3D Zelda.

Visually it was breath taking at the time and surprisingly holds up really well for an earlier 3D game. It doesn’t matter how much graphics have improved since it has a great art style and so much charm and atmosphere.

The soundtrack is phenomenal and I would happily throw out entire, well known and liked game franchises to keep it. And those classic sounds, like opening a chest or finding a secret, god damn, so good.

It has one of the best beginnings to any game ever as well. The opening cinematic is great and the village and Deku tree work as a perfect tutorial. By the time you run out onto Hyrule Field the game has perfectly introduced you to the world, the story and gameplay and filled you with wonder and anticipation. The great pacing continues throughout as well.

There are some flaws though, I’m not completely blind. Navi can be annoying and the owl is way to chatty but nostalgia has rounded off this problem. It’s also too easy, although I didn’t think this as a kid. There is also some quality of life improvements needed, like being able to change items/equipment quicker. It has this weird issue too, were at times the game can feel too hand hold-y but then lean more obtuse at other times.

I think this game is pretty much as good as it could possibly be when you factor in the limitations of the time and the N64 hardware.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time blew me away as a kid when it was new and I played it a lot. I played it again as a teen and fell in love and developed a deeper appreciation for it. I played it again as an adult and it solidified its place as the best, even if there are other games I like more. I revisited it again more recently and I still love it. I will be playing this game at least every ten years until they bury me.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time was one of the key games that made me fall in love with this medium. I think it might be time to do another play through.

9.8/10

Tal vez no es el mejor videojuego de la historia y mucho menos el mejor dentro de su saga pero es innegable ver el carisma que posee y como se volvió un clásico atemporal dentro del medio, es interesante ver como pese a tener la historia mas arquetípica de todas esta se dispone a ser cínica en ocasiones con el relato de un Niño desdichado de su infancia para salvaguardar a un reino bajo la excusa típica del viaje del héroe, como se les arrebata la vida terrenal a personajes que conocimos durante el viaje para que estos mismos se vuelvan un aporte al lore de la leyenda de los títulos venideros, un clásico de clásicos sin duda alguna.

“The flow of time is always cruel... Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days...”

If I could forget one game completely and experience it for the first time again, it would be Ocarina of Time. Not just because I'd like to "Ooh" and "Aah" at the adventure, but because I recognize that I'm COMPLETELY unable to be objective about it. I can't really tell if this game holds up! I've loved Ocarina for over 20 years, so nostalgia may very well have blinded me to this game’s shortcomings. It’s possible that the game is just not that great by today’s standards, and I'm unable to see it.

But I don’t think so.

A few years ago, I wanted to know if this holds up for new players. I watched a handful of videos on people who finally played OoT for the first time and gave their impressions. I also had the fantastic experience of getting my wife interested in Zelda. I was playing Twilight Princess HD shortly after its release, and she took the Wii U Gamepad from me in the Arbiter’s Grounds and didn’t give it back until the credits rolled. After that, I seized the opportunity to get her to play as much 3D Zelda as she would let me, and watching her get sucked into Ocarina of Time was fantastic. She had played TP and Wind Waker before we got to that point, so she was frustrated by the lack of a camera stick, but that was her only criticism as she went through the majority of the game. She even enjoyed the Water Temple! (She ended up giving me the controller for most of the Shadow Temple though, that was definitely her least favorite part)

All I can do to get an objective reading on the game is observe others as they react to Link’s first foray into the third dimension, and I’m impressed at how consistently newbies still seem to enjoy it. When other early 3D pioneers like Mario 64, Final Fantasy VII, Crash Bandicoot or Sonic Adventure get revisited, they’re often met with complaints and criticisms over their controls, dated visuals, pacing, or gameplay that has simply lost its novelty due to advances in modern games. But Ocarina of Time seems to be an exception. The criticisms of the game come from those like myself, who are overly familiar with every detail. We’ve played through the game so many times that the magic is lessened, if not gone entirely. Yet this adventure through Hyrule continues to resonate with new players.

And how could it not! The dungeons are varied. The enemies are engaging. The music is some of the best ever put on a cartridge. The story beats and twists that most of us now take for granted (but potentially aren’t known to someone reading this) have actual weight to them. The world, while not gigantic compared to modern games, is still as large as it needs to be, and filled with memorable characters and locales.

At its core, I think this game has endured because it’s a well-presented adventure with relatable themes and an engrossing world to explore. The gameplay alone, while solid, wouldn’t have made it the classic it is. And even though I’ve beaten it more times than I can remember and some of that magic is gone, my familiarity has never trumped my sense of wonder. I will always be grateful for the time I've spent with it.

there's not really anything new I can say about this game, but I will say that even as someone born after this game came out it's held up incredibly well. there were virtually no other companies at this time that had the same grasp of designing for 3d space as nintendo did, and how they somehow extrapolated this version of hyrule from the square rooms of the previous games is a miracle to be honest. it's bare by today's open-world standards but thankfully you don't spend too much time retreading old ground, and the bulk of the game is spent in the excellent dungeons. whereas the game structure derives much more heavily from link to the past (some would say too much so), the dungeons are designed much in the same way as link's awakening, where there is a key item in each that must be found and then utilized for puzzles in earlier parts of the dungeon. each dungeon's layout is memorable and unique, with a clear progression and enough hints to help you understand what you should be doing. the controls reflect super mario 64 much in the same way that they aren't as refined as they would later become, but offer an excellent amount of movement options that make traversing the game much less annoying. the item variety here is also top-notch, with old weapons like the hookshot transferring perfectly to a 3D space. I won't say that elements like the first-person aiming are particularly great, but at the very least these aspects don't lead to any major frustration. the characters are sweet and fun to talk to, and even navi can be useful at times; this isn't on par with many of the later entries but it still has the typical whimsey of a zelda game all the same.

I feel like I could spend a lot more time thinking about talking about this game's details but from a broad perspective, this is simply an amazing early 3D adventure game, and the bedrock for many design conventions that developed into the 2000s and 2010s. I'm very happy that I finally was able to sit down and play through the whole thing, even with a year and a half break in the middle

growing up i loved ocarina of time, first big game i dedicated my time to. i first bought it on gamecube, got stuck on jabu jabu, then decided to finish it on 3ds back when it was the new hot thing. so ofc its my favorite game of all time, that was until i was exposed to the internet. i didnt outright hear awful things about it but gradually i understood the notion that this game shouldnt be #1 and that it was a bit overrated, and i was starting to dislike that i couldnt shake the fact that its my #1 game on the throne hell i even thought my brothers fav game FF7 was a cooler choice. but lately ive been realizing like ''hey, this game did shape me. it gave me a sense of adventure, atmosphere and wonder. this game is epic awesome sauce and i will learn to appreciate through my own lens

Like most of my experiences with the Zelda franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time took me way longer to complete than I thought it would, as I've been playing this game on-&-off for almost two years now. Maybe it's the game's immeasurable influence on both the Zelda franchise and video games as a whole, or the impossibly high standard that the game has been held to by people online over the years, but for whatever reason, I rarely found myself committing to Ocarina of Time and would play other games instead, even if I did have fun pretty much every time I sat down to play this game. Because of this, I guess it must have been a good thing for me to get so sick of Tears of the Kingdom (which, by the way, I'll get to writing my thoughts on once I've beaten it), as that was what motivated me to finally wrap up my playthrough with this landmark title.

Unlike what a lot of people have asserted for the past 25 years, I don't see this game as a perfect one, but if there's one thing that Ocarina of Time knows how to do exceptionally well, it's creating a distinct and wholly engrossing atmosphere. Every village, dungeon, and temple feels distinct from the last, and the eccentric characters and charming, yet occasionally macabre art direction gave places like the Hyrule Castle marketplace and Kakariko village a ton of life and personality. Koji Kondo's score was especially effective in establishing the mood of each area, with the themes for the Great Deku Tree and the Forest Temple being some of my favorite pieces of video game music ever thanks to just how evocative and hypnotic they are. The temples themselves were already a lot of fun thanks to their solid puzzles, bosses, and utilization of the items that you unlock throughout your adventure, but their unique atmospheres were what really held my attention. Aside from the titular ocarina, one of the main mechanics that Ocarina of Time brought to the table was that of time travel, and while it's slightly annoying to have to go to the Temple of Time whenever you need to go from being an adult to a child or vice versa, I still thought that the concept was well-implemented, as the contrast between the cheery innocence of Hyrule during childhood and the decrepit nightmare that it became seven years later made me want to explore the entire map just to see what was different about each area.

Ocarina of Time is one of those games whose reputation feels impossible to live up to, but even then, I felt that my gripes with the game were big enough to affect my overall experience with it. One of my biggest hurdles with this game would definitely be its control scheme (although this issue can be seen in a majority of the N64's library due to its bizarre anomaly of a controller), as the clunky Z-targeting and stiff aiming made combat encounters not feel entirely responsive or reliable. I also found Navi to be irritating with her useless advice and constant utterances of "Hey! Listen!", although her presence never pushed me to the point of frustration. Talking about this next criticism is a bit of a dead horse by this point, but I still felt that the Water Temple hurt the overall pace of the game, because while I wouldn't consider it to be outright bad, the amount of times that I had to keep equipping and unequipping the same iron boots made it feel tedious and sluggish. Despite its open area, Ocarina of Time is actually quite linear in its progression for both the main story and the side content, and while that isn't a problem by itself, it made me wonder what the point of the empty hub world connecting the actually interesting areas was. Even after unlocking Epona, traversing Hyrule Field was just sort of dull, and unlike something like the open seas of The Wind Waker HD, I was never really compelled to explore this area and instead headed straight for the next temple, side quest, or minigame that I had lined up for me. Ocarina of Time was both highly influential from a design perspective and a fun game in its own right, and while I don't see it as the best Zelda game or even the best game of 1998, let alone of all time, it still managed to stick the landing for me 25 years after its release.

It's the beginning of autumn. I'm done configuring a fanmade PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It's 2022. Four years. It's been almost over four years since I originally played this game, on my old 2DS system. I have many memories of experiencing OOT, whether it be from it's humble but impactful story, appealing atmosphere, masterful music, and most importantly, seeing if it held up to my expectations. For 20 years (at the time), it was, and still is, one of the most critically acclaimed and important video games of all time. I remember being drawn into the world and story of the game, and it quickly became an all time favorite for my younger self. It's an experience I held near and dear to my heart, and here we are again, four years later. Would the game still be as good as I remembered it four years ago? Or would it be where my memories failed me?
There's something awe inspiring about OOT's sheer polish for the first 3D game in the series. Link controls exactly how you expect him to, he has a handy arsenal of weapons, several means of fast travel the further you get through the game, and has now dawned one of his most iconic designs in the franchise. The land of Hyrule is interconnected brilliantly through many different shortcuts and pathways that tie the cohesion of this world together, it makes it feel like a real place. There's all of these dungeons, while not very difficult in the slightest, are designed so tightly and have a satisfaction to figuring out practically anything in them. Lastly, there's the combat. While simple in terms of control and enemy variety, it works excellently, having no clunk or questionable design choices. I feel that's a great way to describe this game- it all just works. I rarely felt like "what were they thinking???", because it's put together with so much competency.
Ocarina of Time, while not exactly a game that has gracefully aged graphically, puts a lot of effort into giving a heavy atmosphere and mood. Dungeons like the Forest and Shadow temple have so much weight to their feel, especially with the dark and grueling context to the Shadow Temple's history. The lost woods has such a feeling of magical whimsy and mystique with its emphasis on guidance of music and fog. The Final Boss is still one of the most visually impressive things the N64 has EVER pushed out, with the shadows interrupted by lightning to emphasize the horror of the opponent before you, the fate of Hyrule completely on your shoulders. It's immaculate.
The story of the game isn't exactly peak fiction or excruciatingly dense, but there's just something about it that leaves a profound feeling when it's over. Throughout my revisit, I was expecting some bit of emotion due to my past experiences and how time has changed me. I felt some chills here or there from a song in the game I remember loving, sure, but it took the ending to finally break me. A pedestal with the Master Sword, sitting profoundly as it can finally be put to rest for many, many, years. The bells ring as the curtain begins to close. This time, it broke me. The feeling of four years passing finally crushed me and I had to let it out. I cried. I cried for a solid minute. It made me completely shut down as I saw the ending come to a close. But when it was all over, I felt so much better. All that stress just melted away as I knew i had truly experienced something that I loved.
It's no surprise that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a game about growing up. The game taught me this well. I've grown a lot over four years, believe it or not. After Link turns away, leaving the Master Sword behind forever to further his own life, the life he deserved, it connected with me on a much greater level. I still have a lot of things to learn and grow from, but this game definitely reached out to me, and what I'm experiencing. It's simply amazing.

It's Ocarina of Time.

Edit (2023)
I originally wrote this in a salty mood. Now I still think the dungeons aren't particularly fun - they're nice when you're not super stuck or dying to a bat - but I like the jank ambition of OoT a lot. And the atmosphere is still great. And all the npcs and little item interactions are great .. I sort of wish they'd try making this scale of Zelda again, but with the better design knowhow of 2023.

--

In summary: https://twitter.com/han_tani2/status/1529794146617421824

(Edited to add some positive things about the spatial concepts of the dungeons and towns)

Would you put a health bar into a 3D block / hidden object game, so if you die at the end of three puzzles, you have to redo all of them? Probably not!

Now imagine that there was a game that did this - and in fact, it sold well - not only that, but it became so unimaginably popular, that its idea - adding a health bar to a 3D puzzle game - became considered 'good practice' in thousands of games, and in fact, this game went on to have dozens of sequels with the same idea: put a health bar in a puzzle game.

Ocarina of Time strikes me as absurd. Having played through the water temple, there hasn't been a single truly interesting idea in any of the dungeons. The base mechanics are so flat and uninteresting - imprecise combat (even with the Z targeting), finicky auto-jumping, slow climbing, a camera that almost always points into the ground, and the need to walk slowly everywhere. When the atmosphere and setting do work, it feels more like a welcome distraction against the task of trying to play through the game.

Every room in OoT boils down to:

- Get oriented, see the obvious thing you need to do, and then do it.
- Sometimes doing it is hard: you might die (often from an enemy that's incidentally in the room, and not the conceptual focus of room puzzle), you might fall and need to re-do rooms. Sometimes it's slow and boring: you need to push a block around some ice.

(One room in the Water temple carefully makes you shoot a water-level-changing crystal 5 times to make it through. Nothing about this idea is interesting, the solution is obvious from the get go!)

Or worse, it might be a combat room, where you're subjected to a camera and combat system that's impossible to aim with, with enemies whose design concepts tend to be "invincible 90% of the time, maybe vulnerable in a weird, awkward window".

Every dungeon is dozens of these rooms stitched together, in a way where it's easy to miss a key you need, only to find you need it later - after completing 10 minutes of boring puzzle rooms. Then, you get to backtrack, and do the boring puzzle rooms again.

In this way, OoT feels like it was a 2D Puzzle game on paper, naive concepts hackily translated into 3D with a combat system grafted on.

Each new item you get is a failed answer to 'how do we make this interesting?' Pointing your bow around the room, bombing a dodongo, equipping the iron boots over and over. These new items are never fundamentally interesting, they just create a new paint job for a switch sitting on a ledge.

To OoT's defense, I think it succeeds with interesting spatial setups and dramatic pacing (deku tree web, etc, water temple water level) but the moment to moment execution of how you traverse those setpieces just really doesn't work. It's super cool to think about the process of climbing to the ceiling of the Fire Temple, but it's kind of shrug when you think about the moment to moment process of getting there.

The layout of the world is cool (on paper), it's just a slog to walk across. Likewise with the execution of the towns like Zora's Domain or Goron City - they're neat to be in, up until you need to Do Something.

If you knew exactly what to do and when to do it (to avoid backtracking or costly dead-end-investigation), I think this game would be a lot more tolerable. I can see why it became people's favorites if you're intimately familiar with it - breezing through dungeons and slowly making progress is actually a little fun.

Unfortunately (for this review) it doesn't make sense to review something in such a context of having played it 10 times...

--

In some ways, OoT fundamentally feels like a mix of Hidden Object games, the puzzle genre, and even mystery games/JRPGs. It's less a visionary step into 3D than it appears, it's more a hackjob of genres whose saving grace was the production value, hang-out-vibes and atmosphere.

It's very easy to get stuck or lost in the sections between dungeons. E.g., stopping the goron and waiting a minute for it to uncurl, in order to get into the entrance to the Fire Temple. And it's all hampered by slow movement and easily getting disoriented, making what might be a fairly straightforward puzzle into a nightmare.

--

What angers me about this game the most is how much Nintendo - and nostalgic developers - doubled
down on the travesty of mechanics the game has. Having a terrible core moveset, tons of stupid items with one-off uses has become 'good practice'. You can probably find a dozen youtube videos on what makes OoT's dungeons "work". None of the fundamentals here are 'good' - they're merely passable ideas that can become palatable through fancy art or story design.

To me, every game reproducing these ideas feels like a child-like grasping at recreating the magic of childhood favorite. And they ironically miss the point: what does manage to work about OoT is NOT those fundamentals of bad puzzles and combat and poor level design, it's the atmosphere and tone, it's the fun of uncovering a dungeon.

Even future Zelda games do this. I don't know how they became so fixated on this uncomfortable mix of tedious puzzles and sloppy action.

Most of what is required in OoT to progress the game is at best calmingly repetitive (it can be fun to breeze through a dungeon and slowly uncover its treasures), and at worst offensively tedious.

What's good about OoT is the strange NPCs, the quiet little subplots on how parts of the world change over time, the random horror, the way you can kind of just hang out and roll around in it. The sense of inhabiting a grand myth. But even that, to an extent, feels cheapened by a story that's too willing to make everything you do as an adult easily fix every single problem. The Kokiri Forest comes back to life! All the Gorons are safe! Zora's Domain melts!

As far as Japanese Anime story set-ups go, Young Link's stuff was not bad. But the follow through in Adult Link's repetitive romp through dungeons, at least through the Water Temple, feels like it's just going through the motions.

--

Ocarina of Time nunca esteve num pedestal pra mim. Posso com segurança dizer que nunca o superestimei. Tem jogo melhor, tem até Zelda melhor. Mesmo em seu lançamento, apesar de sua excelência artística e técnica, isso já era verdade.

Por outro lado, não creio que sou similarmente culpado do pecado de subestimar Ocarina of Time. Se é contestável dizer que ele é o "melhor jogo de todos os tempos", é inegável que ele é um dos melhores. Mesmo 26 anos depois, isso permanece verdade.

OoT é uma aula de como se fazer uma aventura 3D, aula que até hoje muitos desenvolvedores não absorveram plenamente. Seja em ritmo, controles, world design, dungeons, variedade, atmosfera, temas... Cada um de seus elementos é feito com uma excelência tão profunda que é até compreensível alguns fãs mais animados o conclamarem como perfeito. Isso, é claro, é exagero. Mas bem menos do que se imagina...

P.S.: Joguei a versão decompilada, Ship of Harkinian. Ter a oportunidade de jogar OoT em 1080p, 120fps, com loadings praticamente inexistentes e vários QoL é prova de que pirataria, principalmente de games da Nintendo, é belo e moral.

(pelamor, eu sei que decompilação não é pirataria, me deixa em paz)

I originally played Ocarina of Time the year it came out when I was a kid, and the feeling of "this is the greatest thing ever" has stuck with me for a while even though my detailed memories of the game faded. I'd been wanting to go back to it for years but I've sort of been worried that my replay of it would reveal more flaws as I view it with an older, critical eye. But after finishing my replay, I love it just as much as I did as a kid. Yeah there are some annoyances like the occasionally finicky Z-targeting, or the entire Water Temple, but as a whole, Ocarina of Time holds up remarkably well. And even though I really had forgotten a lot of the game, I was shocked by how much was still somewhere in my brain waiting for me to blow the dust off.

With BOTW 2 allegedly coming out this year, I realized that I have a pretty big Zelda backlog I need to get through beforehand. I mean, I haven't even played BOTW 1, and the only 3D Zelda I've played are Wind Waker and Majora's Mask 3D. So I'm going to be dedicating the next couple months to playing through several Zelda games, not because I need to know the lore, just because I really want to see the evolution of this series over the years, and why some games get the reputations they get.

The first thing that really pops out about Ocarina of Time is it's ambition and presentation. In my head, when you wanted to make a "cinematic experience" during this era, with big cutscenes that constantly change camera shots, a large cast of characters, and a story that feels mythological in its scope, you did that kind of stuff on the PS1. And yet they pull it off on the N64 to an impressive degree. I understand why people were head over heels in love with this game on release, it conveys the grandness of this world and story so well both in cutscenes and in the environment itself. It's funny, nowadays the word "feels like a movie" is used as an insult, but Ocarina of Time definitely borrows from film and anime in order to present its story and world, but in ways that never betray the gameplay and only enhance it. I mean, z-targeting literally adds letterboxes to the screen and it does usually make fights feel way cooler. You're doing backflips, blocking attacks, trading blows, and while the camera occasionally freaks and ruins the moment, a lot of times it really enhances the drama and scale of these fights, whether it be giant bosses or an enemy with their own sword and shield. The Dark Link fight would be raw as fuck if it were in a movie, but it's in a game and it's raw as fuck to play.

The cutscene direction really gives off this feeling of excitement the developers had over finally being able to tell a story like this, a whole new dimension for expression. There are some cutscenes where the camera just fucking swings all over the place, some that use first-person, some that cut rapidly between different shots and angles, it really has the energy of "look at what we fucking did!" I've gone on about the presentation too much already, but it can't be understated how good this game is at making this story and setting feel huge, like I said at the beginning, mytological. Ocarina of Time obviously borrows a lot from Link to the Past, but ends up feeling more like the sacred text that every other Zelda game has to respond to.

Despite this grand feeling, Hyrule Field itself kind of feels both big and small at the same time. Like, it does take a while to get from place to place on foot, but also it's very funny that Hyrule Castle is like a couple minutes away on foot from Kokiri Forest. Coming back to this feels like when you go back to your elementary school and feel like a giant, which is pretty fitting considering the whole premise of the game. It's kind of genius, the game is all about seeing the world in two different ages, the things that change and the things that stay the same despite everything, and interacting with the game at different points in the player's life changes how the player sees it. Part of me feels like I'll never really completely "get" this game the way its greatest fanatics do because I wasn't there when it came out and I didn't interact with it the way they did and still continue to.

But the thing about playing Ocarina of Time right now is that, well its kind of hard to get through its most obtuse moments knowing that later on there are games that fix them. Obviously its kind of foolish to hold an old game like this to modern standards, but throughout my playthrough there were little moments that just made me think "man, I really wanna move on to the next game". Part of it might be the fact that I know so much of what happens in this game already due to hearing about it from other people, whereas games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are mostly unknown to me outside of very basic parts of their premises. Especially in the beginning, when you don't have the conveniences of adulthood, the urge to drop the game was honestly something I had to fight. While the dungeons have some cool moments and real nail their atmosphere, I didn't find many of them mechanically interesting until you get to the future.

Another thing that bothered me was the lack of substantial side stuff. This is probably a selfish expectation to put on this game, but Wind Waker and Majora's Mask have a huge amount of side things to do, in Majora you could argue that the side objectives are just as important as the main ones. But I found myself constantly going "Okay what side stuff is there to do before the next dungeon...oh nothing I guess". I love WW and Majora for their side content, so this ended being one of my biggest turn-offs for this game. I was also surprised how there wasn't that much interaction between the past and future timelines, in terms of doing something in the past to affect the future, outside of the actual story of course. I mean, there were definitely moments that did that, the Spirit Temple being one of my favorite instances of that, but I don't know, I guess I thought it would be more like the Dark World in LTTP.

But the game does do a really good job of making Adult Link feel so much more empowering and in control than Child Link. You go from every adult talking down to you to basically every NPC falling in love with you, you actually have a ride instead of walking everywhere like a high schooler with no license, and you can wear red clothes instead of the clothes your tree dad told you to wear. Plenty of great writing has been done about how Ocarina of Time portrays growing up and having to leave the innocence of childhood, so I won't try to write a worse version of those reviews. I'll just say it's all really effective and smartly done, and it being done in an N64 game with, compared to other large game stories at the time, not a particularly long script, is kind of mind-blowing.

I'm glad I finally finished this game, but I understand why I put it down several times in the past. It's a fairly bumpy road but I understand why it has the status it does, and why someone could still find a lot of value in it even when more modernized takes on this game exist. Some stray thoughts that I couldn't fit in the review:

- No wonder so many kids had this game invade their nightmares, it's terrifying and isn't afraid to just show you some fucked up shit. Honestly huge respect for never holding back on the horror and grotesque aspects.

- Water Temple wasn't as bad as it could be, but that's unfortunately because I saw a video of someone analyzing it before playing this, and while I didn't remember everything in the video, a lot of the things they brought up helped me navigate it in a way most people were not able to. Still died to Dark Link and still had a "damn it I need to find a key" moment so I still had some of The Water Temple Experience.

- Music is firing on all cylinders in this game, Kondo shows an insane range here between the Ocarina songs, the overworld themes, and the dungeon themes. Love in general how otherworldly and intimidating the dungeons present themselves as. Also being able to pitch bend on the Ocarina is so cool, it really feels like an instrument, which is something Wind Waker honestly missed out on.

I think one of the reasons this game manages to stand the test of time so well, at least for me, is its message. It's one that constantly changes and evolves with you the older you get. So many people have talked about this already, so I won't parrot what they've said, but I can't think of any game or even piece of media has managed to share this specific message and pull it off nearly as well, with such rich subtext too. I'm the same age as this game and it's one I still think about often, especially as I get older.

Maybe I still have a ton to experience and I'm getting ahead of myself but I often think about how few 3D action games I've played that have released over the decades have really made 3D dungeons as good or stimulating as this game's.

Ocarina's dungeons especially the Temples really make use of 3D space and verticality with all sorts of creative or otherwise stimulating puzzles and scenarios of sorts.

I'm sure a lot of specific praise has been said about that already but one thing I feel most people don't appreciate is Ocarina's variety in dungeon layouts. What I mean is most Zelda games 2D or 3D usually have all or most of their dungeons fall into one of three categories (I don't take credit for thinking of these, I'm loosely remembering these from GMTK's Boss Keys series): (1) more complex lock and key find the path dungeons (2) more linear gauntlet style follow the path dungeons and (3) those special puzzle box dungeons where you change a central mechanism of sorts often

Ocarina dungeons have all of these. The Forest Temple is one of the most memorable Lock and Key dungeons in the series. The Shadow Temple is a linear gauntlet. The Water Temple is probably the most infamous puzzle box dungeon as well.

Just between the temples in terms of variety we have:
3 more complex Lock and Key dungeons: Fire Temple, Forest Temple, Water Temple (and Spirit Temple kind of)
1 puzzle box being the Water Temple (Water Temple is kind of a mix of both)
and 2 more linear gauntlets of sorts with the Shadow and Spirit Temple
Most Zelda games have all their dungeons fit into one category with maybe one outlier (most LA/Oracle dungeons are lock and key and I'm pretty sure every Skyward Sword dungeon is a linear gauntlet of more creative puzzles) but Ocarina manages to have this appreciable diversity I feel most of the others don't have (my memory is a bit fuzzy on some like Twilight Princess)

Also wow this game released pretty close to my birthday.

a weird one to try and rate over 20 years later. is it a timeless video game? ...maybe? being completely honest, there was a solid decade or so where i felt this had aged poorly, and that other games were becoming more refined with their controls, had greater scope, better ideas, etc. none of that really matters to me now—it no longer needs to be all the things that i feel were eventually surpassed by other games—and in a full circle kinda way i love this one now almost as much as i did in 1998. almost.