The big daddy. Best game of all time. 10 out of 10 out of 10 awards spilling off the garage shelf. Yet here I am slapping it with a 5/10.
I bought into the hype when I was young, and replayed it over and over. Why? Probably because the game didn't actually live up to my expectations, and I was hoping, WILLING it to be better, be more than what it was, on each playthrough. As if I could Jedi-mind-trick it into being different, the way I hoped recorded VHS tapes would end differently than the last time.
In reality Ocarina is a slow, blocky, restrictive slog with suffocating geography.
The field impresses at first -- you can't even see the castle until you crest the hill -- but it's an empty polygonal arena with little interest. And the geography of Hyrule itself as a whole is unnatural and unconvincing (we wouldn't get a persuasive Hyrulean CG landscape until Breath of the Wild).
It's cool that you can chop up signs at different angles (the first and last time your sword direction matters), yet this pales next to the omnipresent friction and interactivity felt in Link to the Past.
Even the ballyhooed Z-targeting has a dubious pedigree -- every 3D Zelda game since has been straight-jacketed by OoT's approach to combat.
I think the real magic of OoT was watching a polygonal adventure puppet, complete with sword and shield, react contextually to the environment. Look how he jumps vs how he hops. Hold against the block and watch him pull himself up. Leave him alone and see how he adjusts his gear. It's really a test of gamer vs developer, i.e. "did those designers think of this?" It's the bullshit of Bastion, impressing us with a narrator that "notices" how we act up.
But there is none of this dog-and-pony hustle in the original Legend of Zelda. There it's player vs world. Can you discern the rules, even if the game-space never spells them out for you in explicit text? Can you figure out the telos? It has been sad to watch Nintendo, the original purveyor of video game imagination, rely more-and-more over the years on carnival magician tricks.
I bought into the hype when I was young, and replayed it over and over. Why? Probably because the game didn't actually live up to my expectations, and I was hoping, WILLING it to be better, be more than what it was, on each playthrough. As if I could Jedi-mind-trick it into being different, the way I hoped recorded VHS tapes would end differently than the last time.
In reality Ocarina is a slow, blocky, restrictive slog with suffocating geography.
The field impresses at first -- you can't even see the castle until you crest the hill -- but it's an empty polygonal arena with little interest. And the geography of Hyrule itself as a whole is unnatural and unconvincing (we wouldn't get a persuasive Hyrulean CG landscape until Breath of the Wild).
It's cool that you can chop up signs at different angles (the first and last time your sword direction matters), yet this pales next to the omnipresent friction and interactivity felt in Link to the Past.
Even the ballyhooed Z-targeting has a dubious pedigree -- every 3D Zelda game since has been straight-jacketed by OoT's approach to combat.
I think the real magic of OoT was watching a polygonal adventure puppet, complete with sword and shield, react contextually to the environment. Look how he jumps vs how he hops. Hold against the block and watch him pull himself up. Leave him alone and see how he adjusts his gear. It's really a test of gamer vs developer, i.e. "did those designers think of this?" It's the bullshit of Bastion, impressing us with a narrator that "notices" how we act up.
But there is none of this dog-and-pony hustle in the original Legend of Zelda. There it's player vs world. Can you discern the rules, even if the game-space never spells them out for you in explicit text? Can you figure out the telos? It has been sad to watch Nintendo, the original purveyor of video game imagination, rely more-and-more over the years on carnival magician tricks.