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.