As a preface, I will restate what everyone else says about this game, which is that its best played knowing as little as possible about it beforehand. The game experience inherently works due to how it teaches the player about the world and its mechanics, and knowing any of this information beforehand cheapens the game experience significantly. Spoilers ahead.

The game wears its influences on its sleeves to the point where I almost overlooked this game as one of those "indie games that is just a well made recreation of a retro game the creator liked as a kid". Tunic is obviously Zelda inspired, but I was surprised by how much it felt like a soulslike game. I feel that the game surpasses its influences however, due to the unique way the game teaches the player mechanics through the in-game manual. As you explore the world there are many moments where you learn something about it that recontextualizes everything you've seen before in a way that feels unique to this game. For me there were probably at least 3 points in the game where it felt like the "real game" was finally starting due to this (those being the hunt for the 3 keys, the event that occurs after you die to the heir, and the hunt for the true ending).

One of my favorite moments in the game was the descent into the rooted ziggurat, and almost everything after that point. I'm not sure if there's anything gating the player from going there in the beginning but I think for most people the blue key is the last one they will get. Here's just a simple list of some of the reasons I think this section of the game is brilliant.
- For almost every area before this point, you're given a map of the area before going there. Wandering into this area without any guide as to what to expect beforehand adds a lot to the feeling that you've arrived somewhere you're not supposed to be.
- Lots of scripted events and imagery add to the oppressive atmosphere of the area, along with the fact that your character is constantly descending deeper into the area.
- The normal checkpoints being replaced with their techy variants makes it so that even the places where the player can expect respite feel foreign and strange.
- The boss awaiting you at the end of this area is my favorite in the game. It's one of those well-made mirror matchup style bosses where they have access to lots of similar moves to you, so beating them really feels like you've outwitted and outskilled them.
- Due to this likely being the last area you go to before the fight with the heir that turns the world to shit, it emphasizes the feeling that you've learned something about the world you shouldn't have/done something you shouldn't have.

This section of the game is so good I think I would've given the game a high rating even if it wasn't consistently good throughout.

I'd also like to take a moment to talk about the combat system of the game. The combat is a soulslike-style melee combat experience involving locking onto enemies, utilizing well-timed dodges and enemy windows of vulnerability to punish. What makes Tunic unique is its extreme take on stamina management. In dark souls running out of stamina means you have to wait an extra half second for it to start going up again before you can dodge or attack, as these actions can be done as long as you have any stamina. In Tunic, when you run out of stamina all your defensive options are nerfed until your stamina goes above a high threshold. I like this system a lot as it emphasizes more methodical use of defensive tools in order to succeed in combat, and punishes the player otherwise. Since attacking doesn't cost stamina the system is designed to reward the player for managing their stamina by only using well-timed dodges as opposed to spamming rolls to gap close or cheese their way through certain attacks. At first it feels very punishing as running out of stamina in a boss fight usually means you just lose, but once you learn how to better manage it, fights become significantly easier.

As for many of the puzzles in the world, I don't think I really have anything unique to say about them other than finding them and solving them was very satisfying, especially the final big puzzle at the end of the game. I had a great time with this game and I would recommend it to anyone.

After playing this one I went back to my score on Pikmin 1 and raised it from a 7/10 to an 8/10. Looking back on it, the annoyances I had with the controls and the AI in that game feel very minor in comparison to everything that it does right. Many of the issues present in Pikmin 4 honestly helped me to better appreciate just how little the original game got wrong in comparison.

The funny thing is, despite the issues I have with Pikmin 4 I'd still consider it to be my second favorite in the franchise (though this may admittedly be recency bias). The core gameplay loop is still as fun as its always been, and the game boasts much more content than any of the previous three games. It reincorporates and improves upon ideas from Pikmin 2 in particular, removing a lot of the aspects of Pikmin 2 that made that game annoying.

My biggest gripe with Pikmin 4 is that it butchers atmosphere and mood like none of the games have ever done. While 2 and 3 never quite reached the heights of 1 in my opinion, the atmosphere in those games works well for each respective game. Pikmin 2 leaned into more comedic elements which works well for that game, and Pikmin 3 had a unique blend of 1's seriousness and 2's humor. I couldn't really tell you what's going on in Pikmin 4 however. The best way I can describe it is that Pikmin 4 feels less like a Pikmin game and more like a Nintendo game; it felt less like I was exploring an alien planet, and more like I was playing a video game. It felt nearly impossible to get immersed in the world of Pikmin 4 in the same way I did in the previous games.

You can feel the Nintendo-ification of Pikmin 4 from the very start of the game, with its overly long tutorial that goes for way too long. And while the previous games also had decently long tutorial sections, at least in those two it felt like you were actually playing a game since you gain access to pikmin pretty much immediately. In Pikmin 4, after the initial section with Olimar, too much time is spent in the tutorial listening to boring characters talk while you learn all the intricacies of controlling your new pet partner Oatchi instead of playing with pikmin. Funnily enough, this emphasis on Oatchi in the tutorial feels like unintentional foreshadowing to how combat plays out in the rest of the game.

Those boring characters don't stop talking once the tutorial is done however, and the way they force themselves into the game right up to the very end contributes a lot to how wrong the atmosphere is in this game compared to the others. All of your rescue crew feels the need to comment on everything you do throughout the game with annoying pop-up reminders to use your survey drone and not-so-subtle suggestions to use their new rewind time feature whenever more than 3 pikmin die in a fight. In Pikmin 2 the tutorial messages that come up throughout the game are very infrequent compared to 4. The Hocotate ship would only interrupt you once the first time something unique happens and never again. It also helps that the Hocotate ship is intentionally written to be a bit of a snarky asshole, so being annoyed by the ship feels like the intended emotional response the developers were going for, while still being able to provide tutorial information. In Pikmin 3, the pop up messages are much more infrequent and are less egregious due to how the characters talking are actually present in the situations they are talking about. To me, that is the key difference that makes Pikmin 4's characters so insufferable. They constantly backseat you with information that you already know without ever actually being present in the gameplay, with the keyword being backseating. It feels like playing with a little sibling sitting with you that comments on every little thing you should be doing instead, like when a Twitch streamer gets annoyed at their chat for complaining about the way they're playing their game. The annoyingly talkative cast of the game is only emphasized by the fact that our protagonist is of the silent variety. There's no back and forth between our character and the other characters, no relationship, no personality; when Russ reminds you to use the night radar to track creatures for the sixth time in a row, it's made all the more annoying and condescending since he's talking to you, the player, and not the character you are controlling.

My annoyances with the characters are indicative of a larger issue that affects both Pikmin 4 and Nintendo games as a whole. It's obvious that the only reason the characters talk the way they do is for the kids. I'm sure that everyone who has played and enjoyed Nintendo games is aware of the trend of modern Nintendo games being needlessly handholdy and baby-proofed. Pikmin 4 is no exception to this trend. There's the aforementioned tutorialization of the entire game via the NPCs, the addition of purchasable single-use items to make combat easier, the awkward auto-lock on, how the game stops you from throwing more than the minimum number of pikmin to carry something, how Oatchi's rush trivializes all combat encounters. All of these examples only serve to emphasize this idea of excessive accessibility. I understand that Nintendo is trying to appeal to a broader audience with these changes but that doesn't make me any less disappointed and annoyed by these changes.

Anyway, since I've kind of gone over my main point/issue with Pikmin 4, here's some scattered thoughts/criticisms/praises organized similarly to my other Pikmin reviews:
- The dandori challenges/battles being integrated into the overworld were interesting. These gamemodes were relegated to side content in previous games but they added a lot (mission mode in Pikmin 3 in particular raised my opinion of that game quite a bit actually). As fun as they are, they felt a bit out of place and broke immersion for me.
- Related to the above, there's a weird disconnect between the lack of any time limit and the game's insistence on the importance of dandori. I don't consider the lack of time limit to be a massive issue in Pikmin 2 because I see it as a shift from strategy to combat/exploration, but now Pikmin 4 is insisting that strategy is a big deal in the game when the lack of a time limit suggests otherwise. The only times when dandori actually matters are during the dandori challenges/battles, and Olimar's tale (which I found to be very fun).
- While combat was boringly easy throughout, there were some surprisingly difficult and fun dandori challenges. Nothing vastly crazier than some of the harder missions in Pikmin 3 but overall the dandori challenges themselves were fun and well designed.
- The night missions always felt so one dimensional, they're kinda neat the first couple of times but they lack the depth to be consistently enjoyable. Every single night mission played out the exact same way: throw glow pikmin and piles of star bits, station your captain and dog next to lumiknolls, and hold X to win. They always felt like an obligatory interruption to the main game that I actually wanted to play.
- Lots of new mechanics in this game feel so videogamey in a way I don't like, my immersion is constantly broken by reminders that I am playing a capital V video game. Was anyone asking for sidequests in Pikmin? Why are upgrades bought with currency? Bosses dropping unique upgrades in Pikmin 2 was a lot of fun in that game because you always had something to look forward to at the end of a cave (even if the upgrade wasn't the craziest thing). Even the main goals are tied to quests that play a fanfare and check a box whenever you complete them.
- Caves were cool in Pikmin 2 because they were gauntlet-style endurance tests where if you lose pikmin, you can't just sprout more of them. In Pikmin 4, abandoning a cave doesn't forfeit treasures gained during the expedition, and when you return to a cave you can select any previously explored sublevel to immediately go to, which kinda makes what caves mechanically interesting in Pikmin 2 kinda moot. I guess the only reason for caves to exist now is to provide the player with smaller-scale challenges and areas to explore sequentially.
- In the previous point I suggest that caves mechanically don't add anything to the game since you can now theoretically just leave and come back with more pikmin if you lose any. However due to the rewind feature you would never actually do that if you lost a lot of pikmin.
- In the previous point I suggest that if you lost a lot of pikmin you could use the rewind feature. However, Oatchi dumbs down combat to the point where its unlikely you'll ever lose enough pikmin to feel the need to use the feature.
- From what I can tell caves are no longer randomized. I don't think randomization added that much intrigue to the caves in Pikmin 2, so the lack of randomization means that some caves have some unique puzzles that span the entire subfloor rather than puzzles just being localized in a single room like in 2.
- However lack of randomization didn't really add a lot either. Half the cave layouts feel like they were generated by a computer regardless, and only a few puzzles in the caves actually felt particularly interesting. Similarly to Pikmin 2, the longer I spent playing the caves the more boring they got since there were less and less unique enemies and concepts they could introduce to me.
- I'm not a professional game designer by any means, but the more I think about it the more I like the idea of making it so that Oatchi can't go in caves. Obviously the design of some sublevels would have to be modified, but it would make caves and the enemy/boss encounters inside of them feel more unique, and dangerous.
- Oatchi is pretty cool conceptually. He acts as an additional captain enabling more dandori options and multitasking with the additional gimmick that he can also help pikmin out with tasks. The only major flaw with him is just that he can carry any number of pikmin on his back, which just kills the risk/reward dynamic of bringing a large group of pikmin to a combat encounter. With Oatchi, it's all reward, no risk.
- Having all the pikmin types available was kinda cool but so many of them feel so underutilized that it feels like they did it more as a fanservice thing than anything else.
- They did the lineup trumpet kinda dirty with how late in the game is shows up. It kinda felt like another fanservice addition that wasn't actually thought out. The charge whistle is so overpowered that the lineup whistle is made irrelevant far far before you can unlock it.
- The idler's alert is crazy. It's dumb for all the reasons that the "Assemble All" command in 3 deluxe is dumb (which also returns in the form of a purchasable upgrade). I felt that all the dandori challenges I underperformed on was due to me not abusing it enough.
- Kinda related, it feels like dandori challenges/battles maybe should have had a set amount of upgrades that would always be the same, since many upgrades make the challenges objectively easier, meaning that winning/losing is affected by factors other than dandori.
- The first time I saw a giant yellow wollywog in the trailer I thought it was pretty funny, and then it was the final boss of a cave and I was like "huh, really?". And then more and more "new" enemies were just normal enemies that got scaled up, and I just got more annoyed the more it happened. Sure, some of them had slightly different movesets but it just felt so lazy. How many of the new enemies added are actually new, and how many are slight variants on old enemies?
- Am I the only one who feels like pikmin AI got worse from 3 to 4? There are a few caves where the game wants you to drop down from a higher ledge to a lower one while dismounted from Oatchi, and I swear every time this happened at least five pikmin would just jump into the void for fun and die.
- Winged pikmin also definitely got more stupid and refuse to take obvious shortcuts through the air. In any use case where they weren't strictly required I would prefer to use white pikmin to quickly transport objects.
- When throwing pikmin onto an object to get them to pick it up there were so many cases when one pikmin couldn't quite run to the exact pixel the game wanted (due to the object being too close to a wall/enemy corpse) and thus the pikmin would eventually refuse to help pick the object up. This wasn't an issue in older games since you could throw more pikmin than required onto an object to subvert this issue, while this game just really really hates whenever you try to do that. Just felt really janky considering this is the newest entry in the series.
- The game hands out ultra-spicy spray like candy. I had like 33 spare by the time I got to the final boss, and pretty much never had my pikmin farm burgeoning spiderworts. Just got them naturally from eggs and popping frozen enemy pinatas.
- Final boss was simultaneously cool and disappointing at the same time. For what I thought was cool, it was one of the only interesting fights in the entire game since it felt like one of the only ones designed with the existence of Oatchi in mind. So many difficult bosses returned from previous games just to be trivialized by all 100 of your pikmin being bundled up on this dog rather than trailing behind you. This one was a nice change of pace, and felt much less cheesable than some of the final bosses in the previous games.
- On the other hand, it thematically felt very lame. Since the "gimmick" of Pikmin 4 is that there's a dog, the final boss must be a dog but evil I guess. I had a lot of high expectations due to the way things were being set up at the start. The introduction section with Olimar and the pikmin behaving abnormally when entering the house honestly filled me with a lot of intrigue. I was wondering what kind of cool, otherworldly force of nature we were dealing with in this game, perhaps akin to the wraiths/the smoky progg from the previous games. When the answer is revealed, turns out it was just some gold salamander miniboss that the player likely has already fought in the same area, and I felt a little let down as I thought the answer would be related to the final boss. I maybe hyped myself up a bit too much but I couldn't help but be disappointed by the final boss just being a big scary dog. Perhaps I wouldn't have felt this way if this game had introduced it's own unique otherworldly creature like the other games (Smoky Progg, Water Wraith, Plasm Wraith).
- On the other other hand Groovy Long Legs is maybe the best boss in any video game ever.

Anyways I've already written a lot already. This game is massive so there's definitely some stuff I forgot to mention that I wanted to talk about but whatever. Despite all of my criticisms I enjoyed the game a lot, the core gameplay loop is so unique and fun that all the complaints I have are pretty petty in comparison. With that being said I can't say I necessarily agree with all the 10/10, 5 star reviews I'm seeing here. 10 years from now, when Pikmin 5 is about to release, I feel like people are going to shit on this one the same way people were shitting on Pikmin 3 just before the launch of 4. I can't help but feel that fans would've been happy with anything that wasn't Hey Pikmin, and all the high ratings really deny the fact that there was a lot of room for improvement in this game. At the end of the day I really loved this game, but everything I loved about it was stuff borrowed from previous entries in the series, while almost everything new that this game introduced fell short of expectations.

Didn't really enjoy myself with this game. It only took me about 5 hours to beat but it felt so much longer, like it was dragging me along and I was just waiting for it to end.

To me the biggest flaw with this game is that it's a rhythm game that isn't really a rhythm game. The gameplay involves dodging notes on a guitar hero fretboard, notes that are being played by the enemy, not you. Thus you get to watch the enemy play a rhythm game while you get to play the most boring bullet hell ever created. Most rhythm games have intentionally simple gameplay so that doing simple actions to a beat or the tune of a song becomes satisfying to play. Everhood misses the mark by stripping away the rhythmic aspect that makes rhythm games so good, and all I'm left with is the aforementioned intentionally simple gameplay. Needless to say, it gets pretty boring pretty quickly.

And it's not as if notes being dictated by the enemy means that its impossible to create a sense of rhythm on the player side of gameplay. The optional jump rope fight in this game was one of my favorites due to the fact that it's just about the only fight that I can remember that does this. Jumping over the notes while using the song playing to help time actions perfectly made for incredibly satisfying gameplay that I was struggling to find in any other sections of Everhood. There's a really sound idea behind the concept of this game, but the execution of it is just falls short.

Around halfway through the game there's a bit of a twist in the mechanics involving grabbing two notes of the same color and releasing them to attack the enemy, rather than playing purely defense. While this still has the same problems as before it did make the gameplay more tolerable due to the player now having a more active role in battles. Weaving between notes is made a lot more fun when there's actual incentive to put yourself in danger in hopes of grabbing notes to shoot back as it makes gameplay much less passive than it was before. However it does come with the downside of making the game much easier (as grabbing notes acts as an extra defensive maneuver), and getting your shot blocked by a wall note that you couldn't have known would spawn in your lane quickly gets annoying.

Without compelling gameplay, I would hope that the psychedelic visuals could at least suck me into the world of Everhood, and while the game does succeed with this in certain fights and areas, these are few and far between. There are some genuinely magical moments in this game, but you're going to have to slog through too much bland gameplay for too few of these interesting moments. The ending section of this game is full of them, and I can't help but feel that these could've been better spread out throughout the game, especially considering how much the ending drags on and overstays its welcome. These particularly psychedelic moments also feel very much cheapened by the fact that the game is locked at a 4:3 aspect ratio, with the only real graphics settings in this game being the option to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode with the F3 key. It's hard to get immersed in the visuals when I'm staring at big black bars at both sides of my screen.

That some of the moments in Everhood look spectacular doesn't diminish the fact that much of the game is spent in one of the shittiest looking overworlds I've ever seen in a game. Animations look janky, tiles are endlessly repeated, the fidelity in the sprites seems lower than it really should be. It's not something I'd really be concerned about if it weren't for the fact that the visuals are supposed to be one of this game's strengths, but since it is, I'm much more quick to criticize this. I can't pretend that graphics don't matter when the graphics are just about the only thing carrying this experience in lieu of bland gameplay.

As for the story, I don't have much to say about the it other than I found it unoriginal and uninteresting. This game is like your stereotypical stoner friend that won't shut up about how they discovered the meaning of life during an LSD trip they had. The game comes off as desperate to sound deep when nothing it said really connected with me due to how detached the game is from the player. Not a single one of the "absolute truths" the game placed so much emphasis on lasted more than five minutes in my brain due to how uninteresting I found them. Maybe there's someone out there that really connected to these, but I'm certainly not that person.

Overall the game wasn't THAT bad, I think I made it sound worse than it actually is. It isn't egregiously terrible or anything, if anything I'd describe it as lacking polish. You can at least tell the developers put their heart and soul into this project, but their efforts didn't quite pan out, leaving us with this game that feels like wasted potential. Hopefully the sequel addresses these issues, but honestly I was too uninvested in this game to care about checking that out whenever it releases.

It sometimes feels like every game I've ever loved was at least partially inspired by the Zelda series. Tunic, Elden Ring, and even Outer Wilds cite the sense of adventure and exploration that Zelda provides as major inspirations, and all of these are games that I enjoy for that exact reason. Growing up, the only Zelda game I played was one of the ones on the DS (I don't remember which one), and as a kid it bounced off of me as I found the enemies intimidating for whatever reason. The only real memories I have from that game as a kid was throwing pots around to farm rupees since I didn't want to continue on the main path. Fast forward many years to when I played this game for the first time, as I felt that playing this series was something that was long overdue for me.

Having now played Ocarina of Time I can see why so many people love this game. Despite my 6/10 rating and all the problems that I have with this game I can see why the problems I had would not affect a different player as much as it did for me. The game provides the great sense of adventure that this series is known for, the vastness of Hyrule field and the surprising ways different areas are connected help this feeling immensely. The soundtrack also contributes greatly to this feeling. It's especially impressive how many iconic melodies were constructed with the limited notes that can be played on the Ocarina. There’s the time travel system, which is great in both the shift in tone, but there's another aspect to it I very much enjoyed. For players who take in their surroundings and go out of their way to talk to many NPCs, there's lots of details and changes that feel rewarding to discover once time has passed. Small storylines are constructed with the minor characters that make the world feel so much more alive. These storylines are never really forced on the player however, which is good in that it makes finding these storylines feel more rewarding for players who are interested, while simultaneously not wasting the time of players who aren't as interested. It's a win-win for both types of players, which is not easy to pull off.

As far as I’m concerned, exploration is king in Zelda games, and this game pulls it off incredibly well, perhaps even perfectly. Most of my problems with this game concern aspects outside of exploration, most notably puzzles and combat. It’s for this reason that I can understand the love for this game coming from someone who doesn’t value those aspects as heavily as I do, but for me those two areas failed in ways that I just couldn’t reconcile with.

Sidenote: It's worth noting that as of writing this review I have only completed two Zelda games (the other one being Breath of the Wild), and that I'm not sure how many of the problems I'm going to bring up are unique to Ocarina of Time. Despite not playing many other Zelda games I somewhat suspect that some of the problems I bring up here are ones that show up in some of the other games, but since I’ve never played them I suppose I can only speculate.

While puzzles were alright for the most part, they never really went above and beyond. There were never any standout “a-ha!” moments that the best puzzles in other games provided for me. Perhaps it isn’t fair to hold the puzzles in this game to that high of a standard though, most of the puzzles fit well into their respective dungeons and can provide some challenge, however that description isn’t something that can be applied to all the puzzles in Ocarina of Time. My problem with a lot of the puzzles in this game is that they aren’t really puzzles so much as they are exercises in figuring out what the game wants from you. The best puzzles in this game, or in any game, are those where the goal is clear but the steps required to achieve the goal require some interesting use of mechanics or the environment to achieve said goal. Too many puzzles in this game don’t require interesting use of mechanics however, and are made difficult through obfuscation of the goal. Interesting puzzles are replaced with uninteresting games of hide and seek with the designers, or leaps in logic that are solved by either trying everything until something works or just looking up the solution.

For an example of the former, take the Forest Temple, where progress through the dungeon is gated through use of small keys. This dungeon challenges the player with difficult enemy encounters and creative use of the hookshot, providing the player with small keys as rewards for these small-scale challenges. On my playthrough I eventually ran into a locked door and was struggling to find a small key to unlock it. I found myself backtracking through rooms to look for some sort of challenge I had missed that would reward me with another small key. I imagined I missed a side area that would perhaps contain a strong enemy for me to defeat and gain a key as a reward, but it seemed that no such room existed. After struggling to find it I eventually resorted to looking up the answer, which was that there was a chest hidden at the entrance to the temple that I had missed. These sorts of “hide and seek” puzzles with small keys (or other key equivalents) occur a few more times in other temples, and they miss the point of what makes solving puzzles interesting. This approach to puzzles that substitute interesting use of Link’s abilities for games of hide and seek is not only uninteresting, it permanently damages the experience of all dungeons going forward. Now that I know that the designers aren’t above simply hiding the solution to a problem in some corner, every dungeon I explore past that point must now have every room meticulously observed from every angle with every tool in Link’s arsenal to ensure that nothing is being missed. That the “hide and seek” puzzles are in the minority compared to more interesting ones doesn’t change the fact that my experience with dungeons is now permanently poisoned with this knowledge. My enjoyment of the dungeons was significantly lowered after the first time this happened to me for this very reason. Whenever you get stuck or lost in a dungeon for this reason, the game isn’t punishing a lack of understanding of the tools you have to work with, it’s punishing you for not checking every nook and cranny of every room, and now you must do exactly that. While most puzzles in Ocarina of Time are exercises in game knowledge and logic, the few hide and seek puzzles that were exercises in backtracking and tedium really soured my opinion of the game.

The second category of bad puzzles, puzzles that involve leaps in logic, are ones that I’m a bit more inclined to forgive than the hide and seek ones, as they are only bad on a case-by-case basis. There’s also the fact that I may have missed some hints from the game involving these leaps in logic. Despite these concessions, I’d be lying if I said that running into these puzzles wasn’t frustrating and confusing. One such example was figuring out how to enter the Jabu-Jabu dungeon, which was another case where I had to look up the solution, and while it makes sense looking back on it I still am confused as to how I was supposed to figure it out on my first playthrough. A more egregious example I experienced was in the Ice Cavern, with the central gimmick being the use of blue fire to open up new areas of the dungeon. This mechanic is introduced in a room with a frozen chest and a platform holding the blue fire. Navi comments that the blue fire seems unnatural and hints that it could be used for something. I came to the conclusion that what I was supposed to do was aim an arrow through the fire such that it landed on the red ice and melted it, a mechanic used in other areas to light torches with. This solution did not work, and once again I had to look up the answer. Now, I’m not sure whether this mechanic was better hinted at elsewhere or if this is just some Zelda logic that’s consistent with other games in the franchise, but the actual answer was that the fire could be bottled (?) and dumped onto the red ice. This particular example stuck out to me since not only does the actual answer not make any logical sense, but using arrows to transfer fire from one area to another is a mechanic that was already taught to the player and it doesn’t work here simply because it’s not what the designers intended for you to do. Not to mention, creative positioning of blue fire and red ice to create bow and arrow puzzles would’ve been more interesting than the glorified lock and key system that it currently represents. It’s frustrating puzzle design and doesn’t require any lateral thinking from the player.

There were enough examples of these hide and seek/confusing solution puzzles that I often had to resort to looking up a guide, which is something I despise and avoid since it kills immersion for me. With that being said, looking up solutions to puzzles in other games can still result in an “a-ha!” moment where seeing the solution to the puzzle play out can be interesting. This never happened to me when doing so for Ocarina of Time, which I feel really speaks to how many of the puzzles in this game aren’t really puzzles so much as they are exercises in figuring out what the game designers want you to do. They aren’t “a-ha!” moments so much as they are “oh” moments. Too many puzzles in this game were made difficult in the least interesting way possible.

Combat is another aspect of this game that fell short of expectations. Bosses in the game were often glorified puzzles where the solution was always to use whatever new item Link gained in the dungeon (with some exceptions), and only occasionally challenging, oftentimes for the wrong reason (the Jabu-Jabu midboss was thoroughly irritating to fight). As for combat with normal enemies there’s a severe lack of nuance in most encounters that makes combat dull. All but a few enemy encounters are too easily dealt with by either holding up your shield and striking whenever convenient, or by poking them down with ranged weapons. Just about the only standard enemy that gave me trouble (without being overtly designed to be a simple annoyance) were the Iron Knuckles introduced in the second-to-last dungeon in the game.

The final boss, Ganon, was also very disappointing. The first phase of Ganon requires use of Light Arrows that cost magic to shoot, which can lead to situations that I feel were overlooked by the developers. I unfortunately ran out of magic during this fight (I missed the upgrade that doubles your magic bar) and eventually had to backtrack and come back with extra magic potions in order to properly defeat him, which really killed the mood. I failed and was forced to backtrack not due to a lack of skill, but due to a lack of resources that I didn’t know I would need before entering the fight. In regards to this problem people mention the pots at the bottom section of the arena, and I’m suspicious that the people that mention this have never actually tried this since for me they only ever dropped hearts and arrows (I don’t think any of these are guaranteed to drop magic refills). Not to mention that by the time I would need the extra magic that could potentially be in those pots, enough of the arena is destroyed that by the time you slowly climb back up the tower to the main area it’s nearly impossible to get back into position without getting swatted back down just to have to climb back up again, which makes for a frustrating and time-wasting cycle until you pull it off successfully. Surely the health loss from taking a hit is punishment enough, let alone having to climb up the excessively tall pillar in the center of the arena.

The first phase is an uninteresting rehash of the Phantom Ganon fight earlier in the game. The great evil that the game has been building up to is defeated by playing tennis with him until he dies. This mechanic wasn’t interesting the first time it was introduced, and it’s even more boring the second time it shows up. After this there is a timed escape sequence that is made interesting by an enemy encounter partway through. This moment worked very well for me as it was one of the only times where I was incentivized to take a more aggressive approach to combat to defeat them quickly, as opposed to the overly effective but slow defensive approach that I had used for most other encounters. The final phase has an interesting moment story-wise where your master sword is taken from you with the unfortunate gameplay implication being that Ganon is easily defeated by bludgeoning him to death with a hammer for everything but the last few blows. Ultimately, the final battle struggles to feel climactic as a result of failures in the design of the mechanics of the fight, despite the tone that is insisted on by the visuals and music.

That’s pretty much it for my issues with puzzles and combat, both of which missed the mark surprisingly significantly considering that they are pretty major facets of the game. As for other miscellaneous annoyances, stealth sections are annoying (the Gerudo section being particularly tedious and infuriating), there is too much menuing and swapping around inventory slots (water temple is most infamous for this but let's not pretend like this isn’t a problem with the game as a whole as opposed to one dungeon), and Hyrule field is too open and empty (Epona probably shouldn’t have been missable). The story wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t bad. There are interpretations of themes of growing up that I’ve read in some of the reviews on here that feel too subjective for me to take seriously. Not that the theme of “growing up is scary” is a particularly interesting or original topic to tackle in a game anyway.

I’d like to emphasize that the fun I had exploring the rich world that Ocarina of Time offers outweighed my issues with the puzzles and combat, but the fun I had doesn’t absolve this game of its issues. When I finished Ocarina of Time I couldn’t help but feel that I didn’t experience the masterpiece that I had expected going into this game. At the time I couldn’t really put a finger on why I felt this way, but after writing all this out I better understand my feelings for this game. There’s just too much that this game simply doesn’t excel at, and too many parts that just fail to land for me. This was a game I went into wanting to love in the same way that all my favorite game developers love, but I suppose it was inevitable that this game fell short of my unreasonably lofty expectations.