This review contains spoilers
There's a really, really great and emotional story about growing up and maturing here that could've hit really hard in the heart. It has all the ingredients to be a masterpiece, but fails in the execution.
Between the dungeon designs that range from perfectly fine and somewhat good to directly horrible, the extremely pattern based combat, obtuse and sometimes cryptic exploration and too many goddamn puzzles this ends up feeling as anything but an adventure, which y'know, is the main selling point since Ocarina of Time is a game about the adventure that is growing up.
After you leave the Kokiri Forest - a metaphor on taking the first steps to growing up, as Kokiri Forest is an allegory to the safe and innocent space that is childhood, enclosed and separated from the rest of the world -, seeing Hyrule Field, as open as the N64 allows it to be, is a statement of intentions: go on an take on the world. From there on, a lot of stuff might resonate with certain aspects of life while growing up: characters like Saria (that one childhood friend you end up leaving behind due to the passage of time but always remember fondly) or situations like being told by adults "you're not enough", as some examples. This last one in particular is the more important since Ocarina of Time is still a heroic adventure about proving your worth, of being an adult in this case. This is the main reason stuff like gaining resources like health or arrows from under the rocks, learning enemy attack patterns or solving lame puzzles is so dissatisfactory. I'm not living an adventure, I'm not proving to be worth of anything, I'm finding helpful resources from literally anywhere and not forming any kind of strategy for engaging in combat. I'm being told I'm the hero when all I do is move forward while there is no tangible threat.
Look, there's enough great stuff here, and I was willing to give this a good rating, until I reached the first of the last two battles with Ganondorf and realized it was a tennis match based on pattern recognition.
The ending still made me cry a bit, because even if you managed to physically become a kid again, it would never be the same, the experience of growing up can never go and when the childlike wonder is gone, it is gone forever. Genuinely heartbreaking stuff (if you get too emotional, which I do) I wish could resonate more with me. I don't discard revisiting it some other time in the future, but it is disappointing to see such a hard hitting narrative with a lot of beautiful moments and not few instances to remember be full of wasted potential and missed opportunities to be able to hit as hard as it should.
In case anybody cares, the story here would be a 10/10, but it is everything else that drags it down.
Between the dungeon designs that range from perfectly fine and somewhat good to directly horrible, the extremely pattern based combat, obtuse and sometimes cryptic exploration and too many goddamn puzzles this ends up feeling as anything but an adventure, which y'know, is the main selling point since Ocarina of Time is a game about the adventure that is growing up.
After you leave the Kokiri Forest - a metaphor on taking the first steps to growing up, as Kokiri Forest is an allegory to the safe and innocent space that is childhood, enclosed and separated from the rest of the world -, seeing Hyrule Field, as open as the N64 allows it to be, is a statement of intentions: go on an take on the world. From there on, a lot of stuff might resonate with certain aspects of life while growing up: characters like Saria (that one childhood friend you end up leaving behind due to the passage of time but always remember fondly) or situations like being told by adults "you're not enough", as some examples. This last one in particular is the more important since Ocarina of Time is still a heroic adventure about proving your worth, of being an adult in this case. This is the main reason stuff like gaining resources like health or arrows from under the rocks, learning enemy attack patterns or solving lame puzzles is so dissatisfactory. I'm not living an adventure, I'm not proving to be worth of anything, I'm finding helpful resources from literally anywhere and not forming any kind of strategy for engaging in combat. I'm being told I'm the hero when all I do is move forward while there is no tangible threat.
Look, there's enough great stuff here, and I was willing to give this a good rating, until I reached the first of the last two battles with Ganondorf and realized it was a tennis match based on pattern recognition.
The ending still made me cry a bit, because even if you managed to physically become a kid again, it would never be the same, the experience of growing up can never go and when the childlike wonder is gone, it is gone forever. Genuinely heartbreaking stuff (if you get too emotional, which I do) I wish could resonate more with me. I don't discard revisiting it some other time in the future, but it is disappointing to see such a hard hitting narrative with a lot of beautiful moments and not few instances to remember be full of wasted potential and missed opportunities to be able to hit as hard as it should.
In case anybody cares, the story here would be a 10/10, but it is everything else that drags it down.
2 Comments
@BorealPaella Thanks a bunch for your comment! The narrative aspect here is pretty strong, which makes it such a shame that it isn't as great as it could have been. As I said, there's lot of powerful stuff here, but the game is pretty flawed.
I wasn't even going to do this review, but I felt I had to put something out, so I'm glad to hear someone liked it!
I wasn't even going to do this review, but I felt I had to put something out, so I'm glad to hear someone liked it!
BorealPaella
2 months ago