Twenty years ago, a young boy (of possibly indeterminate age) finally got his fairy and set out on a grand adventure.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of those time-honored classics, critically and publicly lauded as pushing the envelope and bringing an already popular series into three dimensions. Released originally in 1998, it was a hallmark game that I played when I was young (although admittedly several years passed before I finally beat the game). With it turning twenty, and seeing some other people enjoying it online, I felt compelled to revisit it.
The first thing I noticed is that I had become too used to polished modern graphics. Even after fiddling with my television settings (including trying different cord hookups for the N64), I just wrote it off as my version of Link (jokingly dubbed "Fink") being nearsighted. I later grew more accustomed to the old graphics, so it eventually stopped bothering me.
In terms of the story, Ocarina of Time felt very fairy tale like (no pun intended). A lot of the broader implications of what was shown never are explored - you're expected to just take them at face value. How bad was the war prior to the game that it forced people to flee Hyrule itself on fear of death? Why is Ganondorf so unapologetically evil in his dealings with the races of Hyrule? Why is there a torture chamber hidden under the second largest town in Hyrule? There are all kinds of world building details that are only hinted at, never addressed - the kind that many children would not think twice about and yet give me pause. The history of Hyrule is implied to have been bloody and brutal - but we never see that brutality, only the far more saccharine aftermath.
This even applies to Ganondorf's conquest of Hyrule. The seven year timeskip means that we don't know how terrible it was - all we know now is that the castle town is a burned, undead-infested husk of itself, the Zoras were all frozen solid, and almost all of the Gorons were locked up in a prison complex in the heart of a volcano - wait, why does that even exist? If we wanted to get Doylist, the real reason is the lack of technology meant that dynamic events like this could not really be shown (a trait that has persisted in the Zelda series despite the tech having moved way past the N64's limitations), but it's still jarring to realize how non-dynamic a villain Ganondorf actually is. Either he's already done something you can't prevent, or he fails to take any action at all.
While I'm admitted not satisfied with the fairy tale feel of the game,
that's more a matter of me having grown past it. To children of the
time, it must have seemed amazing, and for some of them that nostalgia
factor leads them to praise the story to this day. It's fair though. Like Link...er, "Fink", we all have to grow up eventually.
Moving on from the story to the gameplay, it started off strong. There are many unique locations to explore, from the inside of a dying tree to the guts of a sick whale...er, fish...whatever Jabu-Jabu is supposed to be. The design of dungeons is highly varied, and each location manages to have the unique feel of actually having a genuine in-universe purpose other than being a dungeon for you to conquer...at least, at first.
The thing you have to consider when addressing Ocarina of Time is the development cycle. They rushed the later part of development in order to make their planned 1998 release date, leading to two cut dungeons (a Wind Temple and an Ice Temple). This rushed development shows once you get into the final third or so of the game. Dungeons feel more shallow and less developed, the side quests at this point feel rough around the edges and are a pain to complete (I'm looking at you, Biggoron's Sword). And to touch back on the story for a bit, the one new character introduced during this frame (Nabooru) feels detached and not nearly as interesting. Maybe if she'd been introduced earlier...
To illustrate this in terms of gameplay, there's a puzzle in the Spirit Temple that in theory requires you to climb up a wall where the segments are sliding back and forth. The problem is at this point you have the Longshot item, which allows you to just rappel up past the sliding segments and skip the entire puzzle. And although that seems like a clever work-around, keep in mind there are other walls in other locations that they made the Longshot not work on, so why not do it here? And that's not getting into the heavily overused "collect the five silver rupees" puzzles, which get tiresome after the first few times. There's not much variety in them, but they keep showing up.
This applies to the themes of the later dungeons too, in the sense that they don't have a strong theme at all. Both the Water Temple and Spirit Temple feel more like gauntlets of trials specifically designed for the player, rather than an actual functional location twisted by evil powers. As for the Shadow Temple - that is an unholy (again, no pun intended) fusion of it's original dark concept (most of which probably got ported to the Bottom of the Well mini-dungeon) and the cut Wind Temple, with neither standing out thematically.
This doesn't make Ocarina of Time a bad game. I'd say, in fact, that it is still a good game, albeit one held back by the technical limitations of its time and its own rushed development schedule. But is it one of the all-time greats? That's a trickier question. While I cannot and will not dispute it being one of the most influential games of all time, it is one that doesn't quite hold up to other games with timeless gameplay and stories. It's very much worth playing at least once to see how it shaped the games that followed it - both in the Zelda series as well as others - but its replay value is very much a matter of your personal taste. And while I'm glad I replayed it this time, I doubt I will be revisiting it again any time soon...but we'll see.
Goodbye, "Fink". Goodbye, Zelda. Goodbye, Ganondorf And even...goodbye, Navi. It was fun spending time with you again, even twenty years after you made your debut, and maybe I'll see you (or your reincarnations) in the future. (Does Navi have a reincarnation? Who knows.)
