This dungeon scared me so much as a kid that I had to have my older brother play through it for me. Ocarina of Time was a game of heroes and adventure and it came at the exact time I needed those two things most.
I was born with severe pulmonary hypertension, so I was in and out of hospitals a lot as a kid. And when my increasing medical complications became too much to cope with, it wasn't a dark corner that I fled to but rather the wide and fantastical world of Hyrule. It's only 12 years and about as many playthroughs later that I can articulate these feelings.
That's mostly thanks to the 3DS remake. It's an incredibly thorough overhaul — Nintendo left no stone unturned when improving the game's visuals. But for me, the best part is how they touched everything up just enough that all the rooms are recognizable and none of the classic atmosphere is sacrificed. In doing this, Ocarina of Time 3D made me think more about my childhood than I have in years. You briefly mentioned the music, which is something I wanted to touch on. Especially after playing this remake, I would defy anyone to tell me that Ocarina of Time doesn't have the best integration of music ever seen in an adventure game.
You're constantly using your ocarina throughout the game, playing little musical phrases on it to make things happen — turn night into day, open up secret passages, etc. What's so brilliant is that composer Koji Kondo built the game's big, faux-orchestral soundtrack out of these six-note snippets of sound, integrating these little bits of gameplay into grander pieces of music.
The soundtrack isn't just the backdrop for Ocarina's action, it's the very pulse, the lifeblood of the world.
It's the pinnacle of action-game soundtracks. The greatest joy of going through this remake after all this time has been listening to those old tracks in their proper context again — the up-tempo castanets and flamenco guitar in the Gerudo Valley gypsy camp, the reverent basso profondo in the Temple of Time. It's superlative stuff, and it's kind of a disappointment that even the Zelda team never did anything nearly as thoroughly integrated in its later games.
Ocarina of Time is the music. But no other title has ever earned a 99 aggregate score on Metacritic. Ocarina has only 22 reviews, while a modern multiplatform juggernaut like Red Dead will be reviewed more than a hundred times, increasing the chances of a low-score outlier or two. Still, a certain set of video game fans will be watching with rapt attention to see how close Red Dead gets to achieving the mythic best-game-ever status.
But then YouTube vlogger Jim Sterling gave the game a 7 out of 10, sending the game tumbling to a 97 aggregate score. Sterling received death threats and DDoS attacks against his website from enraged Zelda fans. Poisonous gaming fans are nothing new. But the reach of this type of behavior has been magnified thanks to social media, and it has infected other types of entertainment as the internet has broadly mutated into an endless message-board flame war.
The first negative review of Black Panther generated a raft of Twitter outrage from fans in February. The only reason such shenanigans are even worth the effort is because fans and news websites alike confer value on the numbers these aggregators spit out.
Ocarina was an outlier when it earned such gushing approval in But fan bases increasingly demand that their entertainment choices be validated through perfect scores and lavish praise.
Reviewers largely seem happy to oblige this desire— IGN has given 15 games perfect scores this decade, compared to just two in the previous one. Caligari , features 34 movies from the s. But the further along you get in time with games, the smaller the steps get. Though he gave Ocarina a perfect score, Gerstmann has never returned to the game since reviewing it.
Hyrule Field is a barren green grass texture with few enemies or landmarks. The lack of a fully controllable camera can make the game feel claustrophobic rather than grand at times.
Appropriately, the title truly stands the test of time - and with good reason. We could probably list dozens of components of Ocarina of Time that make the game so amazing, but in honor of its anniversary, here are our top 15 reasons why we still love The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nineteen years ago, 3D game design was still in its infancy, and lots of things we take for granted now were just being discovered back then.
Take combat, for example - how do you fight bad guys in three-dimensional space, reacting to a wide variety of enemy sizes and positions, while being able to attack and defend with numerous items without losing sight of the enemy or having your hero flail around like a fool? The Legend of Zelda solved this problem with the introduction of player-controlled lock-on targeting. It may seem obvious today, but lock-on targeting was a breakthrough at the time, allowing players to have maximum control in battle while providing an unobscured view of the action, and the result was fun, intuitive, flexible combat.
Lock-on targeting system be it manual or automatic has proven so influential that Ocarina of Time could be considered the foundation for the modern action game. It wasn't just combat that made an intelligent jump into 3D. Virtually everything that players loved about The Legend of Zelda was rebuilt from 2D as well, and it was done so well that it felt effortless.
Enemies, weapons, and dungeon designs were just as brilliant in 3D as they were in 2D, and the puzzles and exploration were adapted to make fantastic use of 3D environments. While Hyrule had always been captivating and immersive, it now seemed more like a living, breathing place than ever before. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Hyrule Field, the seemingly massive central area of Ocarina of Time; it was breathtaking simply to look off into the distance and see landmarks like Death Mountain or Hyrule Castle, or to run all the way from Kokiri Forest to Gerudo Valley.
Like Super Mario 64 before it, Ocarina of Time was a perfect example of how to update a franchise for changing times. Saving the kingdom as great and all, but sometimes you just need to kick back and relax.
Some of those temple bosses are especially vivid in the memory. At the end of the Forest Temple, Link finds himself locked in a creepy room of hung portraits, frantically scanning the landscapes with bow drawn, searching for the ghoulish phantom echo of Ganondorf thundering towards him on his menacing black steed.
Ocarina of Time remains eminently playable today because so many of the things it invented became standard for any 3D game that came after it. Even games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 use some version of Z-targeting. Navi the fairy provided a contextual hint system, as well as some company while Link made his lonely way towards his destiny. It is also an understated and powerful story, with the imagination of a fairytale and the gravitas of a legend, told not just through the cinematic cut-scene techniques that were dominant in ambitious games of the time or the abundant text storytelling fleshing out games that came before it, but also through its mysterious, inviting and memorable world.
Zelda: Ocarina of Time at 20 — melancholy masterpiece changed games forever.
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