The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time

2023-06-17
What can I say about Ocarina of Time that hasn't been said before? Maybe that it wasn't really for me. But hey, that's actually to be expected given it's 2023 and it's my first time playing this game from 1998. It's hugely influential and did a ton of things that are now commonplace in games. So how do I review a game that laid the foundation for half of all games in 2023 but by itself if it was released in 2023 would be a pretty mediocre game? Not sure but let's get started.
First of all let's start with the parts that rubbed me the wrong way. The game has some serious frustrating bits and design choices. First of all, while a lot of people seem to have been blown away by the world opening up when you enter Hyrule Field I felt it took way too long to cross. It's a big empty plain, which might have been amazing in 1998, but for me just felt like a waste of time. Epona only helped a little bit and that's only after you spend hours crossing it repeatedly first.

Some stuff is just dated and kludgy. At various points you need to play songs at places to trigger certain events. Let's skip over the normal Zelda problem of some of these hints being obscure and not really helping you find the location or item you're supposed to use to progress-- but even in one case where I knew I needed to play Saria's Song for the Goron guy it didn't trigger. Because I was standing 5 feet away instead of 2 feet. Yup. Had to look that one up even though I had the right answer.

It suffers from the classic problem of older games with annoying save points. In Ocarina it's basically the entrance to a room is your save point if you fall. And if you Game Over it might be the entrance to the dungeon. The Shadow Temple has an absolute fucker of a room in the form of the Guillotine Room. It's jump after jump with enemy after enemy trying to fuck you up. And if you miss one jump you have to restart the whole process again. Tedious and brutal.

But the Shadow Temple actually overall is pretty awesome. In fact once you get past some of the head-scratching puzzles that required me to consult an online guide I had a good time in most of the dungeons. The overworld bits were tedious but once I got into a dungeon it was pretty damn good. And Shadow Temple has one of the coolest bosses in any video game: Bongo Bongo. Yes, a pair of floating disembodied hands that play a giant bongo that you run around on trying to hit them. They try to clap you or slap you and the whole time you're bouncing around because they're playing the damn bongo which is your platform to fight the boss. Cool. Almost all the bosses were visually very cool and fun to fight. After playing Link to the Past recently I'm realizing that Zelda bosses really are best in class and Ocarina is no exception. They were absolutely my highlights of the game.

Other than that it is has a ton of character and charm. It has splendid humor too from the way the Goron dude dances, to Twinrova dying and their weird bird noises, to when you're in Hyrule Castle and hear an organ playing the whole time only to find out it's Ganondorf just playing it in his room alone in a comically broody fashion. Of course all the themes are classic and are riffed on endlessly in the Zelda franchise and beyond. I loved that I finished this just before playing TOTK and Rauru is the name of the head sage in Ocarina but also the name of the ancient Hyrulean king in TOTK. The Zora domain theme is carried over almost exactly in TOTK (and maybe BOTW but it's been a while). There are a ton of aspects of this game that are timeless that I'm happy I've now played to appreciate.

Overall I'd say it's still a pretty solid game. It's dated heavily but as a piece of history it's definitely worth the time spent.