Yeah… It’s Okay

So here’s my dirty little secret: I don’t much like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Up until that Nintendo 64 game came out, I would have considered myself a Legend of ZeldaCreated by Nintendo in 1986, the original Legend of Zelda game presented players with a open world to explore, packed with dungeons and monsters all ready to kill them at a moment's notice. The mix of adventure and action game play created a winning game and launched not only a successful series but an entirely new video game genre. fan. While I was bad at The Legend of Zelda, I loved its mysteries and I really wanted to try and get through the game (even if I failed, over and over again). I liked the concept of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, I respected what it was going for, and I really liked watching the game while my friends played it and I helped with advice while they played it. Actually getting through the game myself was a no-go, but it was fun to see it in action.

It wasn’t until The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that I had a Zelda game I could beat, and I did, many times, enjoying every minute of it. And I really liked The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which took so much of the SNES game and brought it down to the Game Boy to make a fun, portable title for the system that was almost as good as its big-scale brethren. For four games in a row I was hooked, wanting to see more and more from the series that, as of yet, had never let me down.

And then The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time let me down. To be clear, I’ve played through the N64 game more than once. I’d gone into the Master Quest edition Nintendo put out later. I’ve tried very hard to get into this game and love it the way other players love it… but I don’t. The game is boring to me, an overly long, tired feeling, mess of a game that doesn’t have the inspiration, creativity, or hooky game play that keeps me coming back for me. So many people claim this is the greatest Zelda game to ever be Zelda and, frankly, I just don’t see it.

Set early in the Zelda timeline (before the timeline splits into multiple paths and becomes a convoluted mess), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time focuses, naturally, on Link. Not the same Link from other games we’ve played before, but this time a newer, fresher one. He was raised in the Kokiri Forest by the childlike beings that live there, while his growth was overseen by the Great Deku Tree. But when darkness comes for the forest, and the rest of Hyrule, young Link has to venture out and collect three spirit stones to unlock a path into the Temple of Time and protect the world.

Except, by unlocking the temple and taking the Master Sword sealed with, Link transports himself into the future, seven years from when he left, finding a different Hyrule that is still threatened by the darkness of the evil Ganondorf. Link has to go back out, as an adult, and meet the various people he knew as a child, seven of whom are now Spiritual Sages. With their power he can defeat Ganondorf and free the world from his darkness… assuming he can survive the many dungeons and challenges that await him.

Despite being the first game to translate the Zelda series into 3D, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time feels like a safe, unambitious game. From the outset you’re slowly guided through the game, fed story bits while the game holds your hand every step of the way. It never lets you get off path, never lets you go too far from what’s expected. This is a game that keeps you tightly locked down so you can experience Nintendo’s way of playing the game from a safe, reserved level of control.

Its construction is also safe and unambitious. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past saw a young hero forced onto a quest to find three sacred totems before getting whisked to a familiar, parallel world where he then has to collect seven more wise sage totems, all before unlocking the final dungeon and a path to Ganon. And now, for this Nintendo 64 game, we have the exact same construction. Young kid, early quest, three items, transport, seven more items, etc. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time feels, in many ways, like a remake of the story of the SNES title, as in Nintendo didn’t want to do anything different that would scare off fans.

I get the impulse. I know that fans like what they like and they don’t want experiences that feel too different from the “norm” (although even that was later disproven by the wild success of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild). But this N64 game feels like it’s already setting in stone conventions for the franchise, things that were already becoming stale and static when the series had only seen four major titles before. The move to 3D should have shaken up the formula, not made it more rigid and immovable.

There are parts of the game I do like, mind you. The action is smooth and responsive, and it is fun to take Link through many of the dungeons. I actually think those dungeons are fun and appealing, with puzzles that were sometimes complex but never so difficult I struggled to figure them out. Even the brain teaser of the Water Temple, with its multiple levels to navigate, felt fun and interesting to me as I worked by way through the various sections and learned what water levels I needed to have in the temple at what times. Yes, I’m one of those people that likes the Water Temple. I know I’m weird.

At the same time, though, so much of the game felt slow and padded. There was a simple joy in the way you can easily warp between the main realm and the Dark World in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past transporting back and forth via portals and a magic mirror, but that joy is missing in the N64 adventure. You can only travel through time via the Temple of Time, making it function as a hub and a single point of transit. To get around you either have to walk, ride a horse, or know the transport song to move Link to one of five fixed locations. While this is convenient, it doesn’t encourage the kind of exploration or puzzle solving the free transit and back-and-forth world travel you could get in the SNES game.

And, honestly, so many sections of the game are just flat out boring. I hated the early part of the game, when you had to wander around as Link, learning about the Kokiri. I felt that adventuring as a child (which is the first third of the game) is tedious and not at all fun. And there were many times where it felt like the game was artificially padding itself out with long side quests or forced character interactions when all I wanted to do was get on the main quest, find the totems, save the day. I’m a hero in a Zelda game. I already know what I’m supposed to do. Just let me do it.

Finally, while I’m nitpicking everything, I just have to comment that even for a Nintendo 64 game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is pretty ugly. It has very weird, sometimes strangely colored textures, and everything feels oddly angular and weirdly flat. I didn’t ever like looking at the game, and I never felt that sense of wonder at the art that I got from the SNES or even the Game Boy adventures. Even considering the fact that the Nintendo 64 was an early 3D console and it wasn’t up to the kind of graphics we have now, I felt that it just wasn’t worth looking at this Zelda game for any length of time.

So yeah, I really don’t much care for this title. It’s drab, it’s dull, and it’s just not for me. And yet, it’s also the game that set the template for so many other Zelda adventures to come. Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, Skyward Sword, and Twilight Princess all, to a greater or lesser extent, took their cues from this game and worked to be like it in as many respects as they could even while adding in the occasional little twists here or there. There are a ton of games that play like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in this series and they all just bore me.

For many, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a foundational title that cemented their love for the franchise. It was the exact opposite for me. This was the game that made me question if I even liked these games at all. And then, once the series started making various clones of this title, that’s when I jumped ship. I was looking for a different kind of adventure than Zelda was giving, and eventually I realized I just wasn’t the fan I thought I was anymore.