The Ocarina of Time and Perception
On Zelda's most important game, and the one that left me wanting a lot more than it gave
There are two distinct extreme camps when it comes to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. One camp, which is relatively large, parades it as the greatest game in the series, if not of all-time. A much smaller and much more vocal minority considers it completely dated, the worst in the series. Obviously, not everyone is in one of those two camps, but whenever you have a watershed game in a series, it’s going to cause polarization so much that those extremes will have people surrounding them with moderate opinions. Not every game in the Zelda series is watershed; people don’t argue over Zelda II or The Minish Cap. But the arguments are intense over games like Link to the Past, Breath of the Wild, and this title, which was the first purely 3D entry in the Zelda series.
After waiting nearly a year between getting my Nintendo 64 for Christmas in 1997 and the release date of Ocarina, my appetite for the game was enormous. The time I spent on it was commensurate with the desire to play it beforehand. As a teenager, I loved this game, but the cracks in the façade started to show with even the direct sequel released on the same system, Majora’s Mask. The sequel, which saw Link arriving in a strange land looking for his companion fairy from Ocarina and getting stuck in a time loop hoping to save it from a falling-out-of-orbit moon, was released in the same manner as the prior game, in a cartridge, presumably with the same capability for graphics and the same for data storage. It had nearly the exact same control mechanisms. Yet, it was a far richer game experience, not because it had more to do, but because what it had the player do was so out of the box to that date. Much in the same way the Zelda team couldn’t make Zelda: The Lost Levels for its NES sequel, they felt they couldn’t just make Ocarina Clone A-4526Q1 here. Thus, the result was a game that got as close to a cult classic that a major developer could approach.
Further highlighting the shortcomings of Ocarina was the first entry for the GameCube, Wind Waker. This game has a similar reputation only with far more folks hating it than those who dislike Ocarina, but that repudiation either comes from the fact that sailing in empty seas is far too prevalent an activity one must do in the early game, which feels like a legit concern, and that the game was designed to have cel-shaded animation-style graphics, which to me is the biggest whiny baby gamer complaint ever. You don’t like that a game made for kids looks like it should be made for kids? Go play Call of Duty and say slurs with Meyers Leonard and Pewdiepie.
Anyway, I can look past the sailing spam because even with that being so omnipresent throughout the beginning of the game (once you learn the warp song and get to fast travel, sailing becomes fun because you only have to do it for a purpose), Wind Waker has so much stuff to do in it. It’s a classic Zelda title both in scope (Link has to save Hyrule AGAIN) and in size. What made prior Zelda games so fun was the sheer amount of stuff to do in those games. The main quest always has some side stuff to do, which can be more fun than actually playing through the main narrative. Hell, perhaps the biggest reason why Majora’s Mask was such a fun jaunt was because most of the game WAS doing sidequests.
That brings me to the reason why I side more with the naysayers than the worshippers on Ocarina. Nintendo’s insistence on taking the first steps into post-16-bit gaming with cartridges instead of compact discs like Sony and then Microsoft did put it behind an 8-ball at first. The N64 has quite a bit of great titles, and if its hit-rate seems to be high, it’s because the library was never that deep to begin with. They were able to make Super Mario 64, an all-time classic that was packed full of things to do, but absolutely none of the characters outside of Princess Peach in the beginning look nearly as good as they were in Super Mario World, let alone as they could be in future games. Besides, stuffing a Mario title full of shit to do is easy. It’s a different genre of game, and no two titles comparatively show that discrepancy than their Nintendo Switch titles, Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. There’s a ton of stuff to do in the latter game, more than what you can do in any other Zelda game prior. Yet, it feels like the amount of time you can spend on Odyssey completing the game to 100 percent dwarfs even what you can do in the Zelda title. It’s not a fault of the Zelda franchise. It’s just platformers, 2D or 3D, lend themselves to simpler designs and thus more capacity.
So while blocky polygon graphics were a necessary sacrifice to make Mario 64 the dynamo it was then and still is today (get yourself to the Nintendo eShop or a brick and mortar retailer before March 31 so you can get your copy of Super Mario All-Stars 3D before Nintendo foolishly puts it back into the vault), Nintendo could not make a classic Zelda game that looked as clean as it could in future games like Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild nor could it pack stuff to do into the game like in Link to the Past or Zelda II.
The shame part of it all is that, without question, Ocarina of Time is the archetypical Zelda story. The main narrative is by far the one budding with the most realized potential, and it was coupled with such an intuitive and easy-to-master gameplay that it’s hard to look past how important it was and still is. Basically, the game basically was the Miracle Gro on the lore and mythos of the land of Hyrule. It introduced four of the main races of sentient beings, established that a fifth, the Zora, were noble and intelligent rather than irascible baddies bent on spitting fireballs at you from the water. It gave Ganon a proper introduction past being an evil hog wizard. And even though she ended up being captured by the end of the game, Ocarina made Zelda an active participant in the salvation of her own kingdom. Most impressively? Ocarina has a time travel plot that isn’t needlessly convoluted. It’s so essential that it is at the center of the highly volatile and needlessly splintered timeline. If you want to make someone’s head explode, have them make heads or tails of the Zelda Timeline.
Yeah, that’s not anything a sane person would come up with, but video game creators are rarely sane. That’s how you get the good games. Ocarina of Time is a good game, even with its misgivings, but are the misgivings that fatal? If a game leaves you wanting more, is it really a failure? I’d say the answer is yes, especially when with the same limitations, Nintendo made a Zelda game that was satisfying in its own right. But Majora’s Mask is not the kind of game you make the first run out for a main console. It’s not a mainline Zelda game. That’s what makes this whole exercise so frustrating. Ocarina in theory is the platonic ideal of Zelda, but when I sit down to play it, there’s a piece missing.
What’s your favorite Zelda game? Leave a comment!
The knee-jerk reaction is that in the age of DLC, Nintendo could remaster it again and add content. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility given that they rereleased Link’s Awakening for the same system as the original game with a new dungeon. Then again, would you tinker with a game that’s so entrenched in the firmament so far away from its initial release? The answer is no, you shouldn’t. For however many bottles of Moo-Moo Milk left on the table that Ocarina left, one gets the feeling that adding a dungeon or two or creating a new sidequest might muddle the waters. It might be a misfit. It might ruin the little thing that served as a foundation for everything that came after and even some of the stuff that came before.
One can like the idea of something more than the execution. A game can be the most important without being the best. For some people, the lack of girth in the game doesn’t bother them. For me, it’s a lesson in accepting the things you can’t change. Do I want Ocarina to be the best Zelda game? Yeah, I do. It should be the best one because it’s the linchpin for the whole series. Perhaps the role it plays for me is to be a creative template, an exercise to work my imagination. Maybe the real lesson is a consensus is overrated anyway. Human beings only have one perception – their own. Are you going to let someone else’s opinion shape yours, or are you going to experience it on your own? Me, I will continue to be both fascinated by Ocarina of Time’s lore and trappings while lament the game it could have been if Nintendo might have been a little more forward thinking. It’s the only way I can look at it, after all.