I’m not trying to be smug – or controversial – when I say The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time is not one of the greatest videogames ever made. It’s not even the greatest Zelda game ever made (it might perhaps be third-greatest, but not first). The franchise’s formula, which asks players to revisit and rethink all of the gameworld’s parts from fresh angles as they gain new skills, weakens when it’s slung across a massive Hyrule that can be tedious to traverse and listless outside of its handful of relevant locations.
Ocarina wanted to prove the scope and beauty of three dimensions, and as chunky and imperfect as its visuals appear in hindsight, it did succeed for its time, superficially. Yet it also forced its designers to be more creative than ever about ways to maximise assets; the game’s plot ultimately catapults Link seven years into the future and lets him swap between time periods, a clever bit of psychological trickery that makes the game feel large when it’s really just the same place, re-skinned a little here and there. You may remember the same strategy from The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past – a 2D Super Nintendo game that is six years older and gives players far more to do in its world.
Regardless of how one might look critically at Ocarina, and no matter how many arguments one might engage on whether it’s ‘perfect’ or not, there’s no debate that it’s one of the most loved videogames ever made. Plenty of games earn favourable critical reception despite traits that would have sunk a different game in the court of public opinion even before launch.
As well they should, arguably. The list of games that have captured hearts, imaginations and a place in history is full of titles with deep flaws. And while such unlikely favourites can be tough to explain, their champions will tell you something interesting: much of their passion is not about the details of the game, but instead its overall feeling – and playing a primary and much-overlooked role in that sentiment is individual context.
All Nintendo-made games thrive on simple concepts that create familiar patterns for fans, but the Zelda series in particular operates on the archetypal story of a boy who leaves home for the first time to become a man, becoming stronger through lessons learned along his way, until he’s able to support the people and things he cares about. That story arc is almost as old as humankind itself, probably because allegories for growing up are fundamentally relatable.
Many of the fans who so zealously treasure Ocarina today seem to care for the title as a singular, sentimental experience that they have rarely, if ever had repeated. Gaming is a young enough medium that it’s only just now beginning to see its third generational group join the space; for the second-gen console gamers who are now in their 20s and early 30s, Ocarina was a formative experience during the span of teen years. Launching in North America and Europe right around Christmas, countless gamers recall exciting holidays spent with siblings or cousins, the game a gift, after-school winters spooling into terminal summers of quiet exploration, or of joyful discoveries shared.
People don’t talk about Ocarina in terms of graphics or level design; they talk about it in terms of the context in which they remember playing. Everything about the game spoke directly to those who were intended to enjoy it, and as such it was intangible things, shared culture, that made it brilliant and beloved – not the sort of things you could ever hope to quantify on Metacritic.
Context and relatability are woefully underestimated in how they shape our opinions of the games we play. The mind of the game designer tends to prize specifics, not abstracts, and to him or her designing a great experience comes from practical iteration on design components, not musing on ways to be sure a 14-year-old will never forget having gotten the product as a birthday gift. Meanwhile, the gaming press has long operated under a sense of obligation to dissolve personal experience and discuss games neutrally.
None of that helps. Games that define how people recall a period of time in their lives or with whom they shared the experience are the ones that are remembered as truly great. Playing Mario 2 in a basement with my neighbour, making up songs for luck, is a sharper memory of ‘social play’ than anything I’ve ever done on Facebook.
There are films about wartime, songs about youth issues, books about living in the digital age. Alongside them, videogames – from how we make them to how we talk about them and what we call ‘good’ – often seem disinterested in the hard-to-define elements that create greatness and permanence in others’ lives.
It’s a shame we’re often so eager to divest ourselves of personal feelings around games. The lasting memories we have of childhood play don’t need to be the province of our past, so long as we’ve got games that can speak to who we are today – and we listen.
Comments
2With this article, you manage to put down in words what I've been feeling for years. I didn't own Ocarina of Time on N64 so the first opportunity I had to play that game was when they released it on the Gamecube, as a bonus disc with a collector edition of Wind Waker. Since then, every now and then, I fire up the Gamecube and starts my game from my last save but I've never been able to play for more than two hours, for the graphics are so outdated. Some aesthetic choices stand the test of time, some don't, and most of Ocarina of Time's didn't. It's the only Zelda that I never beat. The two DS episodes, A link to the Past, Link's Awakening, Minish Cap or Wind Waker, I played them with absolute delight. But OoT, I really can't. Maybe I should try the 3DS version. When players a little older than me talk about OoT, their eyes fill up with stars and they describe it as they felt when they played it as kids and to them, it's a monument who will never lose its shine. Thus, they have judged amazing iterations like Wind Waker and every single episode since then with an unfair severity. It's high time older players realized how much in their judgement is due to objective opinion, and how much is due to blind nostalgia. Let's hope Skyward Sword lets them change their mind.
The thing is though, I never actually played Ocarina of Time until I was in University, well over 4 years after it's initial release. It also wasn't a gift. The N64 was rescued from my niece who abandoned it, and the cart was picked up in a sale at Gamestation. It's a game that has little if any emotional baggage surrounding it for me. I'd never even played another Zelda game before that.
And yet it was still stunning. The story is simple sure, but engaging, and most importantly, accessible. Graphically, it had aged even then, but I'm the sort of person who still plays on a Master System. I can look past all that. I disagree that the aesthetic choices didn't work either. Both Link and Epona for example, 2 characters you'll see a lot of, still look good even by todays standards.
In terms of level design, each dungeon offering it's own puzzle to solve with the drip feed of new equipment offering new possibilities meant that it always felt fresh. I certainly never got bored during my time in Hyrule, even in the Water Temple that everyone else seems to hate.
This isn't to cast doubt on the idea that things around us can shape our opinions, but rather to offer a defence that, despite the rose tinted glasses many view it through, Ocarina of Time really is that good.