malvasia bianca

Ocarina of Time had been solidly on my list of favorite games ever since it came out almost thirty years ago. I very rarely replay games, so I hadn’t touched Ocarina since then, but for the last few years my brain had been nudging me to maybe make an exception for it. I even got a Nintendo 64 controller for the Switch so I’d be able to play it in a historically accurate way when I eventually found the time.

And, finally, earlier this year I hit a bit of a lull in terms of newer games that were high on my list. So I decided that yes, the game I most wanted to play next was Ocarina.

Ultimately, I actually don’t have a ton to say about Ocarina, though. It looked blurry at first, but I got used to that quickly. A more interesting surprise was that a few now-standard UX niceties just weren’t there at all: you can’t speed up text in dialogs, but even when I was at the end of the game my fingers were still pressing a button hoping that that would let me jump through text faster. (There’s even one early dialog where the game basically warns you “this next explanation is going to be long, are you sure you want to hear it?” and then gives you a chance to bail out. So they knew that was a problem!)

The world and the towns in it are small, but that wasn’t a surprise; I remember even feeling when I first played the game that yeah, Hyrule Field isn’t all that large, but it’s big enough to serve its purpose. (And, conversely, even now, sure, Kakariko Village is small, but they crammed a good amount of stuff into there!) I got stuck a little more than I remember getting stuck when I first played the game; not sure what’s going on there, whether it’s a change in my patience level or a mismatch between my game-playing instincts and 1998 me’s game-playing instincts or me misremembering how much I got stuck back then or random chance. Whatever the explanation, I didn’t get stuck very often: I went to a walkthrough maybe three times, and one or two of those were situations where I had ideas about ways forward, I just didn’t want to put in the time to really explore those hypotheses and figure out which one was correct.

The Water Temple is a dungeon that has gotten a decent amount of complaints over the years; in my first playthrough, I made it through the dungeon without any particular problems, but I could see where those people were coming from, there was an unusual amount going on in that dungeon. This time, though: I think the Water Temple is honestly just fine? (Modulo one interaction glitch that bit me.) You look at the map, you think about the possibilities, and it’s just not that hard to figure out what to do next. Sure, it’s a little fiddly going through screens to change the boots, so that’s another area where the UX could have used improvements, but that doesn’t stand out much more than several UX rough spots in the game. So, in retrospect, that feels to me like a situation where we weren’t as used to thinking through that kind of puzzle in a 3D context but now enough aspects of that are much more normal that the remaining layers of complexity in that dungeon aren’t bad.

I honestly don’t know where I end up in my evaluation of the game. Ocarina was revolutionary at the time, so certainly its place in history is secure. I was expecting to enjoy it on the replay a little more than I actually did, but I still enjoyed it a good amount and have zero regrets about spending time replaying it. Breath of the Wild is of course doing enough new that I don’t want to directly compare Ocarina to it, but how would Ocarina compare these days with other 3D Zelda games between those two, and with games by other developers that were strongly inspired by it? I remember thinking at the time that Wind Waker had too much ocean and that Twilight Princess was getting a little bloated and samey. (And, as a result, I never even played Skyward Sword; maybe I should give its remake a try, though.) If I were to replay all of those, would I still feel that Ocarina hit a sweet spot in a way that those other two games didn’t, or would I like those other two more now that they’re all old enough that my feelings wouldn’t be dominated by expectations from that specific time? Wind Waker has plenty of fans, certainly, so maybe I’d turn into one of them.

I really don’t know. And it’ll be interesting to see what the forthcoming Ocarina remake is like: what kinds of changes Nintendo makes, how both new players and people who played the original react to the remake. (I doubt I’ll make time for the remake, but who knows.) And of course my enumeration of games above has one huge gap, namely Majora’s Mask: that one I replayed years ago (admittedly not purely out of individual nostalgia, I replayed it as part of the Vintage Game Club), and Majora’s Mask, unlike Ocarina, was doing things that are still quite unusual in the present day.