Back to Ocarina of Time

Something I’ve been meaning to write about more on this blog is specific gaming experiences. Not necessarily reviews, but just moments of my history with gaming that got me to think about things and reflect a bit. Memories from my childhood, quotes, a cutscene or mechanic I loved.

Ten years after beating it for the first time—twenty years since I first saw gameplay of it on a friend’s computer—I am replaying The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

I went for the Nintendo 3DS remake! I bought the physical cartridge and started it on a whim. Here’s a summary/playthrough with my experience and how it has differed with my memory of the game before.

Mild spoilers for the first couple hours of the game.

To the Great Deku Tree!

First, the opening sequence and story of this game is a classic, engraved in my memory to this day. However, I actually didn’t recall some of the dialogue, because I originally played this title in Spanish! It was a patched ROM I got from some random website. Those times were rough… The spacing was all wrong, making some words weird to grasp, though I was old enough to understand some things, I think some dialogue was missing or cut-out in places.

Now, I am able to get the official English translation—though I wonder if it differs a lot from Japanese, and also from the N64 original—without now more language barriers.

I am aware that this remake—more like a port I think?–retains pretty much everything the original game has, even glitches and bugs common in speedrunning. I don’t care about such things but it is commendable. I noticed some archaic behavior pretty soon, when I jumped out of my treehouse, landed exactly between a sign and an NPC and Navi’s indicator went crazy trying to figure out who to target, with the sound effects going wild as well for a few seconds, until I moved away from and Navi went back to normal.

The beginning area is iconic, to young me everything seemed so huge, the Lost Woods were such a crazy maze! I was utterly unable to walk on that tall and thin pathway that gives you some rupees at the end (I didn’t get the camera controls yet) and finding the sword required me to use a guide—for some reason I just never went to the little area that’s clearly signaled…

I am trying not to abuse my previous knowledge of the game here, so what I’m doing instead is actually talk to the NPCs for once. This is something I skipped when I was younger, but it’s pretty cool how much it helps. If only I had stopped to read the signs guiding me to that chest…

Got the sword, bought my shield, and I headed towards the Giant Deku tree, who asked me to go inside his… mouth? to kill a parasite that cursed him.

The level design of this starting dungeon is lovely, I never noticed all it does to teach the player how the third dimension works at all! Up to now the player may have missed they can look around in first person, but by making the player aim with the slingshot, they now know that up and down are a thing!

My favorite bit was the spot where you can jump into the central web on the floor which makes it wobble a bit without breaking it. This is the key piece of information I missed as a child, where I had to use a guide to figure out that jumping from up high could break the central spiderweb…

Another detail I didn’t understand much when I was younger were how to use Deku Nuts! These are able to stun enemies, but because of the controls I just never used them. Combat was purely sword and shield with no other aid.

Oh right, back in the day I had a wired Xbox 360 style controller, looking back, it was quite terrible, but I used it for emulating this game as well as PSP online gaming.

Queen Ghoma—the parasite inside the Great Deku Tree and main boss fight of the dungeon—was absolute nightmare fuel for me when I was eleven/twelve, stopping me from playing this completely, due to the design and creepy setting of the arena. Four years after that I finally had the courage and defeated her, but maybe if I had known Deku Nuts were so useful I would have managed much better back then.

Now, it literally took me a minute to get rid of the thing.

Heading to Hyrule Castle

With Ghoma gone, the Deku Tree still… died—I warned you about spoilers!—not before tasking me with a big quest for the ages, telling me the story of how the world came to be, and instructing me to go to Hyrule Castle and contact Princess Zelda, or something—I genuinely forgot what the tree actually said. In any case, I go back to talk to some more NPCs one more time and it was interesting to see how some lines changed now that the Tree was gone.

The encounter between Saria and Link—where we get our first ocarina—is still one of those small moments that carries quite the weight in hindsight, it got me feeling a bit melancholic even now writing about it.

It’s rather tragic, how Link is entrusted with this big mission, abandoning all he is familiar with and embarking to the unknown, with only a fairy companion by his side. His whole life—as far as we can tell—Link was outed by the other kids because he never had a fairy, and now that he has one, he doesn’t get to stay and play with them at all—not even with Saria. Link has a destiny to fulfill, and fortunately for the world, he has the courage to face it head on. Even so, he can’t help but run away from Saria to be able to do so, as they part ways. They may see each other again, but it won’t be the same.

Back to some game design stuff. We finally make it to the Hyrule Fields! A huge region that you get to explore, even if there’s not a lot to see, honestly. I headed straight to Hyrule Castle, ignoring Lon Lon Ranch—I never even had it in sight—as well as Kakariko Village. I found it interesting that you can’t quite manage to make the trip in a single day, making Link face off against enemies at night. This was fun, and let’s the player know that there is a time mechanic! It’s not tied to real time and will pause when you are inside dungeons and other specific areas which I appreciate.

I do have a complaint about the 3DS release of the game! I was riding the bus when I got to Hyrule, and I tried one of the shooting minigames with my slingshot! However, the gyro controls made it absolutely impossible to aim because the bus kept wobbling around and messing with me. Twenty rupees down the drain. If you know a setting to disable this, let me know.

Anyway, exploring the town we meet Malon, a cute girl looking for his father, Mario—I forget the actual name of the guy—the owner of Lon Lon Ranch, who went to deliver some milk to the castle. I also went on a detour to the Temple of Time, and to the streets in the back that seemed to be full of poor people and locked doors. Some interesting world-building there I’d say.

In any case, when I was a kid, I clearly remember getting stuck here, trying to avoid the soldiers to get into the castle, only to be met by Malon’s sleeping father, blocking my way to progress. I left that place and came back and found Malon there who gave me the egg soon-to-be-chicken to wake the guy up, but it was a pain and had to look for a guide to know what to do and then somehow things worked.

This time, the game felt very clear about everything. An Owl guide showed up—it actually shows up since the moment I got into the Hyrule Fields for the first time telling me to go to Hyrule Castle—and explained how time moves forward in some places and pauses in others—I’m repeating myself here. For some reason, this was enough for me to get me curious about leaving and coming back, and Malon was right there already! waiting to give me the egg. I didn’t have to suffer or get stuck anywhere, she was happily waiting for me and even started to sing the classic Epona song as I sneaked my way through the guards.

So, with the egg in hand, I got into the castle, and right as the sun rose once more, the egg hatched, and I woke up Mario quickly and smoothly. Everything is going great!

Seriously, I have conflicted feelings about this, because a part of me always considered Ocarina of Time to be “pretty good, but with some outdated and obscure design elements”, but here I am realizing that pretty much every difficult section of the game so far is actually telegraphed and accounted for if you know how to read and take a hint whenever the game gives it to you! and I am just dumb.

I avoided all the patrolling guards in the castle gardens on my first try and made it to Zelda in one piece, everytime she asked me if I trusted her I replied with “No” just to see what she’d do, but eventually she told me a story, gave me a letter and then Impa was waiting for me. She called Link a courageous boy—something I found super cute for some reason—and taught me the iconic Zelda’s Lullaby at last.

On to… Kokiri Forest?

Behold, more moments where I got stuck as a kid that are actually explained:

One of the most annoying parts when I was a youngling for me was getting all the way to the Goron City in Death Mountain, and then being told by the Goron Leader—Darunia I think?—that he is very annoyed by something or something and wants to listen to something exotic or whatever. I don’t remember, but you are basically required to play Saria’s Song—yep a song by your only friend—and for that you have to return all the way back to Kokiri Forest. This is a painful amount of backtracking…

However, this time I realized that when you get out of Hyrule Castle after being told by Impa to visit Death Mountain, you can get one of those Hey, Listen! from Navi, and she will provide some actually helpful information, planting a seed in my head: “What would Saria think of our journey so far?”—or something along those lines.

That’s something kid me probably ignored completely, but looking back, it’s clearly a clue, a simple lead telling you that maybe it’d be nice to see her, and so I did! I don’t know how much of this is me knowing I would have to get the song anyway, and how much of it is really clever game design to help the player avoid going all the way to Goron City only to backtrack, but I want to think there were plenty of children who did this and saved up lots of time!

And here we face yet another of those obscure game mechanics that are quite obvious in hindsight, and that’s the “follow the music” section to get through the Lost Woods. Kid me was completely lost. I don’t know if I even tried, I looked for a guide that told me “Left, Right, Right, Left, Middle” or whatever and called it a day. Playing it here the audio was much clearer, and even the Owl showed up to tell me about the mechanic, which I’m not sure happens in the original.

Anyway, I battled some monsters on the way and met Saria one more time, I learned the song and had a nice moment playing together with her. What a wonderful, pain-free adventure so far! This game really seems to be even better than I remember, as I already loved it despite how archaic things seemed to young me back then.

Forward to Kakariko Village

Well, from there I went to the village at last—very much missing a quick travel mechanic but it’s early game so whatever—and once again I talked to some of the NPCs in the area. I went to the house with the Skulltula people inside and decided I’d try to find every single one of them, even if I’m unsure how that’d be possible without a guide.

I also went out of my way to find all the cuckoos and got a bottle out of it.

Explored the graveyard brought some memories back, I found the tomb where you can play Zelda’s Lullaby, and another nightmare from my childhood appeared.

The ReDeads were dreadful, scary and almost unkillable to child me. With more than a decade of extra experience, I still got caught by the screen, but was able to run away and got the Sun Song, which allows me to set time to the morning and immobilize the ReDeads!—another mechanic I never used as a kid, in facts I missed it completely. I was such a noob…

Finally, I looked around for all the Golden Skulltulas in the village and talked to some more NPCs during the day or night to see what they had to say. I thought it was about time I made some progress on my adventure and talked to the guard at the trail to Death Mountain. I showed him my letter from Zelda and let me pass, not without mentioning the mask mechanics—which I never interacted with at all during my original playthrough.

Going all the way up to Goron City was pretty easy, I think my overall sense of location is much better nowadays too. I went to Darunia and stopped the game right before playing Saria’s Song and get him to dance like a maniac.

Overall thoughts

All in all, I am really appreciated the game design of this game so far, it really is full of things to do and options to take. I could have already gone and visited some other areas like Lon Lon Ranch if I wanted to, and having the ocarina gives me a couple other options before the main story. Since I want to get all the Skulltulas, I should probably explore a bit more of Kokiri Forest and the village, but we’ll see how it goes.

The gameplay and hardware of the 3DS have been great, and the visuals really strike me as “just how I remembered it” since years ago! I am looking forward to playing more of it and completing it this year, it has been long overdue…

Speaking of completing things in a year, why not? Let’s go for another round of #100DaysToOffload. This is day 1!