87th's review of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time | Backloggd (2025)

I don't hold the N64 in particularly high regard. It's my least-favourite era for Nintendo (you know, dating back to when they started making arcade games). Without western publishers jettisoning the Saturn by 1997, and the cure-all elixir that was Pokémon (which itself would produce a few content-poor N64 games), who knows just how badly it could have gone. Primarily, the problem was that Nintendo had got really good at, and really comfortable with, producing SNES games. Shifting their entire business into expensive, fully 3D N64 titles was really tough for them. Thinking about how the guys who drew the beautiful Yoshi's Island would later be spending their days compressing textures from third-party image library CDs, you get a sense of the growing pains. You still had guys dodging the platform shift, hiding out in the backrooms to work on Satellaview games until 1999. I bet Yamauchi had no idea. It was really difficult to get those people to maintain a consistent standard of quality between the consoles, and ultimately, it was the release schedule that was sacrificed. The console itself suffered multiple delays for Mario 64's sake. They had few opportunities to get their key talent to really focus on a singular game and make it something stunning, but there's no better example of that opportunity than Ocarina of Time.

Attempting to summarise how I feel about Ocarina of Time is difficult. There's so much baggage in here. It's a game that I've gained a profound respect for as I've grown older, but it's also a real time capsule of late-90s videogame writing and shōnen adventure stories. There's a naive ambition to it, but time after time, they came up with precisely the right answer for what this should be. They had so much to take on with designing this game, and due to the strength of its characters, structure, music, artwork and worldbuilding, it's still the core of the Zelda series over 25 years later. I couldn't hope to capture everything that's admirable about this endeavour.

I don't want to make out like this is some golden, shining, pristine sacred relic. A lot of OoT's charm is in its clunk and eccentricity. The way Link leaps to clamber upon a platform that's sliding away from him, or how the Moblins that patrol outside the Forest Temple look like Duplo figures. This is a stupid game where cows talk to you if you play them a song, and big boulders politely step back for a second after they roll into you. As far as I've delved into the Legend of Zelda lore, I still couldn't tell you what the deal with Gossip Stones is, and unless Aonuma has an incredible answer up his sleeve, I hope it stays that way. There's a lot in Ocarina of Time that doesn't make any sense, and whether that makes it more enigmatic and alluring, or dopey and amusing is entirely in the eye of the beholder. I like all the awkward angles, and how long it takes a Goron to uncurl and talk to you, and all the stuff that doesn't totally work. I find it really cute.

Something that doesn't get talked about much is just how scrappy OoT's puzzles can be. It isn't often terribly strict with just how you slot its pieces into place. It's a lot more loosey goosey than that. Fights are kind of clumsy and a lot of stuff just relies on you causing explosions in the general vicinity of a target. I like it. The sense of physicality is deeper than just being surrounded by your environments. There's weird collision models floating all around you, and there's a consistent logic to them. It's very distant from the fussiness of something like Skyward Sword. That castle stealth section plays like a bathtoy and you get there by waking up Farmer Mario with a newborn chicken you just hatched from an egg. There's still a lot of Mario 64 in this code, and it feels playful to knock around in. Folk are shy to talk about how 1998 and Quakey the game feels, but it's a big part of its character.

And I don't think it's right to frame it as a funny, scruffy old N64 cart, either. There's a painful, penetrating sincerity to it. Link's goodbye to Saria isn't framed as melodramatic, but awkward and quiet. She hands him her ocarina, and he doesn't know how to respond. He takes a few little unsure steps backwards on the ropebridge and then rudely runs away. No grand adventure music. No pomp. Just unsettling ambience. The camera cuts to her disappointed face. This feels like someone's real memory from childhood. A regret they've hung onto. I didn't know what to make of this scene the first time I saw it, but when I revisit it now, it cuts to the bone. Ocarina of Time is so fucking good, man.

Before Ocarina of Time, there was a very loose understanding of what Zelda was. Over here, media frequently summarised it up as a story about medieval knights and elves, and I thought that stuff was the dweebiest shit in the world when I was a kid. I blame my initial coldness towards Ocarina of Time entirely on the 1998 English localisation, where The Great Deku Tree opens the game talking like a Shakespeare character. The D&D dorks at NoA did not consider the resulting prejudice from Scottish tweens. I had no idea how distinct its vision of fantasy was, and I certainly couldn't imagine it being something I'd love so dearly.

I tend to think of the start of 3D as something of a rebirth for the games industry. Nobody had any idea what they were doing in the 70s and 80s, and if a good game came out of it, it was a bit of an anomaly. 3D forced designers to go back to the drawing board and establish their ideas with clear intent. Zelda was definitely due one. Through the two NES games, A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, it had started to transform into something distinct from the Tolkien-style Fantasy it was frequently tarred as. The Hyrule we see in Ocarina of Time is the one we're still exploring, playing around and theorising about today. There's no mental gymnastics required to recognise this as The Legend of Zelda. What was established in this game was so solid and potent that Nintendo were terrified to divert from its mould for the following two decades.

Ocarina of Time really is the first game in the series that made its concepts concrete, and really showed us what they were going for. That tone runs through the music, art design, writing and environments. There's no room to misinterpret it. The big Zelda series iconography - the Hylian Shield, Zelda's Lullaby, Gorons, the humanoid Ganondorf, Epona - this is where it all came from. And OoT remains the central focal point of the series. Each point in the series timeline revolves around its relationship to this entry. This is The Adventure. The Legend of Zelda.

Zelda feels so distinct from everything else, because of its far-ranging influences. Religion, western fantasy, eastern philosophy, fairytales, foreign folk tales, ancient middle-eastern culture - it feels like an old story, and an inherent part of our world. Whenever the series has strayed from that vision, with robots or trains or wild west towns, it's felt goofy as shit. Ocarina of Time feels archetypal. So rarely do the games challenge themselves to establish something so grand and reverential as the Temple of Time. When Zelda 1 brought in the Master Sword, it was just the strongest of a dozen similar weapons - they didn't think for a second that it would gain such significance. OoT understood the history on its shoulders and the impact it would make.

It's clear just how much Nintendo rallied around this game. Look at that fucking credit list, man. All the stars are here. Miyamoto, Aonuma, Kondo, Koizumi, Tanabe. Some of these guys date back to the earliest days of Nintendo's game development, while others would become some of the biggest names in the company into the 21st century. Everyone really stepped up their game to produce their best work. This was the last game that Koji Kondo composed entirely by himself, closing a period of Nintendo that began with the original arcade Punch-Out, and the game's an incredible testament to the man. Music serves as a core theme and mechanic in the game, with Link being taught ocarina songs at multiple significant points of the story. Simple little thumb-dances with a musical logic based on the limitations of the N64's C-buttons, and resulting in songs as timeless and emotionally rich as Zelda's Lullaby. And when he's not dumbing himself down for what we could play, he's burning the house down with Gerudo Valley. There's such rich atmosphere to Ocarina of Time, thanks to its art, sound design and imagination. The moment Link steps from the fairytale treetop kidtown into the suffocating, spider-ridden darkness of the Deku Tree's mouth. Nothing I could write would do that transition justice. I'm trying hard not to repeat "Ocarina of Time is so fucking good, man", but I just don't know what else to say.

This is also, arguably, the last time Shigeru Miyamoto would devote so much attention to a single project. I certainly haven't heard him talk about a game with such an intimate familiarity with its production since. It's possibly the hardest he's personally worked on a single project. I think there's more of Miyamoto in OoT than even Pikmin. When you go back to pre-Mario 64 3D action games, you gain an understanding of how abstract the design challenges were, and how Miyamoto's taste and priorities were crucial in defining what they would grow into. That abstract, whimsical thinking that had him propose that 3D cameras should follow the player like a balloon on a string. Tone, clear presentation, lifelike animation, momentum, toy-like logic, memorable environmental designs - they're all hallmarks of Miyamoto's work, and an indelible fingerprint on how 3D games would grow beyond the stiff, messy corridors of Descent and Excalibur 2555AD. There had been successes before OoT, but nothing that could feel as significant and meaningful without giving up any of the fun.

OoT is full of qualities I miss in games. The outlandish stuff. If you want to acquire Fire Arrows, you need to stand in a specific spot and wait for dawn, so you can shoot an arrow into the sun as it rises. I love when an old game just makes you wait in place for something to happen. It makes the adventure feel like a bigger thing than a piece of entertainment software. You have to devote your time and patience to it, wondering if this is actually going to pay off, or if it's something you misunderstood, or a dogfaced lie that some playground bullshitter told you. The logic is so tied to myth and legend. If you didn't discover this via a longform walkthrough or someone's YouTube video, it feels amazing when it pays off.

I love how much time the game is willing to have the player waste. Visiting locations that you can't fully interact with until late in the game - the kind of stuff they'd never dare do in a modern Zelda (even if Metroid still sees the value in it). I think it makes the thing seem bigger, more mysterious and more rewarding once you're big enough to use that part of your game. Freedom in Zelda used to be about optional content that required a bunch of backtracking. Constantly going back and forth between towns for sidequests and items. I kind of miss that approach, but I suspect I wouldn't feel so invested to welcome it in a new release. Ocarina of Time is inherently nostalgic.

That's a big part of the game's power. It's about the passing of time. Things and places we remember from childhood that we can't go back to. Nostalgia is a very intentional ingredient. The way that the ageless children of Kokiri Forest don't recognise Adult Link when he returns, and you're too big to use the slingshot. It's something that Sheik underlines beautifully (and reflecting on the childhood that character must have had, more potent and painful). I don't know if I'd embrace another game like Ocarina of Time now. I don't know if I could value it nearly as much. I'm in a very different place now. It almost feels like too much of a gift that we still have the ability to play this. Like something that wasn't part of mortality's plan. Plunging the Master Sword into the plinth and going back. But I have such a deeper appreciation for the game for having come back so many times over many years. I certainly couldn't have said any of this after a single playthrough. Young love has grown into deep affection.

There's a tendency to overstate the significance of endings, but I think OoT does an incredible job there. It captures everything. The earnest beautiful images of the Sages re-emerging on the cliffside, and the glowing sunlight shining onto the sword as Link steps away from it, paired with the Cucco girl juggling chickens to amuse Biggoron. It's beautiful, heartfelt, and frequently resembles a G-Mod shitpost. There's both real joy and melancholy to it. And when it's all done and the party's over, Link comes back to meet Zelda for the first time, again. It lingers on that image until we're ready to turn the console off. Please allow me one more "Ocarina of Time is so fucking good, man".

They tell us that new Nintendo hires are given a lecture about the company's history, and a big initiative behind the museum in Kyoto was to allow them a more physical, first-hand understanding of it. Do they ask them to complete Ocarina of Time though? I shudder at the thought that are people at the company who may not have done that. How can you begin to understand the weight on your shoulders and the heights you can reach without that knowledge? How do you know what a videogame is without knowing what it can be? If we forget the Legend, it dies.

Look, I'm biased. OoT obsession runs deep in my bones. I instantly feel greater affection for something if it resembles something from Zelda 64. It's hard for me to look at a horse without seeing Epona in them (and I constantly have to remind myself that I liked horses before then, when two of them would meet us each morning by the school bus stop and humour us by kindly eating whatever handfuls of grass and dandelions we offered). I got really excited when I found out I'd moved onto the path of a dairy delivery, because glass milk bottles remind me of Lon Lon Ranch. If there's ever a big fish, that's Jabu Jabu. Through the course of an ever-changing life, Ocarina of Time remains home to me. It reminds me what I value. I can't be objective about its faults, because I've grown deep affection for those, too. You can't dissect love. As much as anyone I've known or anything I've done, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is forever a part of me. It seems absurd that a videogame can take on such significance, but Ocarina of Time is an absurd videogame.

87th's review of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time | Backloggd (2025)
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