The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time

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I love Navi. Apparently a lot of fans loathe her, but I honestly never found her particularly intrusive, so if you’re here for Navi-bashing you’re out of luck. This was the first 3D Zelda, one of the first 3D console games I remember playing, so it seems logical that it would require a little extra instruction, and once she’d given you the basics, Navi mostly got out of the way.

 

It’s honestly hard to overstate how mindblowing the 3D revolution was. Like the CGI in Jurassic Park or Terminator 2, this was jaw-dropping, something we’d simply never seen before, or never seen done this well and this convincingly. It’s 2020 now and you can get CG filters on your phone that work in real-time, this technology is so commonplace. To look at the original Ocarina Of Time now, it may as well have been dug up from the floor of a Mayan temple. It’s blocky and it’s muddy and maybe it’s a relic, but it’s a relic that was absolutely revolutionary, and it still works.

 

So, backing up: you play as Link, naturally. You wake up in your cosy treehouse in the forest and learn the basics – how to run, how to talk to people, how to crawl through tunnels and get squashed flat by boulders. You get your fairy companion, Navi, and you go to visit the Deku Tree, the wise old forest spirit who guards your village, and he sends you out into the world on your mission to find Princess Zelda. She shows you a creepy guy named Ganondorf who she thinks is bad news, and off you go.

 

The Zelda series (up until Breath Of The Wild) has always been a puzzle series, really, in RPG drag. Each game is a meticulously constructed labyrinth in which progression from one area to another is dependent on acquiring some item or ability. Each boss fight relies on a particular logic – a way to use your most recently-acquired weapon to damage a weak spot; watching for patterns of behaviour so as to deduce the right time and manner in which to attack. Look around Hyrule and you’ll see rocks you can’t yet bomb, cliffs you can’t yet scale. In Ocarina, you meet a horse, Epona, that you just know you’ll end up hijacking later on. The challenge of the game is progressing through layer upon layer of this puzzle-world. Seeing a puzzle you can't quite figure out yet, seeing your future rewards just out of reach, is what keeps you going.

 

The dungeons in Ocarina are intricate and challenging and often frustrating. (I must have completed the Water Temple a dozen times, and it never gets any easier to remember where things are or what level I’m on.) There’s a palpable sense of achievement, though, when you get it right. Things are never too difficult in Ocarina. This is Nintendo. It’s family entertainment. Things get tricky, not punishing.

 

Obviously, time has been unkind in some ways. Aside from the graphics, this Hyrule is significantly less impressive in scope than it was in 1996. Back then, walking out onto Hyrule Field for the first time was breathtaking. Riding Epona across the field felt like an epic journey in itself. It’s less so now.

 

The size of Hyrule may be less impressive now, but scale of the quest, the number and variety of dungeons, is not. As in Link To The Past, your quest is split into halves, first to locate the spiritual stones and enter the Temple Of Time, then to locate the Sages in order to stop Ganondorf. There are stealth sections as you creep into Hyrule Castle and later the Gerudo Fortress, there’s horseback archery, there are caverns of ice, temples of illusion filled with ghosts and false walls, puzzles that can only be solved by flipping back and forth between Future Link and Child Link, sidequests for the villagers and townspeople – there’s even a dungeon below Kakariko Village full of chains and torture implements and bloodstains (apparently the blood has been removed in the remake, which is disappointing). Nintendo clearly wanted to show off the goods with Ocarina and they put everything into it that they had.

 

The game also leans heavily into music as part of the quest, rather than just decoration. The titular Ocarina plays tunes that open portals, bring storms, change day to night, or grant access to temples. Later games would reuse this trope with ever-diminishing success, and certainly with less memorable tunes. (Skyward Sword’s harp-playing is the worst example. Breath Of The Wild goes to the other extreme, having hardly any music at all, preferring the kind of ambient noodlings that you might hear in a spa.) The tunes in Ocarina were strong enough that I found I could remember them a decade after I last played the game.

 

Ocarina Of Time has a strong, simple narrative, unburdened by the weight of the series’ history. Later iterations seemed to feel they had to explain away the existence of another Link and another Zelda, and try to provide a convincing chronology into which to fit all the games, to the extent of splitting the series into multiple parallel dimensions. Personally, I would never have bothered. They’re computer games, and I don’t care that they don’t fit together. Ocarina Of Time tells something close to the Platonic ideal of Zelda games: Link teams up with Zelda to defeat Ganon. That’s it. No secondary villain, no Ghirahim, no Agahnim, no Zant. Navi is just Navi, she’s not Zelda’s mum or a reincarnation of anyone. The main attraction of this game was that it was the first Zelda in 3D, so there was no need to overcomplicate things. The story never gets in the way of itself and the characters don’t bore you to tears with repetitive speeches.

 

This game is amazing, really. It’s easy to feel underwhelmed by Zelda games because they’re Zelda games, and their similarities can blind you to everything that’s so good about them. “Oh, it’s just another fire dungeon”, you think, “oh, it’s Ganon again as the villain”, and yes, it would be great if the games stretched the envelope a little further, but so long as you’re faced with a puzzle, so long as you have those moments where – faced with a wall and a few tools and a chest you can’t reach – frustration turns to inspiration and you laugh and say, “Oh I get it!” – those delightful moments are what make Zelda great. Ocarina is absolutely stuffed full of them.