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The original review for this game was written back in July 2012. Here is the link to the old review as it has been substantially modified.

Like many of my older reviews, I decided to give The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time another look after playing it in the early 2010s in my college years. It was actually the first time I played it through, partially because I was pretty young in 1998, lacked an N64, and in general it was the fact that I had been stuck with the 2D Zeldas for some time (I had a Game Boy, after all) that made it difficult to transition to 3D myself. It wasn't just move around with the D-pad, swat at enemies with the sword, it was a whole process. Roll! Z-target! Aim! Wander aimlessly around the countryside! Partially because I neither had access to a real Nintendo 64, my brother's copy of The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition on the GameCube, or any emulators thereof, it took me a while to get around and play it. I finally bought it on the Wii's Virtual Console and even THEN I took my sweet time to finish it. I think I started it in 2011 and didn't finish it until August 2013.

I don't think I can really describe Ocarina of Time because just about everything about it—the plot, how the game actually functions, and so on has been covered elsewhere. It did do a soft reset of the franchise (as well as introducing new species to the Zelda universe, like Gorons), which it needed and would continue to use up until Twilight Princess.

My current run of the game is via Ship of Harkinian, a launcher for computers and other devices. It comes with all sorts of bells and whistles, settings, and other stuff. I made a page for the PC port of the game (requires a specific copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for GameCube, needs the checksum) to put up releases that were only available on Discord but the addition of a GitHub page has made that completely obsolete. I do like SoH. There are a number of little fixes and marks you can change at your leisure. For example, you can restore Ganondorf's red blood; however, not everything is available. Want the original Fire Temple music with the chanting? You'll have to find a mod for that. I should also add that one thing I had to change was that by default, there is a D-pad in the HUD, which can be used to place additional items. If you're more of a purist, that should not be there (it was not in the N64 version). You can change this with Enhancements / Cosmetics Editor / DPad items position / Hidden.

The big question—does The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time deserve its ranking as the "best video game ever"? Well, that's hard to say. It still gets a "Great" rating but I'm not sure if it definitively stands above what I've already rated as "Great" (a small but growing list—as of this writing, Factorio, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Pokémon Gold, SimCity 2000, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Metroid). I also thought about giving The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time its own sub-page like I had done with SimCity 2000 but there wasn't a whole lot I had on it other than "The Hyrule Castle Courtyard sequence is only accessible during the daytime". There are a few other lists and charts that I could probably re-publish in a more convenient form but I won't do that now.

When I was playing the first time (the first time all the way through, not the first time ever) in the early 2010s I thought a lot about Ura Zelda. Ura Zelda was "released" as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest, which was another version of OOT with rearranged dungeons (keys, items, and others in new places).

Despite this, the creators of Zelda, Aouma and Miyamoto, have both gone on record saying Master Quest WAS Ura Zelda, which is a terrible lie or a subtle reveal that development on UZ had been going terribly (Mother 3 on the N64 had been plagued with delays as well), but in terms of Ura Zelda, the groundwork had been already laid, and there's some intriguing screenshots at Unseen64, as well as some other cool stuff: like how you could use the Game Boy Camera, import that to the N64DD, and use the mask in-game. We know that Miyamoto will lie to match the current narrative (stuff about Princess Peach being a "strong character" after The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), Aonuma will lie about everything else (retconning Majora's Mask, even after the release of Hyrule Historia, to "the world didn't actually exist, it was all an illusion") and the 64DD was talked about the features it had (real time clock, editing features, A/V input, and so on). It would be madness if it didn't...not that they talked up Ura Zelda specifically, but as I've mentioned on my Mother 3 review, Mother 3 was supposed to be a 64DD game and later was developed to have an N64 game with an add-on to it. The only game that DID have a 64DD expansion pack was F-Zero X and it had all sorts of awesome features.

As for Ura Zelda, a team of modders attempted to make their own version of the game as a fan project (some details here) but it had issues, first changing Link to a knockoff with a baseball cap, perhaps a nod to BS The Legend of Zelda) and eventually fell apart entirely due to in-fighting.

Back to Ocarina of Time I haven't actually finished it (on SoH) yet as of this writing but I think I'm far enough in (Kakariko Well, which is about 75% of the game) to write a review in good confidence. Besides, I finished it years ago.

FINAL RATING:   

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