The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time

Hey! Look! Listen! Today marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most important dates in the history of video games. The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time was released on November 21st, 1998. Back when Google was being created, back when people were enjoying The Truman Show in theaters and Bill Clinton did not have sexual relationships with that woman, the world of video games changed forever when this innocent little cartridge inserted itself into our Nintendo 64s. The rotating three dimensional N logo that Nintendo was so proud of back in the day, that soothing melody accompanied by the clacking of Epona’s horseshoes, the moon setting, the slow title fade-in and the ocarina that perfectly framed the promise of the adventure that was yet to come. To this day, in my honest opinion, there is still no better title screen than Ocarina’s. It is calm and somber, beautiful and depressing but somehow wonderfully adventurous. It sounds nothing like when you venture into Hyrule Field yourself yet it still manages to encapsulate so accurately what an adventure is and what a Zelda game could be. Let’s talk a little about how this game did its thing.

Verily, thou hast felt it.

Ocarina of Time is often credited as one of the most revolutionary, important and historically significant video games of all time. It is praised for its ambition, execution of its creative vision, world, the introduction of standard industry design concepts, among many other things. It’s ironic, really. A game that features time as such a fundamental theme across the entire experience came out as if brought back in time by Nintendo time travelers themselves that knew how video games would evolve throughout twenty years. How did they know that 3D combat needed a focus on the Z-axis to be spatially aware of your surroundings and the enemy at the same time? How did they know an action button needed to be assigned for interaction with the world? How did they know we didn’t need a jump button and that Link should just jump automatically? How did they know video games would adapt artistic ideas from movies and add cinematics to their storytelling methods? Hell, how did they know every freaking video game in the current generation had to be an open-world game? There’s no other explanation: the Ocarina of Time is real. Nintendo has it somewhere, stored up, and only they can access it. Maybe that’s how they can change how we understand video games multiple times across multiple generations.

That’s not to say Nintendo didn’t use their magical time travel powers to inspect other aspects of the industry. Back when Ocarina was deep in development they experimented with segments and even on-rails segments. Nintendo was out to perform a task that seemed impossible. They weren’t just making a game. They were inventing the future. Most people say that Nintendo is all about gameplay. Gameplay over graphics and that their competitors are the ones that push the technical limits of their products. And while that may be true on a basic level, especially in the current state of the three main consoles, I would argue that Nintendo has always put the emphasis on video games being experiences. You’ll say, “well, yeah… every video game is an experience, but what I want to focus on is the process in which a developer can create their game and how that can directly lead into the way a player can play that game. The identification of a situation, the detection of an objective or a goal and the exploration of how to achieve that goal. This design philosophy applies to not only how Nintendo develops games but how a player plays the games. It can even apply to how we overcome challenges in our personal lives as well. See, when the shift from 2D planes to 3D spaces happened, the developers and artists were putting out games faster than they could catch up with the understanding of said shift. The industry demanded it and there wasn’t enough time to adapt. It wasn’t until Super Mario 64, a couple of years prior to the release of Ocarina, that video games in 3D started to make sense and part of the reason for that was the experience of controlling a character in a newly perceived digital environment. While Sega and Sony released their 3D-capable consoles with a controller that was still carrying the 2D game build of a D-Pad and no control stick, Nintendo realized that something had to fundamentally change in the way we interact with the game worlds because the worlds themselves were fundamentally changing. This would later lead to new gameplay possibilities which Nintendo would try to juice the most out of. Super Mario 64 opened our eyes to something new and Ocarina made us fully understand it. Suddenly, it wasn’t about just controlling a character and interacting with a world in an entirely new way, it was finding the focus of what the experience would be.

A brave new direction for a brave new generation

Mario wasn’t attempting to make us feel like heroes or epic protagonists on a fantastical quest (even though, at times, we could feel that way). It was trying to tell us that having fun is fun. That we could run around and jump and collect things because it put a smile on our faces and that was worth every second of play. A frivolous, constantly distracting and joyful experience. In fact, it still tries to do this even with the newest games like Super Mario Odyssey. Zelda, on the other hand, was the closest thing that Nintendo had to the complete experience of immersing yourself in some daunting new world. It understood that the scale of the adventure is just as grand as the responsibility of the hero and through the magic of programming, the player. The Kokiri in the forest, the Goron in the mountains, the Zora behind the waterfall, the Hylians, the Gerudo, all of it. In a reality where games where slowly getting out of being beeps and boops and imagination carried the wondrous nature of what you were witnessing, gamers were suddenly hit with a sense of purpose unlike any other. It wasn’t about getting to the next level or seeing the next part of the game, it was about saving the world. I mean, you better feel that way because it is kinda your fault that you have to save it in the first place!

Amidst all the incredible things Ocarina accomplished for video games on a functional level, something that I don’t see people addressing too much when discussing the game is the audacity it had when letting the villain of the story… win. When games nowadays would rather let the villain completing their goal of taking over the world be a cool cliffhanger that sets up a sequel to sell in a couple of years, Ocarina decided “no, screw it, Ganon will win and it will be the player’s fault about 30% into the game.” It was probably the boldest choice in a game where almost every decision made is the boldest thing ever. Then it gets better. Ocarina gets relentless at times. Just when you start to feel like you have a good grasp of what being adult Link is and the implications of revisiting locations that were taken over by evil, the game tells you to go back to being little young Link again and to visit the Bottom of the Well, arguably one of the creepiest, most messed up dungeons in any video game. How are people not gonna think this game was mindblowing when things like this happened? Or how about this random, mirage-like room in the Water Temple that feels like it stretches on forever, that has a single tree in the middle and no enemies at all, that doesn’t allow you to keep going with the dungeon until you realize you can’t open the next door before you turn around and fight… yourself. C’mon, man, what a phenomenal moment that’s just slotted in there, that one mini-boss. Even though, with the release of newer games and better understandings of 3D game design Nintendo has evolved the Zelda franchise in many different ways, those classic gameplay and story points derive from a uniquely creative stroke of genius that will remain just as thematically powerful for years to come just as it did in 1998.

Another concept that the game wrestles with is the idea that Link basically loses his childhood and then this becomes his motivation that kickstarts his adventure in Majora, as well as other things. As young Link, the player becomes familiar with the intricacies of how the world functions and breathes. Link believes that he is part of the Kokiri, only to later find out that he can… grow up. He meets up with Zelda, the Gorons and the Zoras and attempts to craft a plan to prevent the world from falling into darkness. There is an appropriate child-like innocence to Link and the player’s mentality when starting the game and taking on the first few dungeons. Up until this point in the series, while it did showcase some genuinely dark moments, Zelda was a mostly colorful endeavor for players, both narratively and visually. But Ocarina takes the franchise into an interesting new direction with things like Ganondorf promising loyalty to the king while listening to the kids plotting to spoil his plans yet knowing they’re moving closer and closer to Hyrule’s inevitable doom. It’s pretty fucked up when you think about it. This kind of subtle storytelling was unheard of in video games, unimaginable. The contrast between Hyrule’s lighthearted feel while Link is a kid and the utter darkness that envelops every corner of the land when Link is an adult. It’s unsettling, even to this day. It’s not just about finishing the game and beating the final boss, it’s about the agency of wanting to find out what the hell happened. How has the world changed? What happened to the places and characters I got attached to when the game was seemingly taking me in one specific direction only to completely turn around its tone? As everything starts to fall into place, you come to the realization that it was your plan that made this happen. The plan you crafted with Zelda backfired in the most unexpected way possible. Before The Last of Us, before Mass Effect, before God of War and Life is Strange and the highest points of storytelling in video games showed up, Ocarina of Time attempted this when people were still trying to figure out how to move in a 3D space. That’s not to say that video games hadn’t had very compelling stories up until that point. I mean, Ocarina shared the release year with Half-Life, Resident Evil 2 and Metal Gear Solid. But it feels like Ocarina doesn’t really care about those other games. It knows it doesn’t need anything from those games to be the greatest among the greats. In fact, it still doesn’t. While storytelling in games has evolved monumentally with and without Ocarina’s influence, Ocarina’s story remains engaging in its simplicity, something that too ambitious games from the current time could definitely learn from. I won’t mention the plot twist towards the end, just in case some unfortunate (or fortunate?) soul hasn’t played the game yet, but the fact that that plot point is still one of the most iconic narrative moments in all of video games really says something about the timeless nature of this game.

A timeless classic out of its time

And that’s what Ocarina of Time is: timeless. It kind of funny actually. Time within the world of Ocarina is so controllable, so flexible, such an integral part of the entire playthrough. It sort of doesn’t exist. I mean, it does at one point but then it just doesn’t. You go forward in time and back in time on command. You make it go from night and day in seconds. Link loses his childhood and gets it back as many times as he needs to. That’s what Ocarina does to not only the character in the game but to us as well. We have lost our childhoods to this game, but we can get it back. We can always go back. The time in the real world almost doesn’t affect Ocarina. It doesn’t matter when we play it as long as we play it, the way we have been playing it for twenty years and hopefully we will be playing for many more to come.