YOSHIBABA

Played a bit of the Ocarina of Time Remake with my son yesterday. We also played through the 3DS version together a few years ago. My son was immediately blown away by the art direction. All I kept hearing was: "Dad, it looks so real!" When he got the Kokiri Sword, he actually reached out and touched the screen to see if he could grab it... lol. Personally, I've always been somewhat disappointed by Ocarina of Time, and that hasn't changed today. After the brilliant A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time just felt emptier and more confused to me. And frankly, none of that has really been addressed. Hyrule Field's design was still somewhat excusable back in 1998, given how incredibly limited the Nintendo 64 was from a technical standpoint. But today, especially when the game is using the technology from BotW and TotK? Yikes. Something that already bothered me back then, but that I couldn't quite articulate properly at the time, was that a huge part of Zelda's magic came from the fact that there was always something interesting to do. The Moment-to-Moment was exquisite in those earlier games. Every screen in Zelda 1 or ALTTP held some kind of secret or some opportunities of interactivity. There were always enemies to fight or something to interact with. Fight your way through a few bushes over here in the overworld and suddenly you stumble into a little grove where the Flute Boy is playing his flute. Whoa! Interesting! Then along came Ocarina of Time, where you'd spend two minutes doing absolutely nothing but holding the analog stick forward to walk across a boring, empty Hyrule Field. Try to do this design exercise: Graph out Hyrule Field from top-down and then try to come up with what interesting gameplay mechanics hide behind every cell. You'll quickly find that there's really not that much at all going on... And sure, Hyrule Field looks prettier now, but it's still just as empty and uninteresting as it was back then. That means the entire overworld, which was so magical in Zelda 1 and ALTTP because every new dungeon item unlocked entirely new ways to interact with the environment, discover new areas and so on, is unfortunately no longer there in the same way. Instead, you get this typical open-world terrain that you just walk through. On your very first trip from Kokiri Forest to Hyrule Castle, you fight exactly ONE tiny enemy and spend roughly two minutes doing nothing but holding your analog stick forward without anything remotely interesting happening. From a level design perspective, that's something I would NEVER approve at Moon. I would've turned Hyrule Field into a proper overworld where every single segment offers interesting opportunities for interaction. And after every dungeon, every new item you got should make you giddy about going back to the overworld to find out what amazing new discoveries are available now! Over here, you can jump into the river and discover an NPC hiding beneath the bridge who gives you an interesting quest. Over there, you can use your Boomerang to interact with something. Around that corner, there's something you can do with the Hookshot. Further back, you can blow open a new path using Bombs. Down that little alley, you can lift a heavy rock that reveals a cave leading into an elaborate underground network, which eventually opens up a secret entrance into Hyrule Castle Town, where you can find a Heart Container. And so on, and so forth. But none of that stuff happens here. Back in 1998, Hyrule Field was a nice little tech demo that allowed Nintendo to show off how the N64 could render some really big triangles, just to make the poor old PlayStation look bad. But from a design perspective, it was already pretty lousy back then. And to simply copy that design 1:1 today? Nah. Every designer at Nintendo should be crying foul and know that this could be done so much better nowadays. Now, I'm sure some people will come along and start rambling about staying faithful to the original... Oh, give me a break. I just took Zelda 1 apart myself and turned it into a 16-bit game. Zelda 1 didn't actually need that many improvements because Miyamoto was still putting his hands on every single screen like a ruthless design dictator back then. But even there, you could improve certain empty areas (like the empty desert where absolutely nothing happens) simply by introducing interesting new designs and opportunities for interaction. What we're getting here, once again, is essentially just a graphical update. And I mean, graphically the game is really nice! But as always in games, graphics != fun. We already had a pure graphical update with Ocarina of Time 3D, so... did we really need yet another one? What happened to Nintendo only making a new game when they figure out featuring new ways to play? From a pure game design perspective, there was SO much more potential here, and I find it quite disappointing that Nintendo's designers apparently decided against really flexing their creative muscles. Any reasonably competent designer could've squeezed a lot more fun out of this simply by understanding what makes the Zelda formula work and then consistently questioning whether the moment-to-moment experience is actually enjoyable. If we're being honest with ourselves, Ocarina of Time these days is a solid 7.5–8/10 game whose design unfortunately doesn't quite measure up to its predecessors due to the technical limitations back then. Those limitations don't exist anymore, so why are we still getting those same old restricted designs? Back in 1998, you could overlook some of those shortcomings because the game was still an absolute bombshell thanks to innovations like Z-targeting and so on. It showed the entire industry where video games could go next in the same way Super Mario 64 did. But nowadays, all of that stuff has become the de-facto standard. So the main focus should've really been on the level design and the interplay between the overworld and the dungeons - and that's precisely where OoT is decidedly hit-and-miss. I genuinely wish the international gaming press had a better understanding of game design instead of largely behaving like a bunch of graphics whores. Giving Ocarina of Time a 10/10 for its design just goes to show that, unfortunately, a lot of games journalists don't really understand game design in the deep manner that they ought to in the first place. We've seen plenty of games after OoT that did terrains like that that kinda looked nice, but really didn't offer much fun. And sadly, nobody at Nintendo sought to address this issue when it's clear that they all understand how to do it better these days.