There’s an initial wave of disappointment here when you realise it’s mostly a value-rebased model/sprite/palette/layout swap of the retail Ocarina of Time rom, but that quickly gives way to a discovery that there’s been significant-enough fuckery with Link’s movement options and item pool to make this worth playing for way more than 10 minutes.

Only True OoTHeads will care about ideas like “what if you could manually control Link’s jump attack with two button presses?” or the ability to passively block while still running, but for those of us who know this game like the Triforce on the back of our hand, it’s just neat to have manual oversight of things like whether Link carries his shield in his off-hand or on his back. I ended up spending a hell of a lot more time just doing the classic Forest Temple Stalfos fight with the new (old, I mean…) control scheme than actually visiting beta map layouts of Kokiri Forest.

Would love for this mod team to refine Beta Link’s handling a bit and then stick him and his new magic spells into the v1.0 finished product for some kind of Ocarina of Time: Professional Edition hack that challenges your ability to make use of these refined gameplay raiments. Why wasn’t this stuff in the final game already, I wonder? I can only guess that Nintendo wanted to simplify things for players of all abilities, at the expense of some finesse that veterans of the 3D Zeldas would no doubt love to have back now. Kinda ironic that an attempt at niche nerd nostalgia for a prototype that was too rough to release ends up feeling like a natural forward progression of the final release candidate… Makes you wonder what wonders we could find in the uberblocky/janky Zelda 64 build.

Also just incredibly pleasant to have a debug menu that lets you load between N64 Hyrule vistas in a matter of seconds. I got to walk around the Chamber of Sages and talk to them! Wild horses roam free on the fields! Awesome!! Check it out!!!