This was the first good video game I ever played as a kid. I played this game so many times I might honestly have the final cutscene memorized. It may have been the first 3d Zelda but I genuinely think it's the best traditional Zelda game. It has really great dungeons with the exception of 1 (I'll get to the Water Dungeon later). The exploration and puzzle solving in most of the dungeons is really fun and I'd recommend you don't do them with a guide. Not the Water Dungeon is bad, I wouldn't say it's because of the design but because of how many items you can have equipped at a time. Due to Nintendo forgetting the n64 had a d-pad for items such as the boots you'd have to go into the menu and then equip them manually. You can't put them on an item slot like any other item in the game meaning you'd have to go into the menu equip the iron boots and then go BACK into the menu to take them off once you're done using em. This leads to you spending half the dungeon time fucking around in the menu and it's a pain. But aside from one dungeon that could be easily fixed with mods or romhacks I'd say most of OOT is a banger that everyone should play

"This game is unbalanced". Now you can say this about any square game. But I think it goes double for Birth by Sleep in particular. Now let's just break it down on why this game isn't balanced. The command deck system isn't particularly balanced in any way. Now there's a lot of ways to make it unbalanced in your favor but I'm going to cover in ways it's not for this review. A lot of fights in this game expects you to have certain abilities such as second chance or once more (Which basically just make it so you don't get one shot or get combo'd to death before you can even react). The problem is that you can only get abilities from forging commands with a certain item and even then it's just random chance. And the way this game is paced makes it pretty likely that you'll probably miss these really important abilities unless you stop to grind it out until you get it. Fights such as the Zack vs Terra fight in the Colosseum starts off with Zack doing a super move that is pretty hard to dodge unless you do a shotlock because Terra has a pretty fair dodge in a game where it feels like 90% of the boss fights were designed around you having a super broken one. And getting hit at any time from Zack's super will probably kill you. This is even worse for the end game bosses especially for Terra. Again the game never really outright tells you how to get abilities like once more or second chance so it can be pretty missable even if you play and beat it as all 3 characters unless you have a guide that tells you a way to always get one of the 2 skills. For Ventus and Aqua this isn't a big deal. The devs gave these 2 dodges that give them 100% invincibility frames as long as they just mash dodge until an opening. But for Terra fights like the Zack are way harder than the devs probably meant them to be.