This game was one of my most hyped up games as a kid next to Sonic Adventure 2. And unfortunately playing it all these years later for the first time it just didn't live up to the hype. I wish it did but the central gimmick to this game being the boat just really bogs it down. A lot of my playtime was just surfing around from place to place which wasn't particularly interesting especially since this game doesn't actually have a way to majorly speed up the sailing. The way they handled collectibles in this also just hammers in the sailing being boring home. In past zelda games you'd do a puzzle or find a secret and would be rewarded with something such as a heart piece but here? Well here they just hand you a map of the location of your reward and you have to go pick it up. It really just delays the satisfaction of getting your reward and I can't say I'm a fan. Filling out the map also isn't really fun either, you have to pay a LOT of bait. Then you have to go to each map tile find the map fish, feed him the bait and finally fill out your map. This gets really tedious considering how many times you have to do this and I kinda wish the map would fill out by itself once you just landed on the island contained in that map tile. Will give credit where it's due though and must say this games artstyle RULES. Not sure why it was slammed back in the day but this is one of the best looking Zelda games to date and I still think it's gorgeous today. Also the dungeons in this game are all really fun to get through I really just wish there was more of them. Basically, I loved when this game decided to be a normal zelda game but was really bored and disappointed by it for most of it's run.

"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.

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