What does it mean to be the highest rated game of all time on Metacritic, why does it matter, and why has no game overtaken it? Ocarina of Time has many things in common with other games in Metacritic's top 10. Compared to the rest of the list, both Super Mario Galaxy games seem out of place until you consider the consistency, the more sensible nature of its world compared to other Mario titles. Why does Mario collect stars, why can penguins and bees talk? Because they're in space, that simple aesthetic theme is enough to tie everything together. Arcade action focused titles like Soul Calibur and Tony Hawk 2 seem out of place not just because they have today been utterly supplanted by sequels, but because they seem to "gamey" to stand among the rest, but there is something obvious about them; having come out so close to Ocarina of Time they are also among some of the earliest 3D games to feature realistically proportioned 3D human figures, in full 3D environments, with a playstyle and control scheme that was accessible for the time. As for what it means, we all know at this point that salaries and bonuses can be made conditional based on a product's Metacritic score, it's not a stretch then to the say that this score is every bit as representative of what the industry wishes to see in games as it is of the critic or consumer.
I read a post some time ago which read something to the effect of "how can we know whether we have a Citizen Kane of video games when we aren't even sure if we have a Citizen Kane of film?" I hate this perspective. Trying to remove the film from the real space that it occupies requires an assertion that I think anyone truly serious about film or art as a whole wouldn't dare make; it assumes a completely outdated classicist notion that there is simply a singular most true form of a particular medium. Citizen Kane is not a blueprint or a formula, and neither would the equivalent game be. It misses the trees for the forest. The significance of an influential work rarely lies in its whole rather than its parts, its individual effects and techniques. It barely matters if the whole is good, if it has aged well, if it was the first to pioneer these techniques (as both Kane and Ocarina surely were not). What matters is that it is a substantial source of inspiration from which the ongoing, repeated, shared art-ideology and understanding surrounding these techniques has been proliferated. Even logically the quote is obviously self-defeating on its face; Citizen Kane is a real movie that exists, and you have just twice used its name as shorthand for some concept, and that concept is the actual importance of the work.
Ocarina of Time's broad appeal is no surprise. While it largely skews towards a male audience (despite Link's appearance apparently being a deliberate attempt to attract more female players), it is an unmistakably all-ages power fantasy. For a child, the whimsy of the fantasy setting offers the initial draw, and the premise of growing up right away and being able to solve all the world's problems heightens things further. For an adult, the early portions of the game offer a return to a time when most people seemed good-natured, when problems seemed simple and rooted in singular evil-doers. From this perspective the latter half of the game takes on the form of a nostalgic retrofuture. The game goes on, you don't get quite as many new abilities as you once did. Songs stop giving you new powers, they just take you to places you've already been. The child player tries their best to hurtle towards the heroic finale, frustrated when they get stuck, disappointed when Link has to go back to being a kid. The adult relishes every minute of bombchu bowling, target practice, fishing, slowly exhausting each optional moment of retreat before truly running out of things to do and begrudgingly allowing the fantasy to end.
It's interesting how this game and others on the Nintendo 64 simply hang on an end screen after the credits, doing nothing more until the player hits either power or reset. Beating the game is not tracked, you don't get a new game plus, you don't get a little icon on the file select, you don't get to go back into a game-world without threat. On a technical level it's sort of obvious why, how did games end before save files even exist, after all? In Super Mario 64 the reward for doing everything isn't really the extra lives or the sparkly triple jump; as Yoshi says himself, the real reward is simply being able to freely play and explore the levels without worrying about things like progression or failure. When you beat Ocarina of Time you will simply be spat back into the world, and Ganon's tower still forever looms over Hyrule while you race your horse and sell masks. Structurally, seeing the credits is just a formality, a thing that you do more or less on the side for narrative payoff.
But just how strong is that narrative, really? I don't know, maybe my perspective on this is too warped for me to approach it honestly. Some of my very earliest memories are of watching my dad play this game, it is perhaps the single most fundamental piece of media to my early understanding of fantasy settings. I saw Gorons and Zoras before I knew what dwarves and elves were. The menu sounds are drilled into my ears, barely registering as a sound, tasting like water. I remember Volvagia looking like some bizarre writhing cheeto. I remember seeing the at-the-time incomprehensible whirling perspective of Hyrule Castle Town's ruins, a distorted extreme image of pure decay at vacuum pressure. I remember wondering what the materials of this world, its fabrics and glass, could possibly feel like. I remember thinking Ganon's tower having an almost sci-fi appearance, its shape and textures not unlike some of the imperial structures in Star Wars Rogue Squadron. I remember not being allowed to play the game until it came out on Wii virtual console because the great fairy was simply too risqué. Ocarina of Time has always been a simple fact of life.
Today the game's obstacles and encounters feel alarmingly simple, I feel like I'm spending most of my time with the game on autopilot. It's not just how much of the game I go through without really thinking about it, but how much of the game's systems feel as though they exist to aid in that very abandonment of thought. The shift to 3D aside, Ocarina often feels like a watered down version of Zelda, complete with training wheels (this is also not a terrible way to describe the way that Link handles here, but well get to that). As a kid, a game having these skeuomorphic onscreen representations of the buttons seemed almost monolithic; I remember the first time I saw the HUD in Minish Cap it felt sort of "high tech". Today I realize that I've have not even once played Ocarina with a Nintendo 64 controller, the onscreen prompts have never matched the buttons of the controller I actually use, I have always had to put together my own abstract mental index of what buttons are actually going to do what.
For all the pretense of adventure and exploration, the game's core progression is a rather tightly choreographed affair. There is little room for creativity and what little player expression is available through mechanical complexity doesn't actually offer any meaningful benefit or skill curve. You either know what to do, or you don't. It always struck me as odd that Nintendo made a big deal about Skyward Sword finally giving the player the ability control the direction of their sword swings, considering that this has literally always been a feature of 3D Zelda. A lone button press will perform a horizontal swing, either tilting the stick or locking on will result in vertical swings, and both at once will have Link stab (this is particularly interesting as it's basically the exact same concept and input as Devil May Cry's classic Stinger move). But again, none of these options in combat have any real meaning. In fact, the best thing to do in many situations is something completely unintended. In combat you should ideally perform a jumping slash and then follow it up with crouching stabs (the jump attack does the most damage, the crouching stab has no damage value and will just reuse the value from the previous attack). Similarly, the fastest way to get around the world is to lock the camera in place and walk backwards.
Something shocking about this game is just how non-threatening most combat encounters are. Wind Waker has the player fighting armed humanoid combatants pretty much as soon as they can hold a sword; Ocarina waits to offer a similar fight until about halfway through the second dungeon. The first enemy you find is just a stick, many enemies are obstacles that will only affect you if you don't bother to clear your path beforehand. Danger is generally extremely easy to avoid, and the Big Goron sword (a reward for a relatively easy trading quest) does so much damage that it trivializes almost any fight that can be fought with a blade. I do want to be clear that I don't mind this, frankly I wish games were a bit more content to be spaces first and gauntlets second when appropriate.
I was disappointed by just how little flavor text there is in the game, your mileage may vary in the sense that you may appreciate how little structural fat there is. Almost every piece of dialogue is some kind of direct gameplay hint, either tutorializing a mechanic, telling you where to go next, or hinting at a sidequest. The trading quest is a breath of fresh air not only because it has the player doing a lot more simple traversal, but also because it's one of the few points in the game where characters reveal things about themselves (though it's mostly just about family relations) other than what they think Link ought to go do. Just like the original Legend of Zelda, many of these gameplay hints are just barely obfuscated presumably either to try and retain immersion or to avoid admitting that the game just gives you all the quiz answers. The game won't tell you to use the eye of truth, it will just gesture towards the idea of "seeing what is true". It won't tell you to use bombs, it will tell you to use the "special Goron crop".
The titular ocarina, the music mechanic, is weird. After getting half a dozen songs that give the player simple but generally creative and unique abilities, the rest of the songs in the game are just fast travel spells. Playing a musical instrument is an interesting idea but in practice it has some tonal side effects. For example, being able to warp to Kakariko Village is useful for a number of sidequests, whether it's part of the trading sequence or you're just picking up a skulltula reward; these are low-stakes, comfy parts of the play session. The song that you use to fast travel here is associated with the Shadow Temple in the town's graveyard, so each time you travel here you have to play the most dour theme in the game. The opposite happens at the very end of the game, where any time you return to Ganon's tower you'll do so by playing one of the game's most lighthearted preludes to return to the nearby Temple of Time.
Epona is terrible. She gets stuck on every little corner of geometry and decides to just not jump fences half the time. I did the trading quest without her because she just isn't reliable enough to trust when the clock is ticking. People always make a big deal about how the horses in today's games aren't as directly controllable, they have a mind of their own like a real horse; between Epona and Super Mario 64's "fish that actually swim away", I'm starting to think that the entire industry has been playing catch-up with Nintendo's advanced animal AI.
I gave this game probably the best shot it's ever had on this playthrough, having gone through the PC port, finally playin the game with a framerate higher than film. An online friend of mine has said that this game has "perfect" movement. I don't agree in the slightest but what is interesting about the port is that playing the game with decent performance, for the first time ever Ocarina of Time actually has appreciable movement and discernable gamefeel at all. On the original code the frames last so long enough that it's hard to judge what's happening between them, the illusion of motion honestly frequently breaks, and small adjustments are a complete gamble. At a higher framerate you realize that Link is actually only able to smoothly make rather wide turns or completely rotate in an instant, and it's exponentially worse when walking underwater with the iron boots. Because of the apparent issues with literally every official port of the game since the original, this is the first time I've played the game without an over-sensitive analogue stick. All these years later it's still absurd to me that the normal way of using Z-targeting as it appears in all other Zelda games is an option that you have to toggle.
Majora's Mask is better in basically every way besides that fact that there's still not really a good way to play it with good framerate. It's structure is better, the way it handles its story and ending is better, its character dialogue has so much more flavor that I barely even see the Ocarina of Time versions of the NPC's as the "original" or "canon" versions of the characters. By Comparison Ocarina almost feels like some kind of shallow fanmade romhack. And Majora's Mask has monkeys. I like monkey a lot.
I read a post some time ago which read something to the effect of "how can we know whether we have a Citizen Kane of video games when we aren't even sure if we have a Citizen Kane of film?" I hate this perspective. Trying to remove the film from the real space that it occupies requires an assertion that I think anyone truly serious about film or art as a whole wouldn't dare make; it assumes a completely outdated classicist notion that there is simply a singular most true form of a particular medium. Citizen Kane is not a blueprint or a formula, and neither would the equivalent game be. It misses the trees for the forest. The significance of an influential work rarely lies in its whole rather than its parts, its individual effects and techniques. It barely matters if the whole is good, if it has aged well, if it was the first to pioneer these techniques (as both Kane and Ocarina surely were not). What matters is that it is a substantial source of inspiration from which the ongoing, repeated, shared art-ideology and understanding surrounding these techniques has been proliferated. Even logically the quote is obviously self-defeating on its face; Citizen Kane is a real movie that exists, and you have just twice used its name as shorthand for some concept, and that concept is the actual importance of the work.
Ocarina of Time's broad appeal is no surprise. While it largely skews towards a male audience (despite Link's appearance apparently being a deliberate attempt to attract more female players), it is an unmistakably all-ages power fantasy. For a child, the whimsy of the fantasy setting offers the initial draw, and the premise of growing up right away and being able to solve all the world's problems heightens things further. For an adult, the early portions of the game offer a return to a time when most people seemed good-natured, when problems seemed simple and rooted in singular evil-doers. From this perspective the latter half of the game takes on the form of a nostalgic retrofuture. The game goes on, you don't get quite as many new abilities as you once did. Songs stop giving you new powers, they just take you to places you've already been. The child player tries their best to hurtle towards the heroic finale, frustrated when they get stuck, disappointed when Link has to go back to being a kid. The adult relishes every minute of bombchu bowling, target practice, fishing, slowly exhausting each optional moment of retreat before truly running out of things to do and begrudgingly allowing the fantasy to end.
It's interesting how this game and others on the Nintendo 64 simply hang on an end screen after the credits, doing nothing more until the player hits either power or reset. Beating the game is not tracked, you don't get a new game plus, you don't get a little icon on the file select, you don't get to go back into a game-world without threat. On a technical level it's sort of obvious why, how did games end before save files even exist, after all? In Super Mario 64 the reward for doing everything isn't really the extra lives or the sparkly triple jump; as Yoshi says himself, the real reward is simply being able to freely play and explore the levels without worrying about things like progression or failure. When you beat Ocarina of Time you will simply be spat back into the world, and Ganon's tower still forever looms over Hyrule while you race your horse and sell masks. Structurally, seeing the credits is just a formality, a thing that you do more or less on the side for narrative payoff.
But just how strong is that narrative, really? I don't know, maybe my perspective on this is too warped for me to approach it honestly. Some of my very earliest memories are of watching my dad play this game, it is perhaps the single most fundamental piece of media to my early understanding of fantasy settings. I saw Gorons and Zoras before I knew what dwarves and elves were. The menu sounds are drilled into my ears, barely registering as a sound, tasting like water. I remember Volvagia looking like some bizarre writhing cheeto. I remember seeing the at-the-time incomprehensible whirling perspective of Hyrule Castle Town's ruins, a distorted extreme image of pure decay at vacuum pressure. I remember wondering what the materials of this world, its fabrics and glass, could possibly feel like. I remember thinking Ganon's tower having an almost sci-fi appearance, its shape and textures not unlike some of the imperial structures in Star Wars Rogue Squadron. I remember not being allowed to play the game until it came out on Wii virtual console because the great fairy was simply too risqué. Ocarina of Time has always been a simple fact of life.
Today the game's obstacles and encounters feel alarmingly simple, I feel like I'm spending most of my time with the game on autopilot. It's not just how much of the game I go through without really thinking about it, but how much of the game's systems feel as though they exist to aid in that very abandonment of thought. The shift to 3D aside, Ocarina often feels like a watered down version of Zelda, complete with training wheels (this is also not a terrible way to describe the way that Link handles here, but well get to that). As a kid, a game having these skeuomorphic onscreen representations of the buttons seemed almost monolithic; I remember the first time I saw the HUD in Minish Cap it felt sort of "high tech". Today I realize that I've have not even once played Ocarina with a Nintendo 64 controller, the onscreen prompts have never matched the buttons of the controller I actually use, I have always had to put together my own abstract mental index of what buttons are actually going to do what.
For all the pretense of adventure and exploration, the game's core progression is a rather tightly choreographed affair. There is little room for creativity and what little player expression is available through mechanical complexity doesn't actually offer any meaningful benefit or skill curve. You either know what to do, or you don't. It always struck me as odd that Nintendo made a big deal about Skyward Sword finally giving the player the ability control the direction of their sword swings, considering that this has literally always been a feature of 3D Zelda. A lone button press will perform a horizontal swing, either tilting the stick or locking on will result in vertical swings, and both at once will have Link stab (this is particularly interesting as it's basically the exact same concept and input as Devil May Cry's classic Stinger move). But again, none of these options in combat have any real meaning. In fact, the best thing to do in many situations is something completely unintended. In combat you should ideally perform a jumping slash and then follow it up with crouching stabs (the jump attack does the most damage, the crouching stab has no damage value and will just reuse the value from the previous attack). Similarly, the fastest way to get around the world is to lock the camera in place and walk backwards.
Something shocking about this game is just how non-threatening most combat encounters are. Wind Waker has the player fighting armed humanoid combatants pretty much as soon as they can hold a sword; Ocarina waits to offer a similar fight until about halfway through the second dungeon. The first enemy you find is just a stick, many enemies are obstacles that will only affect you if you don't bother to clear your path beforehand. Danger is generally extremely easy to avoid, and the Big Goron sword (a reward for a relatively easy trading quest) does so much damage that it trivializes almost any fight that can be fought with a blade. I do want to be clear that I don't mind this, frankly I wish games were a bit more content to be spaces first and gauntlets second when appropriate.
I was disappointed by just how little flavor text there is in the game, your mileage may vary in the sense that you may appreciate how little structural fat there is. Almost every piece of dialogue is some kind of direct gameplay hint, either tutorializing a mechanic, telling you where to go next, or hinting at a sidequest. The trading quest is a breath of fresh air not only because it has the player doing a lot more simple traversal, but also because it's one of the few points in the game where characters reveal things about themselves (though it's mostly just about family relations) other than what they think Link ought to go do. Just like the original Legend of Zelda, many of these gameplay hints are just barely obfuscated presumably either to try and retain immersion or to avoid admitting that the game just gives you all the quiz answers. The game won't tell you to use the eye of truth, it will just gesture towards the idea of "seeing what is true". It won't tell you to use bombs, it will tell you to use the "special Goron crop".
The titular ocarina, the music mechanic, is weird. After getting half a dozen songs that give the player simple but generally creative and unique abilities, the rest of the songs in the game are just fast travel spells. Playing a musical instrument is an interesting idea but in practice it has some tonal side effects. For example, being able to warp to Kakariko Village is useful for a number of sidequests, whether it's part of the trading sequence or you're just picking up a skulltula reward; these are low-stakes, comfy parts of the play session. The song that you use to fast travel here is associated with the Shadow Temple in the town's graveyard, so each time you travel here you have to play the most dour theme in the game. The opposite happens at the very end of the game, where any time you return to Ganon's tower you'll do so by playing one of the game's most lighthearted preludes to return to the nearby Temple of Time.
Epona is terrible. She gets stuck on every little corner of geometry and decides to just not jump fences half the time. I did the trading quest without her because she just isn't reliable enough to trust when the clock is ticking. People always make a big deal about how the horses in today's games aren't as directly controllable, they have a mind of their own like a real horse; between Epona and Super Mario 64's "fish that actually swim away", I'm starting to think that the entire industry has been playing catch-up with Nintendo's advanced animal AI.
I gave this game probably the best shot it's ever had on this playthrough, having gone through the PC port, finally playin the game with a framerate higher than film. An online friend of mine has said that this game has "perfect" movement. I don't agree in the slightest but what is interesting about the port is that playing the game with decent performance, for the first time ever Ocarina of Time actually has appreciable movement and discernable gamefeel at all. On the original code the frames last so long enough that it's hard to judge what's happening between them, the illusion of motion honestly frequently breaks, and small adjustments are a complete gamble. At a higher framerate you realize that Link is actually only able to smoothly make rather wide turns or completely rotate in an instant, and it's exponentially worse when walking underwater with the iron boots. Because of the apparent issues with literally every official port of the game since the original, this is the first time I've played the game without an over-sensitive analogue stick. All these years later it's still absurd to me that the normal way of using Z-targeting as it appears in all other Zelda games is an option that you have to toggle.
Majora's Mask is better in basically every way besides that fact that there's still not really a good way to play it with good framerate. It's structure is better, the way it handles its story and ending is better, its character dialogue has so much more flavor that I barely even see the Ocarina of Time versions of the NPC's as the "original" or "canon" versions of the characters. By Comparison Ocarina almost feels like some kind of shallow fanmade romhack. And Majora's Mask has monkeys. I like monkey a lot.