Final Fantasy VII: Remake is exactly what it had to be, nothing less, and definitely not anything more.

With Crisis Core's recent remaster coming out, I had a couple of thoughts:

A: I first played Crisis Core before I first played FFVII. Now that it's been long enough that I've forgotten a lot of the particulars, maybe I should play the games in release order this time.

And B: maybe I should try to make some more progress in the remake...

The first ten hours or so are kind of incredible, but it gets old quick. Around the time I got to Wall Market I would play the game for about an hour, drop it for a few months, repeat. I did not play the game at all for the entirety of 2022, I played it for 3 hours on New Years Day 2023. I stopped playing just as the game dropped me off in another side-quest hub, and I'm not particularly eager to pick it back up.

To start with a positive, the soundtrack is very good; not just in the obvious sense that these are well-written songs, well-loved songs that we're all predisposed to like, but that the way they're handled in game is very effective. The way that many songs have multiple versions that weave together, in and out, as the tension of the immediate moment of gameplay demands. Ramping up as combat starts, settling back down as the smoke settles. Despite these kinds of techniques having been possible in games for decades I can think of very few examples of it being done this gracefully.

The game probably is the best "mainline" big Final Fantasy game in quite some time, maybe the best since IX (though I don't feel qualified to say this definitively because I haven't seen the credits of most of those games), but I think that says more about the games that have come out in the meantime than it does about this one. For better or worse there's a lot about this game that has been carried over from more recent entries in the series, whether it's XV's loading crawlspaces or XIII's crystarium. Most of the more positive aspects of this game clearly come from the simple fact that it is a game we like; these are characters we're already attached to, the materia system is one we all understand and have already decided decades ago is good, everything that makes this game enjoyable is a known quantity. We don't look forward and wonder "what" will happen next, we just wonder "how".

The combat is genuinely terrible, putting more "action" in Final Fantasy games was always a mistake and I'm tired of pretending it's not. This is bad. Barely halfway through the game mega-potions are the only restoratives that give you a meaningful amount of health, and enemies will perfectly lock on, hound you down, and cut your health in half with one attack. You'll go into the menu to use a potion and get killed before your animation goes through. You'll go into the menu to use an ability and get knocked back, wasting your AP. I'm tired of people saying that a game making you "feel" like you're doing something, whether it's in gameplay or in narrative choices, is actually anywhere near as valuable as giving you genuine agency: it is not. Being able to press a button to swing your sword, to block, to dodge, none of these have actually improved on Final Fantasy VII's combat, they've just catered to morons who have no brains or patience. Between a traditional turn-based/ATB system or pure hack-n-slash, this is the worst of both worlds.

The game sure does look nice. There's all kinds of sparkly effects flying all over the place every time you attack. Everyone's eyes look so pretty. But ya' know what doesn't look nice? Midgar. Hoo, boy! I am so tired of looking at Midgar. Midgar only works because it's the first part of a larger game, the fact that after a few hours of prerendered concrete and steel beams you're let out into the 3D greenery of the overworld, but you don't get that here. You get 30 or so hours of metal and dirt, and you gotta wait a few years for the rest. The plate drop segment loses all of its urgency because it's multiple chapters long, I just don't buy it. Virtually every addition that they've made to pad out the narrative feels like bad anime filler. I hate that the game still has to lean on the rest of the original, playing the main theme in town, playing jazz versions of songs on radios. It robs each element of Final Fantasy VII of its context, it cheapens both this installment and the next.

Somehow by bringing the game into the 21st century, with these fully realized, detailed 3D environments, they've only made it feel even more incongruous than the original. On the PlayStation, where the disparity in detail and style is obvious, I can accept these things, I can take them for what they represent. On the PlayStation 4, all of these elements beg to be taken at face value, and it just doesn't gel together. The voice acting is far from bad, and nobody is as annoying as some of the characters from X or XIII, but adding this additional complexity to the game's presentation opens so many doors for awkward moments; whether it's chatter in gameplay that repeats a little too often, or lines that could probably work but just get delivered a bit weird, or the timing of the line disrupts the conversational rhythm (even "you owe me a pizza" could work if it weren't for this).

I feel like I should like this less than I do, there's a lot of bullshit, but these are things I know. I clapped when I saw Sephiroth.

I sure picked up some garbage, huh?

The game is successful at replicating the experience of being a kid alone in a theme park, perhaps more accurately than Universal may have liked. The obtuse inner workings and unclear objectives of the game, combined with the disorienting fixed camera angles, come together to vividly remind me of the time me and my little brother got separated from our grandpa at Silver Dollar City's Geyser Gulch. Waterworld consists of 5 FMV's, each mere seconds long, each showing the same animated scene from different angles, truly serving up the classic amusement park experience of "uh, that's it?" Seemingly random crowds and wandering NPC's will block you as you aimlessly stumble around, and at any given moment at least half of the rides will be unavailable because of the long lines. There's even an NPC a few hundred yards into the park who tells you that you should have grabbed a map while you were at the entrance, and now you need to go back.

I've seen videos wherein people note a lack of "design" but I think the logic here was pretty clear. If you're making a game about a theme park, you want the rides to be the big exciting set-pieces; if you want to convey the scale of the park, to have a large detailed environment, how do you accomplish that while leaving enough space on the disc for the stuff that really counts? You make it pre-rendered, of course, and because it's pre-rendered that means you can use the rest of your rendering budget on character models and sprites to give the (paper thin) impression of bustling crowds. Why do you pick up trash? For the same reason barrels and rupees spontaneously rise from the sea in Wind Waker, to give the player something to do during what would otherwise be mere traversal. Why are the objectives so obscure? Why are the mini-games so hard? Why is the layout of the park so indecipherable? Why are half the rides too crowded to access at any given time? Why, it's the oldest trick in the book, it's just to pad the game out and make it take longer to beat.

One of the game's 8 major objectives is passing a movie trivia quiz given by Winnie Woodpecker. Every other question is about some completely inconsequential detail of a movie nobody cares about; I have never heard a single human being talk about the film "Backdraft", I have never seen a single person online talk about it outside of the context of this game. The rest are at least about movies that people have actually seen, but the specific aspects you're being quizzed on are so minute that I think literally nobody will get through this without some trial an error. The only text guide I could find for this game was no help, it literally just says "the questions repeat, so just write the correct answer down". I failed this quiz over a dozen times and rarely if ever saw a repeat question, there must be hundreds of them. When you fail, the way that Winnie says "you need to watch more movies" in a peculiar tone of voice. You would think it's like when a friend says "you need to check this out", but it's not, it's much more muted, clerical, a simple requirement. It doesn't feel like part of the "game", it feels like an oldschool PC game's copy protection asking me to find the 17th letter on the 13th page of a manual that I don't have.

This game came out barely a month after the GameCube's launch, and it sure feels like it. Between the muddy, flat textures, simple models, and eye-piercing "graphic design is my passion" text, it feels more like Nintendo 64 backwash than a new generation. The anime-styled character models of the player and NPC's are probably the most visually appealing aspect of the game. The characters are in this style because this was developed in Japan by a studio that seemingly only made this game and nothing else (though a look at MobyGames shows some number of the development staff went on to do things like environments and animations for companies like Square Enix and Hudson). Universal Studios Japan opened near the beginning of the same year that this came out. The game prominently features on both it's box and in-game a disclaimer that the game is not necessarily an accurate representation of the park, and it seems that this is because the selection of attractions more closely resembles the Japan location. Knowing that this a third party game released so early in the system's life, and a tie-in game likely meant to coincide with the opening of the park, I imagine the unimpressive presentation is a consequence of these factors.

The main attractions, the mini-games, aren't that bad, but they aren't that good. Back to the Future controls fine enough and is a visual spectacle, but it does still feel like it could have been done on N64, and the time limit is too strict (I have no idea how someone could get the higher rank on this, it requires having a full 30 seconds left over). Someone else on here said ET is worse than ET on 2600, which is a little mean. The trick (as explained by a random NPC in the park) is to always land your bike's back tire, meaning you should never ever tilt the analogue stick to the right; once you know this, it's fine. Jurassic Park is a mediocre rail shooter. Like BttF you don't have much room for error, and while the reticle is accurate for targeting your homing missiles, it doesn't line up with your rapid fire shots at all.

Backdraft might be the longest and most fully featured mini-game of the bunch (this attraction is still open in the real-life park in Japan, was that movie just a massive hit over there or what?), and in some ways it's pretty cool. It's like a firefighting take on Luigi's Mansion, though the control scheme is nowhere near as intuitive. You shoot with the A button, and while shooting you rotate with the analogue stick and move with the D-pad, though this is mostly workable. The main issue is one common in games with fixed camera angles: when the screen transitions, your character's movement direction won't change, they'll continue to move according to their rotation relative to the previous camera angle until you completely release the stick, at which point the directions are realigned with the camera. If you've played something like one of the old Devil May Cry's or Resident Evil's from this era without tank controls, you know what to expect here.

Jaws isn't particularly great, but at least if you've read the manual it's pretty easy. Most videos I've seen of the game show the player throwing barrels at the shark, but you're actually supposed to throw the boxes at the boat's cabin to break them. Inside the boxes are various items, the most valuable of which is a stick of dynamite that can take out half of the shark's health in a single hit; there's also a bottle item that doesn't do much damage but appears to have unlimited ammo. I haven't done the Wild Wild Wild West mini-game yet, though I think my patience with the game may have reached its limit.

The last of the main 8 challenges is collected hidden letters throughout the park, eventually spelling out "Universal Studios". Between these, the random trash you can pick up for points, and just trying to figure out where you character ended up on-screen between each camera angle transition, there's a good bit of pixel hunting. It's rarely much worse than looking for items in games like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy on PS1, but it's not particularly fun.

I was surprised going back to this how, uh, not impossible it was. As a kid I could barely make any progress in this at all, I thought the mini-games were impossible, I thought the caps were so expensive that I could never reasonably afford them. As an adult the game is certainly not good, it's tedious, it's boring, but it is playable. I thought there was almost literally no reason to talk to NPC's, though there is a sidequest you can find where a character has lost her phone. You can find it ringing on a bench and bring it back to her. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any other moments like this in the game, but it is at least interesting that there are any little touches like this at all.

This is some strong, distilled, pure Video Game in a way that I didn't think Sonic Team had in them.

At first glance the abstract platforms and rails floating above each hub level feel odd, almost like a test level. I found this feeling subsided rather quickly, the abstraction instead serving to give the game a much more consistent visual language than other recent entries, and the wide spaces giving the player much more opportunity to anticipate hazards. Very few obstacles feel cheap in the way that many sections did in previous "boost" games, not only due to the differences in level design, in structure (small sections, quick reloads), but because Sonic's moveset allows for so much more correction. Not only does Sonic have a double jump (with the homing attack moved to a separate button), but boosting in midair will also give him some extra height instead of propelling him directly forward. Levels feel like actual spaces instead of completely automated rollercoasters, you can just reverse direction to pick up an item you missed, even when rail grinding if you're careful.

Comparisons to Breath of the Wild or Unreal "hire this man" demos feel sort of disingenuous even if the resemblance is undeniable; the game is borrowing so many elements from so many sources that it seems kind of telling to fixate on this particular most surface level aspect. Eiji Aonuma didn't invent grassland, but Shigeru Miyamoto did invent purple coins though, and Hideaki Anno invented big robots with teeth (these are true facts, no need to verify).

The pop-in issues mostly affect the small platforming challenges scattered around each hub area. I didn't really find the pop-in detracting from the moment-to-moment platforming, though there is another issue. Many of the "islands" are more like archipelagos, which is to say they aren't a single continuous landmass. A lot of the time, in order to reach another area of the game world, you'll need to use one of these discrete platforming challenges as a bridge. Sometimes it's difficult to tell if a far off area is inaccessible, or if you just haven't gotten close enough for the rail that will take you there to load in.

Many of these short platforming sections will lock the camera into a set angle, often effectively turning the game 2.5D for a time. This can leave the player unable to freely move through the level until they complete the challenge; this wasn't a serious issue for most of the game, but the third hub world in particular began to test my patience. I found myself getting looped back into the same handful of challenges in order to move between certain parts of the island, and the more jagged, unnatural environment compared to the other zones made these moments feel rather awkward. At points it honestly reminded me of the Getting Over It easter egg in Just Cause 4.

Starfall, this game's equivalent of Breath of the Wild's bloodmoon, is genius. In the dark of night, led by pillars of light, the player is encouraged to mindlessly chase these sparkles. It's not just plain good base fun, a complete sugar rush, it encourages the player to stop really paying attention to their surrounding and get lost. Lose your sense of direction in this game where both traversal itself is intrinsically fun and where transit time from one place to another is so short that getting yourself a bit turned around and disoriented is nothing but a plus. Not to mention it completely distracts the player from the (disappointing, in my opinion) fact that the "real" reason this is happening is to respawn all the enemies you killed. And this is before we consider the actual reward for taking part.

Every time starfall happens is an opportunity to potentially get hundreds upon hundreds of the coins required to play the fishing mini-game. Spend the coins to catch fish, trade fish for a different kind of coin, spend those coins in a shop. You can buy small experience boosts or upgrade items, you can buy short audio-logs for a little extra lore, or you can buy any major collectable in the game. I was excited for an open world Sonic game, I was not excited to play more boost levels, and it turns out I didn't really have to. I didn't play a single cyberspace stage in the final hub world, I fished my way to the end, and had a great time.

The story is fun, the characters are great, the soundtrack is fantastic. I don't even mind that it takes literal years to upgrade your speed and ring capacity, one level at a time, because the song that plays when you talk to the relevant NPC is so good. Pop-in aside the game is gorgeous, the last couple of islands being just plain jaw dropping.

I'll be honest, while Sonic's moveset is improved here, this is still not my favorite collection of platform mechanics, and with however many hundreds of wallruns and railgrinds and puzzle minigames you're going to be asked to do there's sure to be some duds. If you want all killer, no filler, pure platforming action, you're better off checking out Spark the Electric Jester if you haven't. But this is the best big budget scrimblo bimblo collectathon from a company not called "Nintendo" in the past decade, not that that's a category with a terrible lot of competition.

Bayonetta 3 gave me everything I could have asked for, but it turns out that wasn't really what I wanted.

One of the biggest problems I've always had with this type of game ("character action", "spectacle fighter", whatever) is that the stories tend to be very self contained, everything feels like a bottle episode, the stakes feel low, and the events of the story have little impact on any overarching narrative. Bayonetta 3 is not like this. Bayonetta 3 ostensibly contains 4 separate bottle episodes, a few miniature action game snowglobes, inside of its own story. The variety keeps things fresh, and without getting too deep into spoiler territory, there are definitely lasting effects that will be felt in any potential future installment.

Something disappointing about previous Bayonetta games in particular is that there weren't very many "real" levels in each of them. Many levels were just a boss fight, or some gimmick sequence. Here, all 12 of the core chapters before the grand finale are real levels with a substantial amount of exploration and secrets. Hidden verses are both easier to find (having clear visual indicators) and more interesting to search for. Obviously gimmick segments and multiphase super-bosses still exist, but they'll be sandwiched in between more traditional gameplay.

The demon summoning is by far the most significant shift in gameplay from the previous titles. For one thing it has quite the effect on the level design; in order to allow these characters to fit, the levels are huge, and in order to make these huge levels feel less empty, they're full of optional challenges. I often thought while playing Bayonetta 2 that I'd like more of the "collect the 5 chest pieces" challenges, or that I'd like more platforming sections while playing the Revengeance DLC's. I feel rather safe saying that they went overboard here. It's very easy to beat your head against a particularly tricky optional challenge only for your reward to be a single basic health restore or a lore book. I collected a number of well-hidden items throughout several levels of the game and my reward was a fight with a boss from Bayonetta 2, which I guess was cool, but not cool enough to keep so well hidden.

Something I first noticed when playing Xenoblade X is that the way we interpret scale is kind of limited by the platform we're playing on. Once we've played enough games on a particular machine, we know what environments look like. Basically, a small high-detail environment and a large low-detail environment are essentially the same thing. If a game is trying to create a sense of scale, it has to be really careful with how it manages to do that. In both Xenoblade X and Bayonetta 3, I don't feel like a normal sized character in a large space, I feel like a tiny character in a normal-sized space.

Viola is a really fun character, both in terms of how she's written and performed, and in terms of how she controls. Unfortunately I often get the sense that she isn't really meant for this enemy roster. Instead of dodging, she activates witch time with parries. Many enemies in this game either deliberately keep their distance, frequently use grab attacks, or just completely whiff their swings at the close range that Viola's moveset encourages. I found nearly all of the optional verses on my first playthrough, and most of the ones I did not complete were Viola fights that I attempted and gave up on.

One of my very few problems with Devil May Cry 5 is how frequently the game has you switch between the three characters, there isn't really a good way to go through the story and stay in mechanical rhythm. Bayonetta 3 also has this, though at the very least Jeanne's side-scrolling segments are both quite fun, a good change of pace, an excellent palette-cleanser to end or begin a session on, and are narratively self-contained enough to be easily glossed over on repeat playthroughs. Switching between Cereza and Viola however is not something I think I'll ever look forward to when going back through this game's core missions, even if each character is more or less fine on their own.

The core concept of the story seems interesting at first. Bayonetta takes place in a universe of light and dark, where perception is reality, and Bayonetta 3 shows us that there are as many parallel universes, as many realities, as there are eyes. The villain being a singularity, tearing through the multiverse not necessarily to destroy it exactly, but to enforce a singular truth, is a very good start that the game does not do justice at all. Again, trying to avoid any specific spoilers, I genuinely think that the way the game handles its characters towards the end completely undermines its apparent anti-determinist themes. Though, to be honest, it seems clear that trying to think about the end of this game in those terms is a complete fools errand.

Jubileus was the kind of final boss that showed up in "Top Ten Bosses of All Time" lists, by comparison Loptr was a bit underwhelming. I want to give Platinum at least a little credit by assuming that the final boss of Bayonetta 3 is the result of overcorrection, but even then it is not good. It drags on, it's not fun, it's not satisfying, it doesn't make any sense, and the nonsense that it makes isn't even fun nonsense.

After beating Bayonetta 1 and 2, I immediately wanted to play them again on a harder difficulty. After beating Bayonetta 3, I have a feeling if I play it again any time soon it will be on the casual mode.

Airblade has some tricks up its sleeve, but doesn't quite stick the landing.

Airblade is a Tony Hawk knock off with a science fiction setting. The titular airblade is a hoverboard powered by anti-gravity, a product of clean energy research. The dystopian corporate overlords want to destroy the airblade, and the experimental anti-gravity technology along with it, so they can continue profiting off of fossil fuels.

The idea of a skateboarding game with no gravity presents some interesting ideas. No gravity means no gaining momentum from downward slopes, your default movement speed is quite slow. Generally in this kind of game you would build up speed, and then start tricking and try to maintain your speed in order to keep balance while you do your moves. Here, you do tricks in order to build and maintain a boost meter. The game does still have combos and scoring, so tricks still have most of their typical purpose intact, though the way you keep pace with the level has certainly changed. The fact that your hoverboard is never actually touching the ground but your combos and trick options are still affected by whether or not you have "big air" does obfuscate things a little. Generally you get a good sense of speed and control, though player expression is not as fully featured as in a typical skating game as "grab" tricks no longer involve grabbing the board, but instead are for grabbing objects in the environment to swing from them.

Each level presents you with some number of objectives, and while they have some kind of narrative explanation for why you're doing what you do, the mechanics are generally 1:1 with Pro Skater; grind on 3 of these, swing off 5 of those, if you run out of time it's game over. One of your partner characters will always verbally direct you to a particular set of objectives at the start, and an arrow at the top of the screen will always point towards a single target. Despite this you are able to do most objectives in whatever order you please, though not all of them will populate the map until some number have been completed. The exit won't open until you've done everything. Generally speaking I would say the core mechanics are much easier than Tony Hawk. Since the airblade is never actually touching the ground, very few tricks can be messed up badly enough to result in a wipeout, and balancing during grinds is borderline trivial.

However, the fact that you absolutely need to do everything in the level in order to progress makes a world of a difference. In Pro Skater, the "perfect run" was primarily a self-imposed challenge, here it's mandatory to progress. Many skateparks have some tedious or obtuse tasks that can be skipped over once the player has done enough to move on, not so here. Almost every level ends with some ridiculous leap of faith combo string where you have to do a specific sequence of grinds and swings in order to reach the borderline inaccessible highest point of the map. If you know what you're doing, this game's main story mode can be beaten in barely 15 minutes, but on your first playthrough your definitely will not know what you're doing.

The fifth level, the last normal one, is just flatly evil. The level takes place on several sky scraping rooftops, with an instant death bottomless pit below. Several objectives involve hopping from building to building, grinding on precarious rails to knock things down into the void. The first objective you are directed towards is to knock four cable cars off their rail; the first and last time that you do this, the game goes into slow motion and the camera angle changes, and you just have to hope and pray that you've pressed the right buttons for the right amount of time to land back on the rail when the camera repositions itself.

It's moments like that which will make you appreciate how well put together Airblade is as a piece of software. Load times are short, quicksaving is unobtrusive, and reloading a level from the pause menu is virtually instant (which is good, because in the later levels you'll probably be doing this a lot). Performance is excellent, visuals are mostly effective for the purpose of communicating aspects of gameplay; the only exception is the character models, which are all a bit dark, making it difficult to distinguish enemies from the small crowds of NPCs that often surround them.

The audiovisual aesthetic is great. After just one half-hour session with the game I had every song I heard stuck in my head all week, I feel like these songs have always been there. To be fair these aren't the most original compositions in the world, and some pretty common samples are featured, but it's solid tunes. The menus are just plain slick. Characters are about what you would expect for early 00's, which is exactly what I want to see. I love it when a businessman in a trenchcoat says he's going to "bust in cap in your ass" to someone who wouldn't look out of place in Cubix.

The most disappointing thing about the game is that we don't really see much like this anymore. Aside from being an obvious attempt to leech off the success of a much larger franchise, this is a very well thought out original concept in terms of how the mechanics and narrative fit together and how it differentiates itself from its competitors. But franchises are where the money is at so all that Criterion can do now is either their signature style of racing or development support on whatever EA's next microtransaction machine is going to be.

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.