I finally completed Ocarina of Time. And only nearly 9 years after it was released. The largest weight on my games backlog has now been lifted. I'm FRIGGIN' FREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Oh, and I'm keeping Ryan Davis' email in my inbox as a souvenir. (If you're clueless, see blog entry below.)
Why did I only just finish Ocarina of Time, reputed to be one of the greatest games ever made?
I actually never owned a Nintendo 64 back in its heyday. I first laid my hands on my own console in early 2002, and the game I was spending time on was F-Zero X. It was a quick pick-up-and-play game that I could play to accompany my sessions of Gamecube and PC games. I owned neither The Legend of Zelda N64 series nor Super Mario 64, as they seemed like daunting tasks that I just wouldn't get to complete with the ferocity they required because I was awaiting Metroid Prime (which, in and of itself, was a daunting task that I wouldn't complete for two years after I started to pursue it).
Sometime around 2004, I got myself the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition - the disc that packaged in The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: Adventure of Link, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Being the senile nut for old 2D gameplay that I am, I just started spamming away at Zelda II before forgetting about it a few days later. I went back to my other Gamecube games, and started trying to find my way around the horribly loopy first castle area of Wind Waker.
At some point I realized that I'd been shunning Ocarina of Time unjustly. It just kinda sat there on my shelf, crying a little and maybe even bawling. I believe it was around February of last year that I decided - dammit - that it was time to play this thing and finish it, especially in light of the impending release of Twilight Princess.
It's taken me nearly 12 months of on-and-off playing to complete mostly because I found it somewhat intimidating. This is similar, again, to my situation with Metroid Prime. The long Japanese RPGs I had been playing during college sort of wore my brain thin - as games that focused more on exposition than mental challenges (e.g. dungeon puzzles), they were easier for me to marathon through despite their length. (Yeah, I'm pretty dumb!)
When I wasn't being intimidated by the puzzles, and most recently the Water Temple, it was the graphics. STOP YELLING. Hear me out. There are some 3D games that don't age particularly well. For my eyes, Ocarina of Time hasn't aged entirely gracefully (though it's still easy to tell why it was considered so excellent-looking back in the day). The biggest culprit for this is the frame-rate, followed by the coloring. Back in 1998, this game indeed was amazing-looking. It was incredibly, richly detailed and considering what was being demanded of the machine, the framerate was very, very admirable.
However, I really did not have the pleasure of playing this game back in its prime. I've been spoiled by the 60 frames-per-second performance and detailed textures of games like Metroid Prime, Half Life 2, God of War and Ninja Gaiden. Now, this isn't to say that graphics make a game. I'm guilty of continually trumpeting the cliche that it's gameplay over graphics. What made it difficult for me to look at Ocarina was the fact that I've grown so used to smooth framerates that the very slight bit of chop in Ocarina of Time - and to be fair, it performs very consistently - manages to make me a little motion sick. Combining this with textures that - while they were once considered detailed - are a little muddy just made me a little sicker.
ALRIGHT ALRIGHT, STOP THROWING PITCHFORKS AT ME. Let me re-iterate: I don't dislike the graphics. Quite simply, it's just that they make me a little queasy. I'm not using that as a troll remark or an insult at all. I truly, honestly got very, very small headaches while playing the game. It's just like how the original Half-Life made the_antipode motion sick. It's just one of those things that happens, and Ocarina did that to me - end of story.
Past the intimidation and graphics, though, the only other reason it took me so long to complete Ocarina of Time is because I have a problem with focus. I can't sit down for half an hour at a time and be able to accomplish something in Ocarina of Time, because it feels like a game that requires completion of huge tasks in order for progression to take place. I need to be able to complete a temple in at most two sittings before I forget what I was doing and get confused, and considering I'd had very few stretches of hours at-a-time at home to play console games, this just wasn't happening.
Now, it's done, and I'm glad to have played it. I'm intensely upset that I didn't play this in its prime, because I probably wouldn't have been annoyed by the framerate. I also probably would have enjoyed it better than I did; Ocarina of Time is a fantastic game and I can see where - like Halo, or Half Life - it gets its accolades from. Like Half-Life (not Halo, but that's just my personal preference), I think this is a really great game. But - and I need to make this clear - like Halo and Half Life, it doesn't rise to the top of my list. I still like A Link to the Past better. I enjoyed what I played of Twilight Princess (yep, I cheated and played about 3 hours of it) more than what I had played of Ocarina at that same point. Final Fantasy VI and Metroid Prime still top my all-time favorites list.
This is going to be difficult for me to review, no doubt. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to give you a score, I'd predict that using the Gamespot rating system, it'd end up getting at least a 9.0. (I hate scores, but I'll humor you this once.) Yet, I'm pretty sure I should brace myself for cries of, "9.0 isn't good enough!" (Comically I'll also probably get "9.0 is too high j00 fanboi lolz stupid" - just ... shut... up, please.) I guess all I can say is, "Oh Well." All that really matters is that now, it's time for Twilight Princess.
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