Ocarina of Time paved the way for virtually all adventure, puzzle, exploration, dungeon crawling, story telling, target real time combat games that followed. To this day, many games still borrow these gameplay aspects from Ocarina of time.
The progression is amazing. Whenever the game introduces an item, the game also makes the player use common sense to see where to apply that item to solve a puzzle to progress. There's a great sense of satisfaction when I did figure it out. Passing by unsolvable puzzles, I knew I'd probably pass by an item later to help me. However, there were some puzzles where the solution was a little vague, forcing me to refer to a guide. However, these were far and few in between. Most puzzles were reasonable. The puzzles within the dungeons were very deep, and fun to play through. Anticipating what new item I'd come across was exciting, and seeing how it could be applied to solve puzzles.
The story is amazing. Time traveling between young link and adult link was cool, and probably a mind blowing concept to see in a game back in the 90s. The way some puzzles were incorporated with the time travel was also really neat. The areas were varied. Forest-y areas, watery areas, volcano, snowy caverns. It gave the world so much live on top of the abundance of different characters Link met.
Some bad things though...the ice cavern was stupid, because my wallet was full, so why would I think about getting the silver rupees when they are worth 100 each. I would go back when my wallet is empty to get the rupees then. But little did I know that the rupees also served as switches to open the gate. The game should have used switches instead of rupees to not be misleading. In Ganon's castle, I needed golden gauntlets to move big pillar in puzzle, but they didn't let me know I had to get it in another room in the castle. In kakaro village, I had to go through invisible opening in the well with no hint aside from "whispers in the area". This was to get the lens of truth which was used to SEE invisible walls. Being required to solve a puzzle using the item which was concealed inside is like trying to open a safe that has the key locked inside.