Episode 122 - Narrow Guillotine Alley - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Would you like to hear what I said again? Welcome back! I don’t know how much I really need to say about Ocarina of Time, it’s one of the few axioms of video games that you can just assume people know about and understand. This game accomplished a lot for the industry at the time, making a lasting impact on both games, in the form of how design changed after it came out, and players who would use it as a point of comparison for action adventure games for years to come. But we’re playing it now, in 2021, and want to examine it using our modern lens. What design decisions hold up, and what felt like a limitation of the time or the hardware it was originally released on? How has its impact affected other games in its series and otherwise? How annoying, comparatively, are the different NPCs who talk to you against your will? We try to answer these questions as well as discuss our experiences more in our usual way and hopefully that ends up being an entertaining take on this game that has been talked absolutely to death over the last twenty years. We’re going to be talking about dungeon design and how the 3DS update brought out the best in some of them, the presentation of the game in terms of its world and atmosphere and the effect that had to enrapture players at the time, and the many Unix systems that we should know. Thank you for joining us this week. This game almost feels like a right of passage for content creation, and it’s probably about time we finally talk about it. It certainly has a legacy that is lasting, and coming at it with fresh-ish eyes won’t really change that, but it’s interesting to see what parts of it still work because it really shines a light on the parts of the game that have been emulated by developers over the years. Is this a nostalgic classic for you, or did you get on the boat late? Have you, however impossible it might seem to people, not ever played this? Let us know in the comments, or over on Discord. Next time, we’re going from an all time classic to a newer title in a beloved (by us) franchise with Life is Strange: True Colors, so come back for that if you thought it was weird for us to not be talking about a game mostly about walking around and talking to people.