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Comment by Tainnor | Hacker News Reader

I cannot describe in words how impactful Ocarina of Time was to me as a kid, how intensely I got sucked into that world to the point that I even wrote some (bad) fanfic set in that universe back in the days. When Majora's Mask came out I was almost bursting with excitement until I was actually able to play it and was again totally blown away by a unique experience.

When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing. It's not that I hated the game, it was even enjoyable up to a point, but I just can't seem to get as excited about it as many others, and it seems to be missing everything I loved about Zelda. I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date, the only one that I think pulled this of well is IMHO Witcher 3 where every side quest feels meaningful.

So I wish everyone a ton of fun with Tears of the Kingdom, but I feel no particular urge to play it right now, given that it appears to largely copy BotW's formula from what I've read. Maybe I will pick it up at some later point.

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I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.

That's not to discount the criticisms or "feel" you get from the game, but it's worth noting that nothing lives up to our childhood favorites.

I agree. It's a formative stage where everything is novel - even a new game that does everything right can't capture that in adulthood. You also have way more patience as a kid with nothing but time. I didn't mind trudging through jrpgs then, but I hate it now.

I don't replay old games like this (the ones that have you solve and explore). It's effectively a security blanket, with no thrill - the opposite of the first experience. I find it bittersweet and it dulls feelings I associate with those games.

You can never go back, is the thing.

I don’t know. If we’re strictly speaking of nostalgia, I can still feel a very strong sense of nostalgia from things I’ve experienced as an adult, even experiences from just a few years ago — or even the previous year!

This can apply to a trip we went on, or a TV series we watched, or music I listened to, or a video game I played (e.g. I really experience this when playing Factorio again after it’s been a while).

So maybe YMMV, but I can still have things that (at least almost) live up to “feels” I had from childhood.

Agreed. My niece loved Breath of the Wild and has been eagerly anticipating Tears of the Kingdom since it was announced.

I loved Star Wars as a kid. Then the prequels made me jaded that there could ever be anything as good as the originals. The sequels and other content did nothing to dissuade me from this. Then Andor showed up and it's like, holy cow, this is actually good.

Sometimes when the follow-on content is bad... it's because the follow-on content is bad.

Ok... that was my path and since I was not interested I did not know of Andor. Will have to take a look at it.

It really is brilliant. The screenwriter is Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Bourne Trilogy).

Andor is the first SW content I have re-watched since Jedi.

[spends a few minutes on a mental inventory]

Well, okay: I watched all the SW eps with my son. (His words after seeing Ep1 were "Daddy, that wasn't a very good movie.")

Still, I rest my case. Andor is the first content that I would actually miss if it went away.

Check out Clone Wars and Bad Batch. These brought me back to star wars fandom. Don’t be put off by animation. The stories are excellent and there is lots of character development.

Rebels as well, which IMO was the best of all 3.

Clone Wars & Rebels both suffer at first from being a bit too kid-oriented, but both wind up getting pretty serious over time.

I really tried to make it work, but going through the first season was unbearable dread... imagining that there are like 5 more to get to good stuff is IMO not worth it.

I did watch The Clone Wars (note this is the 2008 TV series, not the 2003 one). The last season (especially the finale) was amazing, up there with Andor for best Star Wars content of all time. But watching the rest of it to get to that point was honestly a slog, and plenty of the shows are gag-worthy or at least blah. It's bad enough I can't recommend it to friends, but I've been trying to think about whether there's a minimal subset of shows I can recommend watching to give enough of the experience that you can appreciate that finale without needing to suffer through the rest of it.

Andor comes with the distinct advantage that you don't have to slog through hours of questionable content to get to the good stuff.

There are lists out there on which clone wars eps are skippable vs not if you just want to be up to date with all of the key storylines and hit the good eps.

Rebels is harder because they had a habit of sneaking key storyline bits into the meh episodes.

I was able to get my kids obsessed with Star Wars before their first Disney trip - watched all of Clone wars, every main movie. Their favorite? Episode 2.

Breath of the Wild is objectively a masterpiece though.

These things are not incompatible in any way:

X is a masterpiece Some person doesn’t enjoy X

I think that's why they used "objectively"

It gets the big things really really right but it is missing human character in a lot of ways compared to Ocarina and MM. Not sure if it was infeasible to do both or if they were on principle trying to let the nature elements do 100% of the work.

Weird because I am split on this. I still game a lot but never got those feelings again that immersed me in the world. Sid Meiers Pirates in my C64 for example. the first CIV or Xcom. I still rack up significant game time but the immersion is less. This I attribute to me not being a kid anymore.

When I was a kid I gobbled up all movies, good, bad, ... Whatever I watched it all. Last decade I haven't watched that much movies anymore. I am in the middle if it is me not being a kid anymore or it is quality.

The difference is that I still put significant time in gaming although it doesn't make me immerse into it like I did as a Kid. Movies I just quit on most of them and watch a couple of good ones.

Maybe it is unfair. A good movie you watch once but even if in a year only 1 good game comes out you can still rack up a big amount of time ;)

Moreover, today's kids, including your own if you have them, like different things than you did. Most kids growing up with Breath of the Wild are not going to be impressed by Ocarina of Time. Most likely, you have pretty different preferences for book/music/movie preferences than your parents.

It’s funny… talking about the Tears of the Kingdom yesterday with my son, he kept bringing up Ocarina of Time as an example of a perfectly rated game. He’s never played it and yet, it’s stuck in his head. I played it when it came out, but I still had more of a fondness for the original Zelda which somewhat betrays my age. I think Ocarina felt a little too guided for me (or maybe it was the limits of the platform).

My son never finished BOTW, but I did. But I have a feeling he’s going to try to play Ocarina of Time before the summer is through. (And yes, I’ve already put in some time in TOTK).

I would disagree. As a kid I played OOT to death but never owned a copy of Majora's mask. I have just started playing it and I think it may even be better than OOT (though it is not really even a "Zelda" game.)

I think if you play MM before OOT you would think MM is way better. In a way MM is genius because it feels so alive with all these characters reliving the same three days over and over. The time reset makes all those hard scripted events believable.

Ocarina of Time does a fantastic job going from the bright world of young Link to the more serious and darker world of adult Link. This adds a ton of depth to the game. And let's not forget the clever game mechanic of swapping between young and adult Link to solve puzzles.

There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors. Game design has gone through a variety of eras and fashions and fads, and games "back then" (for whatever period you happen to be nostalgic for) were just built different. That doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, and maybe nostalgia is the reason people prefer games from the time period when their tastes were developing, but it's not just the games themselves. It's the way games operated.

I guarantee you that if Nintendo released "A Zelda in the mold of OoT but with a new set of dungeons and items and such" people who love OoT would go nuts for it. Look at what happened with Sonic Mania. For some reason, though, publishers/developers are very wary of doing this. Nintendo refuses to make a new Zelda that just reapplies the winning formula. Sega refuses to make Sonic Mania 2 - honestly, I was very pleasantly surprised they made the first one! I blame the late 2000s mantra of "innovation" and its presence/absence that seemed to be all the rage in critic circles.

> There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors.

That just seems tautological to me. Of course things that are deliberately trying to tug on your nostalgia will "live up" to it.

> I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.

Of course, you're entirely correct but other entries in the series, even Skyward Sword with all its flaws, has managed to capture some of that spirit. BOTW to me is just an entirely different game.

I thought I was too dried up and curmudgeonly to get immersed in a video game but BOTW dispelled that myth. Prior to BOTW Ocarina of Time was my greatest gaming experience.

Nostalgia is definitely the reason I love civilization II so much (I'd argue it's #2 behind civ IV in the series).

It's a damned shame civ II is so hard to get properly running (dosbox, win3.1, etc, sound drivers, etc)

I don’t think that’s true. I played Ocarina as an adult and loved it, but BotW left me feeling similarly cold. It’s just a different style of game.

Meanwhile, Elden Ring drew me in like no other game in recent memory.

I've experienced the opposite, where I played OoT as an adult but thought it was only okay but got completely absorbed into BotW. OoT is too railroaded for my taste, especially the dungeons that often have one linear path. Towards the end of the game when you have to do several temples I thought of quitting. BotW on the other hand gives you plenty to do all at once and doesn't care how you do it. I enjoy devising my own approaches to things rather than finding the singular linear solutions to OoT's dungeons.

I played OOT for the first time at the start of COVID after no gaming for 20 years.

It's the best game. As a kid I liked Marathon and Mario but never played Zelda for some reason. OOT is just a perfect game.

As a kid Zelda might be too hard. You need to be able to read. And as me, read a foreign language, English. I could not play it properly until I was like 12-13yo.

How would you compare it to MM? I think MM is better.

MM is better aesthetics but I enjoyed the storyline and adventure of OOT more.

That's interesting. I'm roughly your age, and having played both the Witcher 3 and BotW, I vastly prefer the latter.

Part of it is just controls. BotW is nice and responsive, and Geralt feels incredibly sluggish in comparison because of all the presumably mocapped animations that have to play for every single little thing you do. Try running forward and turning around to run backwards in both games. Gerald has a hell of a time coping, but Link just does it.

Part of it though was definitely the design of the open world. The Witcher 3 just feels claustrophobic. You can't walk two steps without having to collect herbs or fight drowners or talk to NPCs. BotW spaces things out more, and I feel the pacing is improved by this.

I actually liked that sluggishness about the Witcher; it made Geralt feel like a person, in a way. Having read the books, he isn’t the youngest anymore - even for a Witcher - so it feels right that he isn’t as quick to turn on his heels as a teenager Link :)

However, I’m with you on the claustrophobia regarding the map. I guess that’s due to resource constraints of the previous console generations, and I have high hopes for future Witcher games. Glad the series isn’t dead yet.

I don't mind the sluggishness as much as the dialog in Witcher games. I tend to prefer games with little-to-no required dialog and Zelda's interactions tend to be more mechanical than conversational.

I'm fine with lore, but as soon as I have to sit down and listen to video game writing while losing control of my character, I'm instantly bored.

Well, then that game just isn’t for you, which is fine, and why Zelda exists.

The Witcher is also considered a "role playing game", which were always heavily focussed on story. Zelda was never considered an RPG, more an "action adventure with puzzles", although nowadays these genres have converged a lot.

Good to get some other perspectives from OoT fans. I played it multiple times as a kid. No other video game came close in terms of the connection. It was the perfect game IMO.

My interest in video games declined greatly as the trend in the video game industry shifted toward heavy violence and more realistic graphics. Fast forward to last year, I decided to pick up the Switch as I found one for a really good deal. I wanted to try the new (to me) Zelda. I felt pretty unimpressed, decent not great. As it turned out, I had mistaken the much hyped BoTW release with the Zelda release that I bought. I was playing Skyward Sword.

Once I realized my error, I picked up BoTW and took it for spin. I now think the hype is totally justified. I got all the feelings I felt with OoT. It's been wonderful so far. I'm only about halfway through and stocked for Tears of the Kingdom.

> When I played Breath of the Wild, I felt ... nothing.

Interesting. Opposite for me. Playing BotW reignited the feeling of playing OOT and MM for me.

I don’t know man. Compare the ambience of Zora’s Domain, music and all, to the equivalent area in BOTW. Compare the divine beasts to literally any temple in OOT. BOTW doesn’t even come close to the magic of Ocarina imo. The story in OOT was also much better imo. Seeing Hyrule as a kid and beginning to love it, then seeing it waste away as Adult Link, and being motivated to defeat an enemy with clear character development, Ganandorf, as opposed to a vague dark force. BOTW substituted magic for tedium. I didn’t have fun running around (because my horse is too far away and can’t be summoned), breaking weapons, running out of stamina constantly, and completing grindy uninspired shrines, all with almost no music. There’s enough there that I’ll finish the game…eventually. 7/10 at best

For me the magic of BOTW was the way its design encouraged you to approach the game more as an environment for free form play. My best experiences with BOTW were when I turned the HUD off and just enjoyed the world, finding Koroks, clearing enemy camps, but mostly just wandering. There are a lot of design elements that come together to make this play style really rewarding and fun like the density of Korok placements and the way you can easily spot shrines from a distance. I think it's hard to compare BOTW to OOT since they have such different designs. OOT is like a carefully constructed theme park ride where BOTW is more like an enormous playground filled with toys. But BOTW succeeded at giving me the same childlike sense of wonder I had with OOT (despite now being an adult).

Exactly. I played the hell out of BotW, but I never came anywhere close to beating it. I spent countless hours just running around and seeing what I could see and do.

I think I might have beaten one or two of the beasts and probably about half the shrines. And most of that came in the tail end of my many hours of gameplay. Yet I'd been all over the world, and had all kinds of fun adventures.

That's how I played Horizon Zero Dawn. I am playing Botw at the moment but it lacks that Alttp or Oot or Link's awakening spark. I guess the zelda novelty wore off along the years because I can see how BOTW has better mechanics than Horizon (but I prefer Horizon settings much more).

Again, ‘as a kid’ is what’s going on here.

I also grew up with OoT, absolutely obsessed and life-defining in many ways. Now I’m a certified Old, and while BotW didn’t click for me initially, I grew to love it and soon understood it to be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

That did require me to consider the context though, and force myself to play it with a type of ‘beginner’s mind’.

A few months ago, I decided to give Ocarina a play via the Nintendo Switch Online N64 emulator and—I couldn’t do it. With modern games to compare it to, the graphics, the frame rate, the controls, etc. was just not a good experience and I had to stop.

Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

The kids growing up on BotW/TotK will have the same rose colored glasses for those games as many of us have for OoT.

I can’t wait to get off work today and fire up TotK.

Personally I'm never put off by old visuals, and find that as you go along with it you stop noticing. However, I avoid replaying games like this. Once it's finished, it's finished - you won't get the same experience ever again. Instead I go through old catalogs of games I missed.

> Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

I played dozens of hours of Goldeneye back in the day (a friend had it, and I spent a lot of time at his house) but it very nearly wasn't tolerable to PC gamers. Its sole redeeming feature was that it was far more social than PC shooters. Playing it felt like going backwards 5-10 years in graphics, level design, gameplay, et c., plus the controls were astonishingly terrible (unless played in dual-controller mode, but that was no good for multiplayer). About the only feature it had going on that was up-to-date for the time were the multiple hit-zones on enemies (different animations and amount of damage depending on where you hit them).

Perfect Dark was a huge improvement in every way (and in many ways is still unsurpassed), and with modern controls on the XBox 360 port, I still play it to this day. Going back to Goldeneye from Perfect Dark, though? Oof. Even at the time, Perfect Dark's release seemed like it straight-up obsoleted Goldeneye, aided by the fact that it included renamed clones of some of the best Goldeneye multiplayer levels and many of the weapons (though, why would you play with them when you have Perfect Dark weapons available? They're so bland)

You didn’t have to use two controllers. You could do the preset where you use the D-pad to strafe and the stick to turn. It’s basically the same as PC.

That's just a flipped mapping of the default, which used the c-pad (just another d-pad, really, but with discrete buttons) for strafe, right? I wouldn't think that's an improvement, since A and B are on the c-pad side.

[EDIT] I mean, I was just nostalgia-playing a little Goldeneye on the Switch like last week for the first time in years, and checked the mappings because my god is the default bad, and if you know one that can put look + turn on the stick, and forward/back/strafe on the c-pad... that'd be great. It didn't look to me like any did that, so I just stuck with the default.

I have the same feeling about OoT but I find many old games to be extremely playable. I think the difference is that the highly replayable games have very responsive controls and throw you into the action very quickly. I could probably replay original Legend of Zelda and enjoy it, but I actually did try with Skyward Sword and the game is too much in the player’s way too often. BotW was very good at getting out of the player’s way and letting the player do things.

For me, "as a kid" was Zelda 1 and Zelda 2. I played some of the intervening Zelda games, and I liked them well enough, but they were fine. Which isn't a knock on Zelda in particular, 99.9% of games I thought were, well, "fine".

And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.

Same here. And so far with TotK I've got the same feeling. My original zelda experience was a link to the past on the SNES though, so maybe I enjoy the "openness" aspect more? LttP lets you go around pretty much wherever from the beginning, while OoT is pretty linear, especially at the start.

For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.

Glad someone mentioned link. It was open ended but the world was limited, thankfully. I spent a year stuck checking each square until I met someone who told me to walk through the forest a certain way to obtain the letter/scrolls I needed.

I had a very similar experience to you. The only parts of BotW that came close to the "feel" of OoT were the Divine Beasts, but they were such a small part of the game.

My biggest criticism was how much like it felt like you were canonically in a game. Link with his iPad complete with selfie camera, and the clearly computer-generated matrix-y shrines, and if you went too far towards the mountains a "You can't go further that way" message, the strongest feeling I got playing that game is that in truth Link is being observed in a simulated fishbowl environment. A cool idea for a game to lean into, maybe, but not in this case.

> and the clearly computer-generated matrix-y shrines

Good observation. Compare with Ocarina's temples which felt genuinely scary.

> I cannot describe in words how impactful Ocarina of Time was to me as a kid

Maybe it's an age thing? My first Zelda was the original Legend of Zelda, and while I absolutely love the whole series (except for Tri Force Heroes), Breath of the Wild brought me back to the feeling of playing the original like nothing has since. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were huge, but I was already in college at that point.

It’s definitely an age thing. I’m a little bit younger than you, so Ocarina hit when I was 15. I mean, is there a more perfect age for a game like that to land?

I was fortunately able to takeoff my nostalgia glasses for Breath of the Wild, and similarly it blew me away. Haven’t felt that kind of emotional connection in a very long time.

I almost want to write a book: ‘Zelda Mind, Beginners Mind’

> I almost want to write a book: ‘Zelda Mind, Beginners Mind’

I'd read that :-)

Now we’re too distracted by “I wonder how they render that” or “how don’t these physics explode all the time”

I think BOTW was too non-linear. You could do the main storyline and shrines in any order; there were no new skills or items blocking you from exploring the entirety of the map from the beginning (just health/stamina); and the dungeons and shrines are all visually identical. It lacks a feeling of progression.

Compare that with the "old" Zelda formula: you have to do dungeons in order, because the item you get in each dungeon unlocks the way forward on the overworked or in the dungeon. There are few to no side quests that aren't actually necessary to beat the game. Each dungeon (and overworld region) has a completely different visual aesthetic.

I think a middle ground would lead to a much better experience. Talking just about BOTW, imagine if 2 of the dungeons had to be done first, but each of those gave some item or ability that allowed you to complete one of the other ones. Or if the game was divided in half like most Zelda games are (light/dark world, young/old link), this makes you feel like you've accomplished something and are moving into a new chapter of the story.

> I think BOTW was too non-linear. You could do the main storyline and shrines in any order; there were no new skills or items blocking you from exploring the entirety of the map from the beginning (just health/stamina); and the dungeons and shrines are all visually identical. It lacks a feeling of progression.

This is exactly why it was one of my top 2-3 games of all time.

Yeah, I feel exactly the same way.

The Shrines were a huge part of why I was so unimpressed with BotW, because they were all so transparently made piecemeal. "Open World" doesn't mean a whole lot when you're expected to complete random identically flavored puzzles every 15 minutes.

I can also picture how Shrines were engineered in a fast-food style assembly line: "Nintendo Engineering Team 46-b, you're being assigned Shrines 5-23, complete them in x weeks."

Even barring Shrines, the "Open World" itself was fairly devoid of interesting things.

Crucially, the shrines are basically 100% optional. If you hate them, there are lots of other ways to improve health and stamina.

I got a switch and BoTW and played a bit but I hit a wall. I think its personal, maybe similar to you, where a game with big open worlds including long main quests and side quests I feel lost or rather overwhelmed after a while. It feels like never ending, repeated chores. Some of that I attribute to the game developer just repeating a bunch of content like the shrines, fetching things, weapons breaking (but not clothes?), etc.

I also don't like replaying games - I've tried this a few times but once the nostalgia wears off I don't find it fun. Maybe my brain knows I did it already so it feels like chores? I don't know what it is but I just don't really replay things at all. This means I pretty much don't play Nintendo titles because they are all revivals/remakes of the same IP. Its-a-me Mario, again.

I'm in my mid-30s and loved SNES and N64 Zelda games with a fervor bordering on zealotry.

BOTW is certainly different regarding its core game design, but then again Majora's Mask and OOT are incredibly different in design as well. Look at the contrast between the first NES Zelda and Zelda II. Compare the SNES/N64 titles to 4 Swords on GameCube as well.

My point is there is incredible gameplay variation in the Zelda franchise historically. While they've often come back to release more "classic" Zelda games, Nintendo has _always_ tried new mechanics and gameplay loops. Some of these titles that deviate from the core/classic design have major flaws, but I think it is important for a game development studio to branch out and deviate from their "winning" formula.

That's a good point. I don't know of any other gaming franchise which tries to reinvent itself basically every time. (Maybe Final Fantasy is similar, though I haven't played any of those games.)

I enjoyed Breath of the Wild for a bit, but felt it was over hyped. The open world feels pretty empty compared to other games (Skyrim, GTA5), and the shrines are a bit of a repetitive loop. Still had fun with it, but never finished. Of course also much less of a gamer than I used to be.

Good game, but seems to be a fair amount of herding/rose colored glasses with reviewers.

> I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date

In theory they sound great. In reality it seems to work against every open-world game I've played. Elden Ring is almost an exception, but the side quests are completely broken in this format without following a guide.

I hated the Witcher 3. Much like RDR 2 it has great presentation, writing and VA - and everything else suffers. But it seems the new generation of gamers have spoken, and they like glorified interactive television with a low bar for gameplay.

Based on some of my recent YT watching:

Open world games need the open world to work with how players explore and interact. Interesting sites should be visually distinct from each other and the environment, and frequent. They should not all be visible at once, to avoid players being overwhelmed with unclear choices. They should all be rewarding so players are confident they aren’t wasting their time visiting. There shouldn’t be important content hidden from visibility because then the game is teaching the player that looking at the world is futile. And the world should be navigable without the UI, i.e. the players are focused on the world and not the UI.

That point about the UI is really important. I played a bit of BotW, and then at some point I had a dialogue with an NPC which slightly (not in am obvious way) hinted at some reward if I do something special. But then that immersion was immediately broken as this interaction was added to a "quest log". Instantly the feeling of being smart in the virtual world went away, and it was just a videogamey checklist with nice GUI. No need to remember what the person wanted you to do, or to recognize it as a quest in the first place. Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now.

Similar things hold about minimaps and teleportation. They make things easier, but also less immersive, and therefore probably less fun for most players.

> Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now.

Not in FromSoftware games. They relented somewhat in Elden Ring by adding NPC markers for last-known-location, but otherwise there is zero hand-holding for quests. In the other games it's more trivial since you tend to come across everything if you explore enough anyway, but Elden Ring is so absurdly huge that it's easy to miss a lot of content.

Well that seems part of the explanation why their games are so well-regarded. If you obviously can't miss things, you also can't get excited about discovering things.

When OoT came out I'd already played Link To The Past And Link's Awakening so I didn't find OoT very impressive.. it often had clunky camera and controls & the story was pretty lame(especially compared to Link's Awakening).

It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda. Majora's Mask was much better though.

I'd agree that it is closer to Link to the Past in terms of storytelling, but I also think that Link's Awakening is the best Zelda story in the entire lot of games. I don't agree that the story was lame. Doing so would just be a condemnation of the series as a whole, which has always been light on narrative with very simple themes. Link's Awakening was the exception.

> It also just wasn't that creative.. a very safe Zelda.

It was the first 3d installment of the franchise. I think that it was unbelievably creative in how it approached the game design because it translated the ideas from 2D titles and took them 3D and found ways to make them new.

Majora's Mask got to be as creative as it was because it was just building on top of all the work that Ocarina of Time did to bring Zelda to 3D. In my case, I think it's a worse game, even if it is more "creative."

In terms of story, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in Orarina of Time that's gently implied but left as subtext.

I recommend the video essay called OCARINA OF TIME - A Masterclass In Subtext "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyUcwsjyd8Q"

Thanks for that, It was interesting. There was no chance I'd ever pick up on any of that as a kid, let alone as an adult. I'm always pretty amazed by people that do these deep analysis.

Nostalgia is a funny beast. Your comment holds true for me but the wonder was with the original NES Legend of Zelda and I felt nothing for Ocarina/Majora's Mask.

Interestingly, Breath of the Wild is the first modern game I can remember that brought back that sense of wonder I had as a kid.

I also have a preference for more linear RPG's that tell a great story over big open worlds. The time and investment in a 100 hour open world RPG is too much for my FOMO/ADHD addled mind to handle. I can't commit long enough to finish.

I think it is the difference between a fine crafted adventure/narrative versus an open world sandbox for you to experiment in.

I am very similar to you in that Ocarina of Time was a game that blew my mind and converted me from "kid who plays some video games" into "video gamer". I couldn't get enough of it. And while I also yearn for that older style of Zelda adventure, I find that because I always loved the puzzles, that experimenting in the shrines and around the world with BOTW brings me some level of enjoyment. However, I agree that I am not as "over the moon" with this style of game like some others are.

I share this feeling. I loved Ocarina of Time on the N64. BotW was a total snooze fest for me, just felt like way too much to see and do without a lot of structure.

You can’t recreate ocarina. The link to the past structure has been criticized for being stale since twilight princess.

I'm having this issue also right now. I'm trying to play through it, but what really had me stopped at the beginning was the indirection, not knowing where to go, or if I was really headed in the right direction. It's not a problem per say, but it is when you expect "zelda is a linear experience". You have to treat it like Dark Souls or Elden Ring - which has helped me enjoy it more.

Similar situation for me. Ocarina of time is my favorite game of all times. Got BOTW and after playing ~40 mins I left it and never touched it again. It felt too open and overwhelming, maybe as an adult I don't have the time to commit or I missed a more contained/guided approach like with Kokiri Forest.

I totally agree with you. Being a kid was certainly one factor, but breath of the wild got a little boring and repetitive after a while.

There was something fun about getting Nintendo Power and the guidebooks which sticks with me as well. Super nostalgic

If you want more of that kind of Zelda seek out the earlier Ocarina-like games. Wind Waker & Twilight Princess were remastered in HD on the Wii U and Skyward Sword was remastered for the Switch.

Yeah, it's hard to word it exactly, but that's how it felt for me too. OOT felt like the characters and world were more personally touching and meaningful, and BOTW felt more cold/meaningless in comparison. I think they're both great games, but BOTW just felt hollow at various points.

Majora's mask is hugely underrated IMO. It's on par with OOT for me.

BotW is post-apocalyptic, so the hollowness is kind of by design IMO.

Of course it is a copy of the initial formula... just like EVERY direct sequel to pretty much every video game ever made.

TOTK is just bigger and better than BOTW in every conceivable way. It's the perfect video game sequel.

The Witcher 3 is a truly remarkable game. Probably the only one where I’ve felt some kind of connection with the characters, and somehow felt sad when the game ended. It’s extremely well written.

Well, ocarina was open world...

Yeah because you’re not a child anymore. This is like saying you can’t get into fruit rollups like you used to. Don’t fight your nature and find some mature hobbies to get excited about rather than looking forward to the next Zelda game.

I don't understand this. Someone expressed feelings about two entries in a franchise with wildly different gameplay designs. The age of the player does not change the content of the game.

As a kid you would play the dumbest stuff and think it was amazing. The age is 100% relevant to how you remember it.

I am not sure I agree Ocarina of Time falls into the category of "the dumbest stuff"

How could the OP be enjoying the feeling of Witcher 3 if they have childhood blinders on? Someone could draw roots of W3 & BotW back to Ocarina. It is reasonable to wish they made a modern Zelda that went down more of the W3 open world path instead of BotW style.

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