The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
1998
- puzzle
- adventure
- action
- fantasy
- sandbox
- open world
- single player
The story
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the fifth main installment of The Legend of Zelda series and the first to be released for the Nintendo 64. It was one of the most highly anticipated games of its age, and is listed among the greatest video games ever created by numerous websites and magazines. The gameplay of Ocarina of Time was revolutionary for its time, it has arguably made more of an impact on later games in the series than any of its predecessors even though they had the same cores of exploration, dungeons, puzzles and item usage. Among the gameplay mechanics, one of the most noteworthy is the time-traveling system. The game begins with the player controlling the child Link, but later on an adult Link becomes a playable character as well and each of them has certain unique abilities. Ocarina of Time also introduces the use of music to solve puzzles: as new songs are learned, they can be used to solve puzzles, gain access to new areas and warp to different locations. Dungeon exploration is somewhat more puzzle-oriented than in earlier games but they are not too complex.
What it’s like
Warm, sun-washed meadows and amber cliffs rendered in bright, chunky N64 polygons, with the sky turning violet over a quiet ranch and mist drifting through shadowed forests. Koji Kondo's score does much of the emotional work: pastoral flutes and plucked strings across the fields, a low pulse under the dungeons, and a short melody on the ocarina that returns like a half-remembered song. The camera sits behind your shoulder and swings slowly through caves and courtyards, so exploration feels unhurried, with long stretches of riding across open country and pauses to listen to the wind. The mood is wondrous and bittersweet, with a wistful undertow as the world shifts between a sunlit childhood and a grey, ruined future. Intensity is mild. Combat is brisk and cartoonish, with skeletal and ghostly foes that can be eerie but never gory, and death is a brief setback rather than something lingering. Dungeons are puzzle rooms lit by flickering torches, with tidy logic rather than punishing difficulty. It suits a long rainy weekend, a comfort replay, or an evening spent slowly learning a new melody, and it is for players who want a sprawling, gentle adventure with a sense of time passing.
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