What made Ocarina of Time so monumental?
the cool scarecrow
>>12535023First of its kind, and it it well (for its time)
>>12535023It was one of earliest games with an immersive open-world. Day & Night cycle, interesting side quests & activities, tons of hidden secrets, fun combat & enemies, and a decent video-game storyline. Better open worlds have definitely come out since then but in the 90s this was all there is.
>>12535023Ludocore.
>>12535023Perfect timing. Once the novelty of Mario 64 and GoldenEye wore off, N64 owners had to endure two years of shovelware and were about to abandon it, and then OoT finally arrived to deliver on the promise of a long and engaging cinematic adventure.
>>12535348This.There's no logical explanation as to how they made it though. Shinto magic.
>>12535023Genuinely phenomenal soundtrack. Lots of games and movies I loved as a kid are less about the thing itself, and more about Koji Kondo or John Williams or whoever sinking their hooks into me with really memorable soundtracks. I also think it’s the most perfect hero’s journey ever told through a videogame. The peaceful places are very peaceful, safe and cozy. The mysterious places feel mysterious. The scary places look terrifying. There’s no moral ambiguity, and the stakes are pretty clear. Tons of small touches, like Zelda gasping when you get hit during the last boss fight, really heighten the emotional stakes in ways few other games succeed at.Of course I was ten when it came out, that doesn’t hurt.
>>12535448This. I was 12 and got it for Christmas 1998. Playing Ocarina during that winter is a very fond memory for me.
>>12535023it tightly followed a perfected formula. for the 6th gen of consoles there weren't many games with such breadth and refined, yet simple, mechanics executed as well as oot did.
>>12535343>Better open worlds have definitely come out since thenYou're going to have to sell me on this, with a specific game. OoT is full of amazing design, I can't think of any open work game with freeform item progression like it that lets the accessible world available expand naturally in such a satisfying way.Even just the way it presents the landscape to you is fantastic, and in a way that isn't just a novelty that only made sense "for its time". Like, replaying the game recently, it surprised me how awesome it felt to be thrown into a new area "for the first time" (though I was already very familiar with the game), because of the context the game gives for this. i.e. however you play through it, discovering Lake Hylia requires you to do something interesting, like falling down the Gerudo Valley gorge, or swimming through the underwater tunnel right into the lake, or using the hidden ladder.BotW honestly feels tryhard in comparison with the way it really tries to push the entire world upon you at once at the outset. Like it obviously wants to to be impressed with the novelty of how open the land is, but OoT just authentically wows me more with the way you feel like you're continually discovering more aspects of the world that feel more significant, and there's seemingly always the possibility of a familiar place holding a means of accessing a new area.
>>12535625Yeah, BotW is really pretty and is a good open world game, but it still has a lot of the same issues as other open world stuff from its time. The shrines get repetitive and imo the giant world doesn’t make up for the lack of large scale, intricately designed dungeons that 3D Zelda had from OoT through Twilight Princess.
>>12535023American millennials.
>>12535625I agree with you. Ocarina of Time is still a great open-world game. I'm replaying the game right now and exploration in this game is so fun. There is hardly any wasted space, there is little handholding for the player, and content is unique & often doesn't repeat itself. And it all fits on 32MB which is crazy to think about. What I meant is that in the 1990s there wasn't any open-world games on the scale of Ocarina of Time. But it's been 30 years since then and tons of other open-world games have come out.To give an example from another retro game, I think GTA:SA has a better open-world. It takes the great elements of OOT open-world and multiplies it. There is far more customization and you can truly make CJ who you want, the different regions in the game feel like their own little worlds, the game has a great balance between linearity & exploration, and the amount of content & freedom the game offers is just unbelievable that even many games today do not offer.It's also the reason why BOTW felt so overhyped when I played it. Because by 2017 we had countless open-world games, the majority of which were much more deeper and immersive.
SHUT UP.HOLY SHITLINK TO THE PAST WAS BETTER.
>>12535817A Link to the Past is more overrated than Ocarina of Time. It's a fucking turd.
>>12535817They're both top notch, who fucking cares what randos online prefer?
>>12536938Truest post on /vr/.
>>12535023good music can elevate a 6/10 into a 10/10
>>12535023The first truly immersive game>b-but ultimaYeah you can't be immersive if you look like shit
