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.