My Newfound Love for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Ocarina of Time was a game I already loved before I even played it.
I got to know about the series from a friend at school in 2010, but at the time my family had a PC that came with a botched version of Ubuntu that wouldn't even let me run downloaded Linux apps. It was pretty much a PC I could only use to surf the web so I surfed the hell out of it to get more info about this game.
There was this Brazilian fansite that really had it all, and the thing that caught my eye the most was the character designs and it immediately got my interest. I kept consuming content about the game but not really being able to play it. I didn't watch gameplays on youtube because I really wanted to see it for myself, but I read character information, I read guides, I drew the characters, and above all... I listened to Ocarina of Time’s OST.
What wonderful music it was, my “recently joined the local orchestra” ass couldn’t help but wave my arms in front of the stereo pretending to be conducting it. Listening to it made me play the game in my head, assuming the events of the story from the songs’ titles, which created some funny scenes like me assuming that you had to play a song for Zelda to appear, just because in the soundtrack her theme plays after the ocarina version of the song.
When my father got a guy to install Windows on our PC, installing Project64 and playing Zelda was literally the first thing I did. And it was a wonderful experience… finally being able to hear these songs in-game, Kokiri Forest, Hyrule Field Theme (“IT CHANGES AS YOU PLAY???”), Lost Woods, Goron City, Zora’s Domain... until I couldn’t play anymore?
You see, there’s nothing that could entice a kid like me more than a “Cheats” button in the emulator. I was a dirty cheater and used them in every game I could after finding out about GameShark Codes in VisualBoyAdvance. And there was one of them (infinite carrots for Epona) that for some reason constantly crashed the game in the Adult Link dungeons. And I would only find it out much much later after replaying the whole game up to the Forest Temple over and over and over again, until I played the game on another computer, forgetting to switch on that one cheat code.
As I braced to meet the crashes again… the game kept going??? I was meeting a side of the game I hadn’t yet??? Water Temple, Shadow Temple, which felt so legendary at the time, Spirit Temple??? This game is so good?!?! And I beat it, tears rolling down my eyes. That day was probably the longest time I sat at a computer for at that age.
Then I replayed the game, this time with a walkthrough to get 100%. Then I kept replaying it every now and then throughout the next 12 years until we got to this point in 2022, where I am once again playing it and… like no other replay before it, I feel like it’s the freshest experience I’ve had with the game since my first time playing it, so much so it got me remembering the whole background I had with this game, enticing me to write this post.
The problem of it being a game that I was forced to replay over and over again, and then replayed over and over again for funsies, is that I kinda started optimizing my playthrough way too much. Why bother talking to Navi if I know the order or events and the enemies? Why lose time talking to Darunia if I can from the outset play Saria Song right in front of him? And that kind of stuff that piles up in playthroughs where I keep pressing A repeatedly and I already know everything I have to do, and only interact with what I have to.
However, this time I cannot do that.
I’m playing the game in japanese, as one of my first attempts to do language immersion in a non-slice of life kind of japanese media. Playing the game as I always do would make this entire endeavor pointless, so I’m doing the opposite and trying to read as many dialogue boxes as I can…
The most striking difference in this experience at first was in what couldn’t be translated. The obscene amount of puns which makes everything the more playful, the speaking mannerisms of not only the individual characters but also each race that changed how I perceived some of them compared to the English version… But what ended up shocking me the most was the content I was already familiar with: I found out I remember less about this game than I thought.
The NPC dialogue in Ocarina of Time is not very enticing to read in subsequent playthroughs; most of them are well placed and well written hints to guide you throughout the game so when you already know what you have to do there’s not much of a motivation to talk to them.
But GOD is this game’s NPC dialogue fun. When giving hints they can be very silly and get a smile on my face, like the guy in the castle town who sneaked into the castle and is the reason it’s heavily guarded, or the Goron that has to stand to cast a shadow over the conveniently placed only bomb flower in the overworld or else it’ll explode because of the sun.
I also love how silly dialogues build up the world little by little. You understand the disconnect the Kokiris have from the outside world, the ongoing troubles the Goron faces with the closing of the cavern, the Zora’s pride and their ignorance of the danger they faced with Ganondorf… Creating a sense of scale that can’t really be felt without it… at least I certainly couldn’t when thinking about the game.
Until now I replayed the game knowing these things, but it was just a lump of wiki-like summarized information in my brain instead of the individual information that built up that they are. And it’s just so crazy to think that not only I wasn’t able to experience this in my many playthroughs of the game, and even crazier that I could experience this again!
I often talk about how I’d like to replay some of my favorite games “for the first time again”, to have that feeling of having the story unravel before me, have the “aha!” moments again, figure out and pull through difficult fights, the melancholic feeling of having to finish the game despite wanting it to last forever… are things that I strive for when playing a game and that I know can’t really be achieved in a replay… maybe a different wonderful experience, but not the same.
This is the closest to playing it for the first time again I’ve ever got. Sure, the gameplay itself is nothing new. I know what to do in every part of the game and already do the optimized playthrough that gets a lot of the collectibles as fast as I can. But just by stopping and reading I feel like I’m getting to know all over again something that was very dear to me but I had forgotten somehow…
Before settling on the decision of playing this game in Japanese, I questioned myself whether I really should as it was a material I was already familiar with and the bias can get in the way of acquiring the knowledge the experience can give me. In writing it I realize how dumb it was in retrospect, and I’m really glad I didn’t back down from the idea. I’m playing this game as I once loved it, from a new perspective, and it’s just so wonderful.
This game single handedly set me on course for many things in my future, like how making arrangements of its songs in MuseScore is what got me interested in making music, and how my name “Saria”, while didn't originally come from the character, it definitely warmed up my heart to it even more.
I don’t know what the takeaway is here. Everything I’ve written here was born purely out of my personal experience with the game so it is not like I have anything to leave you with. Maybe just stating the obvious.
Ocarina of Time is a really good game. If you haven’t you should play it. I’m really happy I could fall in love with it again!