I was torn when I sat down to start writing this article, the second in the Best Games Ever Made series. Should I make this a 'versus' article, like the first one was? If so, what game would I really want to pit against this one? To be sure, there are some I considered. Metal Gear Solid might have been an interesting choice. It and Zelda: Ocarina of Time were both released the same year and feature enough similarities to compare them. I thought about Mario 64. Both released by Nintendo, and somewhat comparable in certain ways.
It just didn't feel right.
You see, Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a game that made such a deep impression on me, that I would even go so far as to say I would be a different person had I not encountered it when I did. It what way, exactly, is hard to answer. But I knew this: this important title was worthy of it's own article, if only because I have so much to say about it. To find out why we'll have to take a little trip back 18 years to the year 1998.
I was just about to turn 14 (my birthday is in November) and, as per our Christmas tradition, my brother and I were picking the gifts we wanted out of the toy section of a Sears catalog. We didn't have internet back then (most people didn't), so our mother would circle the toy/gift we wanted, and head out to the shops to find it locally.
I recall looking at the back of the catalog and spotting Zelda. I'd never played a Zelda game and had no idea who Link was, but there was a postage stamp sized picture of him riding a horse with a sword on his back. I thought: "hunh. That looks interesting," and, having no other idea for my fourth gift slot decided to get it just because.
I'm pretty sure that we'd only gotten our Nintendo 64 the previous year. My brother asked for Yoshi's Story, which I warned him would be crap (and it was. I had a pretty decent sense of video games even then), and I do recall that I asked for Mission: Impossible 64 (hey, nobody's perfect... It was actually so-so for a movie game), but the real star of the show was Zelda.
Christmas that year was at my Aunt Evelyn's house, and the tradition was for the younger people to open gifts in front of the older ones (you know, to add sunshine to their dreary existences... I would not understand this until I experienced adult dreariness myself much, much later). My mother was a notorious trickster, putting boxes inside of larger, different shaped boxes so that we were never quite sure we got everything we wanted.
I opened a rather large shoe box and, sure enough, inside was a beautiful gold box that read: Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Something about the way it looked suddenly made me incredibly anxious to play it. Popping it out of the box I marveled at the gold cartridge. All of the other Nintendo 64 cartridges that I'd seen up to that point had been a sad grey.
I popped it into the console in my Aunt's main living room as the family talked in the background, not interested in my game at all. The opening was the show for them, not the actual playing.
The titular Zelda: Ocarina of Time music started playing as the main screen filled with a man dressed in green on a horse galloping through what I would later learn was Hyrule field. I learned from the instruction manual (which I actually read back then) that the main character's name was supposed to be Link. So I filled that in when prompted and began the journey.
When I first started playing I was shocked by the amount of freedom you had. Mario 64 has shipped with the Nintendo 64 and that game was already incredibly impressive for the period, but this was a different level. Mario 64 had given the illusion of free roam, but there was still a strong sense of 'levels' and 'sub-levels'. The area in the castle and the areas in the paintings always felt distinctly separated in that game.
But in Zelda it was different. When I first started playing I thought Kokori Forest and the Lost Woods was the entire game. I thought, bit by bit, there would be similar, smaller, 'levels' revealed. Keep in mind, I'd never played a Zelda game. Everyone's first Zelda game is almost always their favorite, but Ocarina of Time really was a giant leap forward from Link to the Past in many ways.
The first time I entered Hyrule Field my breath was taken away. The world was so much larger than I had suspected, so much more full of promise. And I knew, sooner or later, that I'd get a horse. The title screen had promised as much.
As time went on, and delved into the game non-stop over the rest of Christmas break, I began to uncover the rich tapestry of the different cultures in the game and the temple structures which held things I would need. Here was that 'level' feel I was expecting. And yet, not. Each of the temples felt distinct, but was clearly still part of the wider world. The skills, weapons, and tools that each place taught you were needed for later in the game.
Then, at the Temple of Time, one of the biggest and best plot twists in any game even to this day, occurred. Just I had been sure that Kokiri Forest and the Lost Woods were the entire game, I was now similarly sure that the three temple-like places I had visited in the beginning had to be the entire game.
Spoiler Alert!
But when you put the stones in you realize that you have helped to empower one of the most evil people in existence. You get put in stasis and wake up seven years later to discover that you have grown up. As amazing as that is, you also discover that you can travel backwards and forwards through time! This absolutely, positively, blew my mind.
But surely the fun times were about to cease, right? Certainly this was near the game's end, and this was just a final gimmick to add to the last level. Nope. You had barely played through a third of the game (less if you think about side quests, etc.).
The game was rich, the player had a ridiculous amount of control, and the journey and adventure felt fun and worthwhile. This game was absolutely, positively transformative, and I've been waiting on a game that would be that transformative ever since.
There are some classics that just can't be beat. They're unimpeachable. Not necessarily perfect, but certainly beyond question. The game you played in your heyday, that made that impact onto you and dragged you willing or no into a world of pixels manipulated on a screen - chasing the same high like a lover looking for their first time. For me, that game was Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
And come hell or high-water there is one simple truth that I that will never cease trumpeting, even when no one talks about it anymore: Zelda: Ocarina of Time is definitely, indisputably, one of the Best Games Ever Made.
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