A couple weeks ago, I asked you about games you'd been memorably excited about until you got your hands on them and, for whatever reason, stopped playing them almost immediately. Partially because my own primary answer is so related to one from my OP then, it's only seemed appropriate to eventually ask for the other side of the coin.
For me, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina ofTime will always be the game that stands out for me. I was an avid Nintendo Power reader but I had a bad relationship with Link to the Past for entirely non-game reasons. My cousins who could afford to own systems while my parents would merely rent them had Link to the Past and I played it obsessively despite never becoming very good at or even completing it whenever I could. They lived close, so it was a lot. But I was always teased for not wanting to go out and hang with the neighborhood kids, play basketball, whatever. So I'd sit there in my aunt's basement, playing Link to the Past and not doing very well at it, sort of annoyed with myself that my interests didn't align with the people I liked most (and wanted to like me) at the time.
Ocarina of Time just didn't resonate with me as a result. Everything I read about the game sounded dumb. This was the era when games were becoming increasingly realistic, or more accurately focusing on dystopian, dark futures with deep, dark stories. I wanted to play sports games and action games, games wrapped around collisions, explosions and the impossible possibilities of the future. Ocarina of Time was none of that...and then they announced the gold pre-order cartridge. I was always a sucker for colored cartridges, and I'd started doing part-time paid work so I had my own disposable income aside my highly valuable allowance, so I really wanted to be in on the ground floor and knowOcarina of Time wasn't worth the energy; maybe I'd even write Nintendo Power about it!
The game enveloped me. I'd dive off the cliffside in Zora's Domain for 10-15 minutes at a time just for the rush and the novelty. I'd had a soft spot for Bass Pro Shop fishing games on the SNES, so I really enjoyed the progression of the fishing. The items hooked me, the mere idea of riding Epona around the open countryside hooked me. The music was perfect. One of the swords was really fucking big. As it happened, Ocarina of Timewas worth all that time spent on it in various Nintendo Powers and early message board arguments. I was the idiot, not those Nintendo shills or those who'd had a regular experience with the other Zelda games rather than a spiteful one.
I'll think of some others later, but since Majora's Mask was one of my OP examples in the other post, I only felt it was worthwhile to go into detail about how its predecessor set the wheels so violently in motion for me to be dissatisfied by its follow-up.
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