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    The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

    Game » consists of 20 releases. Released Nov 21, 1998

    The first 3D Legend of Zelda game, Ocarina of Time was created for the Nintendo 64 in 1998 and introduced innovative mechanics such as Z-targeting as well as many of the series' other trademarks. It has frequently been ranked as the greatest game of all time by many publications.

    The Indelible Memory Dilemma

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    This is my reaction to a thread on NeoGAF, asking people which of their two favorite video game franchises they would save if they could only pick one. For me, the choice comes to Zelda and the Souls series. If the prompt had allowed room for an individual game, Tales of Symphonia would have been the game I would reluctantly let go in favor of any given Souls game, and maybe I wouldn’t have felt compelled to write this. In fact, I might not be writing this if the thread were as simple as I’ve mentioned. I’d save the Souls franchise because, as much as I love Zelda, I feel like I’ve had the most important experiences with those games as I possibly could already, and the Souls games just happen to be taking a route that is more immediately captivating to me.

    But, upon seeing that people were sacrificing franchises that were likely to never get another game anyway, the creator of the thread decided to add a condition to the original prompt: the series you let die would never have existed. Ignoring however the game industry might have turned out if a major franchise such as Zelda had never existed, the important aspect of this stipulation is that, since the franchise never existed, you wouldn’t have any memories of it either. And with that, I realized that I just can’t let go of Zelda. More specifically, I can’t let go of when I first played Ocarina of Time.

    Before Ocarina, I had a Super Nintendo and a game collection that consisted mostly of platformers like Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country and Kirby’s Dreamland 3. I owned and rented games from other genres, but at that age, I only really understood jumping and other simple forms of action. When I got an N64, I was still pretty much oblivious to other types of gameplay. Then, I happened to hear about Ocarina of Time from one of my babysitter’s kids. I wasn’t even aware of what Zelda was at that point, but I looked up to this guy because he was older and better at games than I was, and the fact that he was excited about Zelda was enough to get me excited too.

    Having played nothing like it before, as soon as I got Ocarina of Time, I got stuck in the Kokiri Forest because I didn’t notice or know how to enter the Hole of Z, leaving me to wander around with the Deku Shield, which I had somehow acquired on my own, and wonder when I would get the boomerang that was in the instruction booklet, because boomerangs were, and are, incredibly cool.

    Anyway, I didn’t start making progress until I got the strategy guide. I remember using the guide for a lot of the game, perhaps even step-by-step for areas I hadn’t even tried exploring on my own yet. But my young brain hadn’t yet formed that notion of how to properly appreciate a game. And that it hadn’t didn’t matter, because as I read my way through the Great Deku Tree’s puzzles, I couldn’t help but be impressed by what puzzle-solving meant in this game.

    Puzzles weren’t about achieving a high score through planning and speed; they were about looking all around and finding creative uses for what you had. Even in situations where the end result of a puzzle was clear, or where there was a particularly simple solution, finding out how things worked and thinking about why they worked that way created a sense of discovery and wonder. By requiring such a level of interaction with the environment, I felt like I was developing a relationship with the world beyond what I felt from discovering secret areas in games like Donkey Kong Country.

    What Ocarina had shown me about the relationship between player and environment alone would have made it one of the most impactful games on me, but it also introduced story and characters and atmosphere to me in ways that I hadn’t encountered in games before it. Even when I was still stuck in the beginning, I was already attached to Ocarina’s version of Link, the only boy in the forest without a fairy companion and target of the bully Mido. I was fascinated by how there were other characters I could talk to, all just going about their business: like that guy who could never pick up that one rock, or the girl on top of the shop’s awning, who teaches you to talk with Z. I was charmed by the little motes of light that floated around the forest. And, on top of all that, there was that lighthearted and playful music that made even just running around a wondrous experience.

    There are plenty of games that have accomplished some or even most of what I love about Ocarina of Time, games that would have probably been made regardless of whether or not Zelda ever existed, but that’s not the point. The point is that Ocarina of Time has informed so much of what I’ve liked in games and other media that I’ve consumed since, that the thought of it, let alone the rest of the Zelda franchise, being wiped from existence is tantamount to the thought of having been born a different person. I might be oblivious to what I was missing out on, being someone else, and for all practical purposes, that somebody else might not even be that different from who I am now; but even acknowledging all that, I’m not willing to let go of my memories of the game that opened my eyes to so many things.

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