That's right, I'm back on my randomizer bullshit. That chalupa-chomping fart connoisseur Dan Ryckert decided to start a fresh The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time playthrough on his Twitch channel and it's inspired me to investigate if the randomizer tools for Ocarina are as ingenious and rewarding as those available for A Link to the Past. The one downside I foresaw here was that Ocarina of Time is a much larger game than LTTP: maybe not strictly in terms of how much there is to see and do (there's fewer dungeons, if I recall) but definitely in terms of geography. It's part of the reason it wowed so many at the time: just strolling across the enormous Hyrule Field after the Kokiri Forest prologue made it seem like there was a huge world to explore. That Breath of the Wild pulled off the same feat again almost two decades later is partly why it's rocketed up so many "favorite Zelda" lists.

There's a few other odds and ends specific to Ocarina of Time, or at least factors that distinguish it from A Link to the Past, which makes a randomizer run that much more awkward (and maybe compelling?) as a result. My expertise with the game, which really just boils down to "I completed it two or three times years and years ago," does not extend to typical speedrun strats: glitch exploits, sequence breaks, and the memorization of every chest location are all way beyond my limited familiarity with the game. Thus, I don't expect I'll get to the end in any kind of competitive time; however, I still do intend to get to the end, even if it takes the most circuitous route to get there. It remains to be seen how much of that process I intend to immortalize here as an LP though: I want to show off some of the randomizer's quirks (and how they pertain to the game's already extant quirks) as well as some of the bad decisions I've made w/r/t the toggles you can switch when generating a randomizer seed. Speaking of which...

The Randomizer

I found this site quickly, which suggests there's a pretty big community around this already. If you're unfamiliar with randomizers in general, most of them are specifically "item randomizers": they fill a pool of key and inessential items, usually the contents of chests or prizes won from bosses and mini-games, and then redistributes them. This works especially well for Zelda games and explormers, because they're both heavily dependent on specific items and upgrades to make progress. If you don't have the right item, progression is temporarily stymied... unless you picked up an item you weren't supposed to have yet, at which point you can either use this unexpected boon to jury-rig alternatives to the traditional solution or jump ahead in the game's critical path. (I created a much longer series on ALTTP's Randomizer here, and then tried a bunch of other randomizers two E3s ago, if you need more of an explanation of how randomizers can affect a playthrough in many unforeseen ways.)

Anyway, getting to the Ocarina of Time randomizer specifically: there's a few really boneheaded decisions you can make here that I want to show off once the LP gets started below, but in general it's super robust with the sheer volume of features on offer. It even has a multiplayer "cross-world" co-op mode, which randomizes your world's items with those of everyone else joining you. That might mean that your game's hookshot is in your friend's world, and you have to wait for them to find it before you can use it. I'm not sure I have anyone in my life I'd be able to convince to try that, since randomizers are already niche enough, but I'd love to see it show up on Giant Bomb or a GDQ someday (needless to say, there's a Link to the Past version also).

(EDIT: I guess I wished upon the right shooting star or something, because there will actually be an OoT Randomizer Co-op run at SGDQ 2020 this August. I swear I only heard about it this morning.)

Some of my favorite toggles in the standard single-player randomizer include skipping less fun (and randomizer irrelevant) sequences like sneaking through Zelda's Castle as Young Link, both of the races (Epona and ghost Dampé), and the climactic crumbling Ganon's tower escape. These toggles mostly serve to save time on speedruns, but they weren't my favorite parts of OoT so I'm happy to lose them. You can let the Sheikah Gossip Stones tell you where items are if you're stuck, though if you don't want to make it too easy you can set it so that you need the right item first. You can make the game even harder with enemy damage boosts or fewer starting hearts. You can randomize the note order in every song, making them amusing cacophonies that are almost impossible to remember. You could even add Triforce pieces into the item pool and instead turn the game into a big randomized collectathon: by finding them all you win the game (the randomizer suggests this for the cross-worlds co-op mode, since there's more item pool slots to go around). There's more I want to introduce in my LP though, so I'll cut the explanation off here.

Suffice it to say, one of the most popular titles in video game history has a suitably complex and intelligent randomizer program to suit. I always enjoy any excuse to warp my own nostalgia like this, even with all the headaches that are about to ensue. And oh boy are they.

The Playthrough

Episode I: The Deku of Many Things

OoT NOoTe #1: Yes, you can choose to randomize the Kokiri Sword along with everything else. However, there's also a toggle to eliminate that little jerk Mido, who blocks the entrance to the Great Deku Tree until you have a sword and shield in the vanilla game. I toggled the former without toggling the latter, which meant the sword had to be obtainable before I could leave Kokiri Village and continue the prologue: hence, it's back in its usual chest as there's nowhere else it could really spawn. If I were a little more adventurous, I could've also randomized shop inventories; in that case, I'd probably have to buy both the sword and the shield before the game let me continue. (If you're unlucky enough not to find the sword early in a seed that has randomized its location, you have to make do with Deku Sticks for general combat instead. You burn through those things fast, often literally.)

OoT NOoTe #2: OK, so another one of the randomizer's options is to blend in dungeons from Ocarina of Time: Master Quest. Master Quest was an extra mode offered by the GameCube port of Ocarina of Time, which was given away as a pre-order bonus for The Wind Waker. It shuffled the dungeon layouts to make them more challenging, but didn't really use any new content besides a handful of assets dummied out of the original Ocarina of Time; thus, it didn't take much for sharp modders to recreate those changes in the game's original ROM for the sake of this randomizer. When generating a seed you can decide how many Master Quest dungeons are thrown into the mix - between zero or all of them - or set a random value.

OoT NOoTe #3: One major difference between Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past are the gold skulltulas: one hundred sneaky spiders with pre-determined locations across both Hyrule and future Hyrule. They appear in overworld locations (though usually only at night) as well as dungeons, and each of them produces a gold skulltula token upon death. The idea being that you collect enough of these tokens to uncurse a rich family in Kakariko Village, who give you things like wallet upgrades after certain token milestones. Now, in randomizer terms this means a hundred new items could potentially infect the item pool; I believe you can choose to keep the skulltula tokens out as a default setting, but this idiot over here - as an inveterate invertebrate hunter - chose to keep them in.

The repercussions of this decision have proven to be dire. Not only do most chests and rewards now provide near-useless tokens (there's always a chance a gold skulltula family gift turns out to be something vital, like the bow, so I gotta keep getting them) but there's a chance that any gold skulltula in the game might drop something important instead of a token. In fact, several will in the upcoming screenshots.

OoT NOoTe #4: Ever heard of a Keysanity run? I did one for Link to the Past here. In short, it assigns every dungeon's map, compass, boss key, and small keys to the global item pool. That results in cases like the above, where I find a dungeon item for a dungeon I've yet to access (the Forest Temple is an adult Link dungeon). The compass and map aren't such a big deal - dungeons can be cleared without them - but shuffling the keys is a much bigger obstacle to progress. You cannot complete a dungeon without its Boss Key, and you can't expect to get too far without enough keys either. It's for this reason Keysanity runners usually do all they can on the overworld first, since otherwise they'll be dipping in and out of dungeons depending on the limited number of keys they've found. (Fortunately, the three major Young Link dungeons don't require keys.)

Just to reiterate: Keysanity (a portmanteau of "key" and "insanity") runs are an extremely bad idea for neophyte randomizer players. I've no clue why I chose to do this to myself again. Especially when combined with the skulltula thing.

Episode II: Hyrule More Like Whyrule

OoT NOoTe #5: I feel the need here just a moment to reiterate the early game's progression, for the sake of those who haven't played Ocarina of Time or simply no longer remember the specifics. After completing the Great Deku Tree dungeon and leaving Kokiri for the first time, your goal is to meet Princess Zelda and obtain two things from her and her attendant Impa: an invitation to get you past the guard in Kakariko Village who blocks the way to Death Mountain and the next dungeon, and the Zelda's Lullaby song which is needed for a bunch of different triggers, including the entrance to Zora's Domain. After that, you can visit Death Mountain and Zora's Domain unimpeded for the next two dungeons. Just need to wake up Talon to get into the castle in the first place...

OoT NOoTe #6: Yes, you can randomize how many cuccos you need to save. I could've sworn I set the number to random, but I still needed all seven. Worth the time and effort, as you can see above. For the record, there's a bunch of Deku Shields in chests (and thus the item pool) because they're easy to lose if you're dumb enough to block fireballs with them.

OoT NOoTe #7: There were at least a few ice traps in the original Ocarina of Time, which were chests that simply froze you in place and drained a bit of your health. The randomizer can insert even more of them into the item pool, leading to unfortunate gotcha moments like this. Irritatingly, ice traps can be found anywhere, not just chests: you can grab an item in the wild and it'll suddenly reveal itself to be another ice trap. The game managed to trick me with the promise of a bottle, even (since I didn't get one from the Cucco Lady, and nor will I from Talon and Princess Ruto for future reference).

Now that I have access to Zora's Domain and Dodongo's Cavern, the game's opened up just a little bit. I can also go visit Lake Hylia and the entrance to Gerudo Valley, or go commune with the Great Fairies of Hyrule Castle and Death Mountain. Nothing guaranteed, but enough possible item spawns to get me a little further on.

I might resume this playthrough later if anyone's interested, but I think you get the gist of the sort of mental gymnastics a randomizer run regularly cajoles out of the ol' gray matter; doubly so when you're stupid enough to include rules like "mix in all the Gold Skulltula tokens" or "randomize all the dungeon items too." There's so much punishment you can put yourself through, but it's been a super rewarding exercise thus far regardless.

Use the link (not that one) at the very top of the blog if you want to try generating a seed yourself, perhaps with some gentler variables, and I'll see you again should I ever stop picking up rocks hoping to find a boss key underneath.