RetroGrade Episode 1: A Question of Time - Part 3

Legend of Zelda, The: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64, GameCube, 3DS - 1998)

The irony of this is that Ocarina of Time is probably my least favorite Zelda game. While it is the most celebrated game of all time amongst the general gaming populace, just about every game in the series, from the console-launching Twilight Princess to the handheld off-shoot Link’s Awakening, had a bigger impact on me than Ocarina of Time. And yet it’s impossible for me to even begin to imagine a better example of a use of time in its respective generation.

In spite of all the things I tend to nitpick on in regards to Ocarina of Time, its disappointingly electronic soundtrack, its schizophrenic sense of atmosphere, its infuriatingly stiff physics, my biggest complaint for it is its title. In a perfect world I imagine Ocarina of Time being named something else. I imagine me playing through the first three dungeons and expecting the game to continue on its course. Then I imagine the sense of utter shock and awe I would be consumed by after pulling the Master Sword and finding myself amidst a ruined Hyrule, engulfed in darkness and teaming with the moans of the living dead that now inhabit it in place of the quirky, colorful townspeople who existed there before.

That’s not to say it wasn’t a powerful moment when I witnessed it in reality, but the fact that the game was called “Ocarina of Time” and featured a more mature version of Link badassedly brandishing a sword on the back of the box sort of implied that there was going to be a chronological transition to that effect.

At any rate, the fact still remains that Ocarina of Time is a great game and did a lot of things really well, particularly its use of time. What separated Ocarina of Time from its predecessors and contemporaries in its use of multiple time periods was the way they were juxtaposed. In games like Chrono Trigger, time periods were separated by centuries at least and eons at most, disallowing any immediate comparisons between eras. Ocarina of Time’s two eras are merely 7 years apart, distant enough to show the significance of what had transpired, but near enough to see how what had transpired impacted things that were familiar to the player. It’s the difference between “Oh, so that’s why Africa looks like it could fit perfectly when placed next to the Americas.” and “So that’s why my father never finished college.”

This effect is usually only seen in sequels. In Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, for example, we, as Zoë, get to retrace the steps of April 10 years after the first game and see the disarray many of the locales we came to love had fallen into. Particularly, we venture through April’s boarding house that, after a decade of neglect, has become something out of a Silent Hill game. Wonderful moments like that come from game designers who take note of the things that impacted their audience and exploit those things to work at our emotions through memory. In a triumphant example of foresight, Eiji Aonuma and his development staff were able to execute that idea without yet having an audience to observe, working entirely from tactful assumptions about how the player would respond and become attached to certain aspects of the game world. Even I didn’t realize how much I cared about the Lon Lon Ranch until I found it and its livestock under the control of a disgruntled employee turned crooked villain.

The biggest problem with Ocarina of Time, like Link to the Past before it, is that it doesn’t so much give you two wonderful worlds to run around in as it exchanges one for another. Once you’ve made the 7 year jump, there’s little reason to go back aside from a few odds and ends and minor tasks you need to accomplish in the past for certain things to happen in the future. Even worse is the fact that Link himself is vastly more adept as a teenager than as an a child, making the previous world not only primarily obsolete, but a bit of a nuisance to return to.

Regardless of how I feel about it, though, Ocarina of Time has already left its mile-wide mark on gaming culture. It was a revolutionary title that pushed the boundaries of what was possible and laid a strong foundation for nearly every 3D game that followed it.