Mr Durand Pierre
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I didn't care for Ocarina of Time (OOT) that much. I really wanted to like it, but I had a lot of pretty major problems with it.
First of all, I should mention my nostalgia with the Zelda series. The first Zelda along with the orinal super mario bros was the first videogame I ever played as a kid. And the SNES A Link to the Past was my favorite SNES or earlier console game of all time. But after playing OOT I'm not sure if I've simply outgrown the series, or if Zelda just didn't translate to 3D that well.
I'll start with my problems with the game. For one, Link moves too slow. Watching that pitter-patter of his footstesp strolling along Hyrule Field got real old real fast. I also didn't like how he keeps grabbing on to ledges if he wants to climb anything. A personal pet peeve of mine is the inability to jump in these kind of games. The sounds Link makes are pretty annoying too, esepcially his rolling grunt which you hear way too much throughout the course of the game. Playing this character really hurts the pacing in the game in a lot of places.
And the pacing is already pretty slow. The reason most people go in for the Zelda series is for the dungeons. Lets face it, everything else is just filler. But OOT has unusually long intermissions beween dungeons. I figured that each dungeon took roughly 2 hours to play through, and it took at least that much time simply to make it to the next dungeon. I don't remember A Link to the Past being like that, not to mention that OOT only has 8 dungeons compared to ALTTP's 11. A also spent long periods of time simply being uncelar as to where to go next. As much as I hate walkthroughs I had to resort to one more than I would have preferred (which is never). And I actually do like puzzles in games. A lot actually. Oldschool Lucasarts graphic adventures are my favorite. But in those games when you'd have a puzzle to solve everyhwere you could go would be easily accessable, so it was really the puzzle you had to concentrate on. Here I was often discouraged ot try that hard because it would simply take so damn long to get from one area to another.
Also, Hyrule field just plain sucks. It's long, bland, and the time shifting makes it os there's either a ton of enemies to fight in a constant state of respawning, or there's nothing to fight. I deffinitely prefered the older Zeldas where enemies were just spaced out around the map.
One thing that I never liked that much about the 3D Zelda's that everyone else seems ot love is the "Z-targeting." (no idea why they call it that). I find it's auto-targetting system faulty and boring. If you don't resort to auto-targetting you're a sitting duck, but if you use it the combat is too easy, and you need only hold down the R button to avoid all attacks. Fighting the wolfos really tried my patience. This coupled with the games poor camera made combat a lot less fun than it should have been. Often I'd be in a room with a flying enemy, like a bat, and I would know they were in the room, but be unable to move the camera and lock onto them from a distance. The combat isn't that awful, I enjoyed fencing with the lizards, but it really is overrated.
But the game has it's pluses too. It's really open ended for those who enjoy subquests. There's no way in hell I would ever track down all the gold skulltilas, but I guess that's good, 'cuz it means there's always more game to be played. But there are a lot of subquests that feel less cheap than that one (like the trading sequences) that I really enjoyed.
The dungeon design really is brilliant though. As the highlight of any Zelda game these certainly didn't dissapoint. And the new warp portals you can open was really a stroke of genius (though unfortunately, everyone's most hated enemy, those hands that take you back to a dungeon's entrance, have also returned). The bosses are also really well designed and a lot of fun.
OOT really does have a lot of good in it, but it feels a lot more tedious than previous Zelda games. Maybe it's just me, and I had a hard time adjusting to the 3D, or maybe I just had more patience for these kind of games when I was young, but OOT just didn't do it for me.
7/10
First of all, I should mention my nostalgia with the Zelda series. The first Zelda along with the orinal super mario bros was the first videogame I ever played as a kid. And the SNES A Link to the Past was my favorite SNES or earlier console game of all time. But after playing OOT I'm not sure if I've simply outgrown the series, or if Zelda just didn't translate to 3D that well.
I'll start with my problems with the game. For one, Link moves too slow. Watching that pitter-patter of his footstesp strolling along Hyrule Field got real old real fast. I also didn't like how he keeps grabbing on to ledges if he wants to climb anything. A personal pet peeve of mine is the inability to jump in these kind of games. The sounds Link makes are pretty annoying too, esepcially his rolling grunt which you hear way too much throughout the course of the game. Playing this character really hurts the pacing in the game in a lot of places.
And the pacing is already pretty slow. The reason most people go in for the Zelda series is for the dungeons. Lets face it, everything else is just filler. But OOT has unusually long intermissions beween dungeons. I figured that each dungeon took roughly 2 hours to play through, and it took at least that much time simply to make it to the next dungeon. I don't remember A Link to the Past being like that, not to mention that OOT only has 8 dungeons compared to ALTTP's 11. A also spent long periods of time simply being uncelar as to where to go next. As much as I hate walkthroughs I had to resort to one more than I would have preferred (which is never). And I actually do like puzzles in games. A lot actually. Oldschool Lucasarts graphic adventures are my favorite. But in those games when you'd have a puzzle to solve everyhwere you could go would be easily accessable, so it was really the puzzle you had to concentrate on. Here I was often discouraged ot try that hard because it would simply take so damn long to get from one area to another.
Also, Hyrule field just plain sucks. It's long, bland, and the time shifting makes it os there's either a ton of enemies to fight in a constant state of respawning, or there's nothing to fight. I deffinitely prefered the older Zeldas where enemies were just spaced out around the map.
One thing that I never liked that much about the 3D Zelda's that everyone else seems ot love is the "Z-targeting." (no idea why they call it that). I find it's auto-targetting system faulty and boring. If you don't resort to auto-targetting you're a sitting duck, but if you use it the combat is too easy, and you need only hold down the R button to avoid all attacks. Fighting the wolfos really tried my patience. This coupled with the games poor camera made combat a lot less fun than it should have been. Often I'd be in a room with a flying enemy, like a bat, and I would know they were in the room, but be unable to move the camera and lock onto them from a distance. The combat isn't that awful, I enjoyed fencing with the lizards, but it really is overrated.
But the game has it's pluses too. It's really open ended for those who enjoy subquests. There's no way in hell I would ever track down all the gold skulltilas, but I guess that's good, 'cuz it means there's always more game to be played. But there are a lot of subquests that feel less cheap than that one (like the trading sequences) that I really enjoyed.
The dungeon design really is brilliant though. As the highlight of any Zelda game these certainly didn't dissapoint. And the new warp portals you can open was really a stroke of genius (though unfortunately, everyone's most hated enemy, those hands that take you back to a dungeon's entrance, have also returned). The bosses are also really well designed and a lot of fun.
OOT really does have a lot of good in it, but it feels a lot more tedious than previous Zelda games. Maybe it's just me, and I had a hard time adjusting to the 3D, or maybe I just had more patience for these kind of games when I was young, but OOT just didn't do it for me.
7/10