What was it like playing Ocarina of Time when it had just come out?

Magical.

>>712644984 (OP)
It was difficult since I barely knew how to read. Also, you could only play for 10 minutes at a time until your mom was done shopping and we had to leave K-mart.

>>712644984 (OP)
I was 6 years old. Atmosphere inside the Deku Tree was so good I almost shat my pants.

>>712644984 (OP)
Exploring Kokiri Forest and the Deku Tree on Christmas morning was peak gaming bro

>>712645292
>widescreen

>>712644984 (OP)
an evolution, not a revolution

>>712644984 (OP)
It was amazing. The game felt so immersive. There was nothing else like it.

>>712645496
It was definitely a revolution. There was nothing like it in 1996.

>>712645292
I can hear this webm

>>712645593
nah, it evolved the whole thing until others decided to revolution

>>712645593
>1996
1998, but still true. I had even seen my brother playing Quake on PC but OOT just was way better when it came to immersion.

>>712645292
Images you can hear

It was great, sharing little tidbits with friends about what he did and what you did, progressing slowly

>>712644984 (OP)
Man, i was 4 at the time, so my older brothers only let me wander around Castle Town. Recently i asked my oldest brother about what he had thought of OoT, and he said it felt incredible.

I beat it before my brother did and I spoiled the whole thing for him hahahaha fuck that retard

Link naming his horse epona is actually really cool

>>712644984 (OP)
As a dumbass kid i got a bit disappoined that kakariko village was completely different from the LTTP one, but the game grew on me.

>>712644984 (OP)
Am I the only one who thought it was boring? It felt like a slower, less interesting rehash of Alttp. The puzzles were mind-numbing, the combat was worse, the dungeons were lacklustre. Literally only the plot and music were better and those are icing, not cake.

I do not get the love this game has gotten. It feels like it was just the BotW of its time.

>>712645959
idgi
is it becasue it's an electronic pony?

>>712646074
you weren't even alive when neither of the games you are talking about were released

>>712644984 (OP)
It was magical, but I don't remember it like people misrepresent Zelda games constantly as
>OH MY GOD, SO HUGE, Open World,
>Sloooop
>slop-slop-slop!
I remember it for what everybody remembers it for: The story, the atmosphere, the melancholic tone of it, and the dungeons and items you get. I remember it for the locations in Hyrule and how they FEEL, not the fact that it's "omg, so open and free to explore, amazing 3D game holy shit".
People who goon to BotW saying it's the second coming of OoT don't understand that OoT was basically a hit with its biggest fans for the polar opposite reasons. But there was a mainstream attention on it at the time as "Omg, so huge, so big" that people keep misusing when making retrospectives on it.
I remember it as being a game where you go between areas and wonder what's gonna happen when you go to them, not about its landscapes. It was more about crossing Hyrule Field but it's full of the skeletons that come out at night, so I wanted to run to the castle before it happens because it creeped me out. Or that it took some courage to proceed when I found the Royal Family Tomb below Kakariko to find Sun's Song because the ReDeads triggered my zombie scare. Or walking in circles in the Water Temple because the 3-floors and water-level nonsense can get a little hard to memorize. Or the N64 stick becoming weaker on literally all controllers my friend had, so I couldn't get out of the vortexes with the poor stick strength.
And I remember climbing up to Ganondorf at the end and how truly monumental it feels, and how I get that same feeling every time I revisit it.

It doesn't quite have the same oomph it used to when I go back, but it's still full of that melancholic, contemplative feeling and those mature undertones I remember it for. It's one of the few good vidya narratives where you can tell a normal ass adult is telling a good moral tale to children.

>>712644984 (OP)
It was great. I remember reading the booklet on the ride home from the video rental store. In my mind N64 had 4 controller ports, and every game I had rented before hand was multiplayer, so I was a little bummed when my little bros couldn't play with me. But it didnt take long for that to wear off, it was insane how great the game felt. I got genuinely scared when the wolfos howled in hyrule field and the sun went down and the stalfos started to spawn. As a kid, it was easily my second favorite game of all time. I wished for years for Pokemon to get a game like Ocarina of Time.

>>712646091
Epona is a Celtic deity of horses.

>>712646074
I was 17 when it came out, thought it was boring and never finished it.

>>712646074
>Am I the only one who thought it was boring? It felt like a slower, less interesting rehash of Alttp. The puzzles were mind-numbing, the combat was worse, the dungeons were lacklustre. Literally only the plot and music were better and those are icing, not cake.
It is pretty boring, but it's boring in the same way that I think Nier or Nier Automata are boring. It pays off when you stick with it, and then you remember it as being extremely good after a while. And then revisiting it, I'm not as impatient with the "boring" parts.
It's the same with other classics like the Ace Attorneys, Planescape Torment or Mass Effect 1, or even Half Life 2. Those have varying degrees of "fun", but I find that Zelda was never about the gameplay to me. They're adventure-games, so I view the format as an extension of the Point & Click concept, where it isn't really about the mechanical depth of firing the bow and arrow or the sword combat, but those things are there to put you in the world, and to live out each scenario as it happens in the story. The way they make everything kind of immersive through gameplay is what matters to me, not whether the game is like a "True Gamer Experience" or whatever. I love my Souls games and more hardcore RPGs but I've never viewed Zelda with the same lens.

Amazing what they accomplished in terms of world building and atmosphere, with the limitations of the hardware. Nowadays you have bazillion polygons and thousands of people working on games pumping out turd after turd.

>>712646374
that's very cool indeed, shows that those japs had passion enough to research that kind of shit while still crunching like mad men to put out one hell of a game in just 2 years.

>>712646464
17-25 are the "snob years" of gaming. That's around the time I would play Mass Effect 3, Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us and just decide that they're shitty games compared to the previous games by the same companies, only to find that everyone else seems to cum from them.

>>712646754
You're right.. I was probably being really snobby.

>>712644984 (OP)
Exploring a 3D overworld with a day/night cycle was a new experience so the sense of exploration and discovery was incredible. Traveling with your horse, shooting arrows in first person, visiting different areas and characters, plus the storytelling and gameplay was executed creatively and immersively. All while catchy tunes like Gerudo Valley and Lost Woods played in the background. To be fair games and tech were constantly evolving and mind-blowing experiences were a regular thing during that period.

>>712646625
They developed OoT for 7 years lol. The only part that took 2 years was the final crunch once they had finished prototyping and became sure of how the game should be.

As a kid my family rented it and F Zero X after purchasing an N64 from a cousin's friend at his workplace.

Played for a few minutes and got bored and went straight to F Zero. That being said later on ended up watching a friend get further in and ended up playing the whole thing myself down the line.

It was my first game after Mario 64. I had nothing to compare it to other than that.
I was like "why can't I jump?".

A game like that was a lot of firsts for me at least.

>>712646831
>They developed OoT for 7 years
got any source for that? everywhere I look at says two and a half years.

>>712647220
>"why can't I jump?".

Lol yeah like what the fuck.

>>712644984 (OP)
Hyped up in the school yard chatting with all my friends about how hard the Water Temple is. Good times

>>712644984 (OP)
It was very cool, the ability to just run around and mess in an wide open map with secrets around almost every corner was a good evolution of the Zelda formula to 3d at the time, it felt weird not being able to jump on command but the feeling wears off the more you play it and get accustomed to how Link operated.

>>712646625
MM came out in a year and was just as impressive, of course half the game had been done already but fuck me, a banger right after another is just nuts.

>>712646796
Multiple times a year, and honestly by the time this came out, we basically already had Half Life 1 which in many ways has the same "wow" moments.
I think what makes OoT stand apart from most things, other than Nintendo bias, is that it really is a game of perfect "composition". And not just the OST. Koji Kondo's sound track is spectacular in that every single tune in the game is something striking that perfectly fits the mood. Very few tracks are just random ambiance (like the volcano area just having kind of a coarse noise) but it's all so melodic and well considered, and perfectly simple.
But again, that's just the OST. It's a perfectly composed game because it follows an advanced structure that doesn't fall into just a "game loop". The loop is just combat with items, and exploration, but that happens within this structure of "3 dungeons + story" and then event-driven moments ouside of that, leading to "6 more dungeons + more serious story" and that raises the stakes while calling back to those "innocent" early bits of the game in a darker context, which then leads to this Point of No Return when Link has to rescue Zelda but in doing so knowing he's bringing the Triforce back to Ganon.

That final moment is glorious for 2 reasons. It's a fanservice moment for ALttP fans showing "Ganondorf => Ganon" but it's also a culmination of this as a standalone narrative about Childhood vs Adulthood -- like I said, "perfect composition" between the game starting in childhood, progressing to adulthood, as the complexity of dungeons is raised, and the story becomes darker despite having been in a less dark mood earlier.

It's thus a progressive adventure, like a PROPER storyline should be, and the video-game aspect of it follows that progression through the Child-Link->Adult-Link switchup, and the items you get fulfil a power fantasy, as Adult Link becomes ready to confront the Cruel Man who threatened the innocence (childhood) in the world you're meant to protect.

Depends on your experience with video games at the time. I was 8 and until that point I had only played a few NES games, Mario 64 and Diddy Kong Racing, so it was the first game with something resembling a story that I played. The world, the music and the general mood of the game made it seem like it was much bigger than it was, and that every corner was some magical place full of secrets.

>>712645292
fpbp

It's still the best Zelda game desu.

>>712648407
Oh and I forgot to mention, when it got dark and the zombies started showing up in places like the Royal Family Tomb, I shat bricks when I heard the scream and it paralyzed Link lol. Everyone has that "non-horror game that was scary as a child" moment, but for me I think it was pretty standard.

Everyone complained about the water temple at recess.

>>712648827
I still remember when the first kid claimed you could get the horse and jump out of the ranch with it to keep it, and everyone mocked him for being a liar.

>>712644984 (OP)
>What was it like playing Ocarina of Time when it had just come out?
I'm gonna echo what fpbp said at >>712645292.
I was 10 at the time. I'd played some Zelda games on NES before this, even watched some of the Zelda cartoon series. However, unlike Mario, I had zero understanding of how big the Zelda franchise already was. It was also a lucky coincidence I ended up getting OoT that Christmas 1998.

The next few months, however, I lived and breathed anything Ocarina. It was the first game that truly felt like an epic, grand adventure. The first game that gave me a desire to LIVE in its world. Mind you, we had no internet at home at the time, and unlike Burgers we didn't get any fancy strategy guides either, so the kid-me really had to figure things on my own.

And what a world it was: you start off from this Neverland knockoff filled with the "lost boys", step into this hugeass open fields that felt like something out of a Ghibli movie, then into a busy medieval town that treats you like a delusional kid... constant carnival of vibes and emotions, that only got elevated once the Adult phase started, and the kiddie gloves came off.
I honestly don't recall a single other game pre-OoT that would've made me feel this bittersweet, emotional emptiness when "The End" screen finally arrived and just froze there on my screen.

I've since replayed Ocarina a countless times. I've also watched many friends of mine play it for the first time, always enjoying it a ton. It's one of those games I still launch every once in a while to relive the experience. Every passing year I'm actually more and more impressed of how much content and atmosphere Nintendo managed to jam into that ~16 megabyte cartridge; it feels much more "modern" than it age and graphics would imply.

>>712644984 (OP)
>What was it like playing Ocarina of Time when it had just come out?
The title screen blew my mind. Looking back, it looks like shit.

>>712647480
You really getting at what makes the game actually great. Simply saying "it has a good story" falls flat, because people can then go "but is the writing and narrative really that good, it's basically a simple children's fairytail" and so on. But when you really look into it and what the game is doing and why it leaves such a lasting impression, you clearly see that the 'story', the way the events of the game are presented to you, how you personally live through it all while playing, how everything in the seems seems to be constructed to have interconnected significance etc. is all integral to the game and an OoT gutted of all such 'story' elements would be a far inferior experience that would hardly even make sense and would barely resemble the actual game we got.

One of my favorite things about the story is that it isn't even just a linear progression from child -> adult and back again, but involves actively going back to the past, before everything went bad, but with the foreknowledge that it *will* all go bad, and are trying to make the best of things with this otherwise "too good to be true" freedom of time travel you now have.

I consider gaining the power to go *back* to the child time for the first time to be the single best moment in all of gaming.

>another OoT circlejerk thread
Here's what it was actually like for those of us who weren't tiny impressionable fucking children with shit taste in video games.

It was awesome! I had a good time playing it with my relatives. We would work together to figure it out and beat it and take turns. Good times

>>712650464
>for those of us who weren't tiny
back then you weren't even sperm, fuck off

>>712650464
I feel like people who deeply love the game the most will readily admit that the enemies are the weakest aspect of it and the thing that ought to have been improved and made more threatening. The game definitely needed more danger and terror in its later parts and it's probably the single most unfortunate thing that there isn't a proper, official hard mode that isn't just an actual hackjob like Master Quest. It's pretty much up to people who want to to make/use mods and challenge runs to improve the game difficulty.

Otherwise the game is closer to perfection than anything else.

>>712645959
>Link naming his horse
so you didn't play the game

>>712650464
Why’s this zoomer so buttblasted?

>>712644984 (OP)
youngfags will never know the experience of jumping from sprite based graphics to fully 3D environments. It was like stepping through a portal into a magic world you could have only dreamed of. It’s old hat now but at the time it was truly mind blowing. Unfortunately we’re at the point of such diminishing returns that the only thing they know is a stagnant churn

>>712651141
>I feel like people who deeply love the game the most will readily admit that the enemies are the weakest aspect of it and the thing that ought to have been improved and made more threatening
Nope.
Fuck every single Dark Souls zoomer trying to make every single game into some sadistic hack & slash slop. Zelda is a chill adventure game, first and foremost. Exploration and problem solving need to be the #1 aspect at all times.

>>712644984 (OP)
I thought it was boring. I just played Hexen instead.

>>712651141
>I feel like people who deeply love the game the most will readily admit that the enemies are the weakest aspect
sure, but that's a major failing of the alttp-onward zelda franchise in general. OoT has easy combat, but every non-NES Zelda has easy combat. It's just part for course.

>>712652262
Kinda cool how some of the enemies & bosses are puzzles within themselves that are aced once you "figure" them out and less skill based and more problem solving based.
>ok so when this spider turns around to expose its backside I can kill it
>This clam attacks three times then exposes its insides so I'll just wait till its done and kill it with the only thing I can use underwater with iron boots on
>This giant worm will eat my shield if it catches me so I can just pick it off with arrows

>>712645748
You have the descriptors reversed

>>712644984 (OP)
it was fantastic to see what video games could be, with a scope greater than before
a real adventure that you could immerse yourself into like you were really there
seeing the different places of Hyrule and its peoples, getting to explore an environment that was conducive to be both gameplay and exploration/narration
a great time

>>712650464
If you're properly playing the game the atmosphere will overwhelm you and inhibit you from desiring to disrespect it by cheesing all the enemies.