Ocarina of Time: Thoughts

I recently completed the normal mode version of Ocarina of Time on the 3DS. It is definitely a good game, though the controls seem a little outdated. I can remember when Z-targeting came out and how it was a big deal. It switched to L-targeting on the 3DS but it's essentially the same thing. It works (aiming at moving targets is annoying; there's a reason I don't really play first person shooters) but it doesn't feel right. It breaks immersion. I'm a dude with a sword and a shield and I get jumped by 2 were-wolves. If I manage to target one of them then suddenly his friend backs off? Me and my target do a little dance to the death that I can't possibly lose if I'm semi competent and then his friend starts in. Having him targeted and using my shield makes me practically invincible.

The game had lots of great dungeons with interesting puzzles to figure out. Boss fights tended to be very gimmicky and were often trivial if you could get the camera to show you the boss (and therefore lock on with L-targeting) and very hard if you couldn't. I died quite a few times to being unable to make the camera do what I wanted it to do. (It didn't help that I had just played Dead Rising 2 which has an entirely different camera scheme and that you start off in OoT with 3 health. By the end of the game I was both more used to the eccentricites of the camera and had 56 health plus 50% damage absorption.

I enjoyed playing the game, and will likely play through on the Master Quest difficulty at some point, but it didn't make it up into the best game of all time category for me. Maybe I'm just a 16 bit kinda guy, but Link to the Past had lots of cool dungeons and interesting puzzles and gimmicky boss fights. It didn't have an annoying camera to control. So it still comes out ahead in my book. I should probably hunt down an emulator version of the initial one and give it a spin. (I have the NES cartridge on my floor but my NES doesn't work. Maybe I should fix it instead.)

Perhaps the most telling aspect is that I would play the game for 45 minutes on the way to work, and for 45 minutes on the way home, but wouldn't just sit around and play it at home. I'd much rather bust out some League of Legends or Final Fantasy II. (Though the latter is not because it's a better game but because I really want to get to FFVI!) Yesterday I started reading a book on the bus, and I ended up spending about 6 hours last night reading it, and 2 more this morning. I only really stopped to write this, and because I need to shower and clean up for D&D in a couple hours. But the book, which is easy to read on the bus, snared me and forced me to keep reading it. Ocarina of Time wasn't able to do that.