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So I played Ocarina of Time for the very first time, and this game could do with a modern remake

Marvel14

Banned
OoT and Windwaker are both better than BotW and TotK.
Fight Me GIF by MOODMAN
 
Is this a zoomer thing? Like any time you play an old game you just are like “ayo on god this shit hella mid frfr” and just say it needs a remake so everything unique and interesting about it can be drained away and it just end up looking, running, and playing like everything else? What happened to playing a game on its own terms, good and bad? Just play the game and stop comparing it to new stuff, most of which sucks ass btw. I guarantee that people will still be talking about OOT in 25 years while the stuff getting 9s and 10s today in 2023 will be mostly forgotten (except for TOTK lol).
I agree, that's a big reason I enjoy playing older titles. I love to explore/learn old game mechanics you don't see anymore. It's what makes retro gaming fun for me.
 

Romulus

Member
I think this is the first zelda game I've played that doesnt feel timeless. botw and totk both feel like they have this sort of timeless quality


Ocarina felt the same way when it was released. Botw already feels aged compared to totk.

Totk will feel aged just like all the others.

Keep in mind, Ocarina isn't just an old game, it's an old game in the infancy of 3D adventure games. That was an awkward time when devs were still trying to figure out everything.
 
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nkarafo

Member
OOT needs a few things to improve the controls. The water Temple boots juggling for instance.

Otherwise it's a perfect Zelda game (for the hardware).

It's great if you also want better graphics but i feel like the 3DS remake did a bad job because they altered the art direction in many scenes. So yeah, better graphics but keep the same art style and tone please.
 

Shut0wen

Member
Thing is its remade on the 3ds with gameplay untouched and oot still feels great, personally still better then botw and totk imo
 
Played it twice.
Ocarina of Time is overrated as hell. It's good, but it's not as good as some people make it out to be.
Although, to be fair, I've never been a Zelda fan, and the franchise didn't grab me until BotW and TotK.

Here's the thing. Games should only be judged for the time period they released in. Ocarina came our 25 years ago. In '98 it was incredible. Pure magic for Zelda fans. It was so influential on 3d action/adventure games. It was the first to introduce certain gameplay mechanics. It translated 2d Zelda into 3d Zelda and did that in a way that was beyond expectations.

If course today a lot of jank will exist. To say its overrated sounds like what someone who has no idea about how great it was to play this in 98
 
OOT needs a few things to improve the controls. The water Temple boots juggling for instance.

Otherwise it's a perfect Zelda game (for the hardware).

It's great if you also want better graphics but i feel like the 3DS remake did a bad job because they altered the art direction in many scenes. So yeah, better graphics but keep the same art style and tone please.
3DS fixed just that when it comes to controls. I'll take that for a few missing bloodstains.
 

AndrewRyan

Member
Played the 3DS version and the controls didn't feel clunky or too outdated and I tend to be picky. Link Between Worlds is probably my 2nd favorite Zelda.

OOT feels like one cohesive game that continues to build upon the story and gameplay as the game progresses. It's clear what to do next though you can still explore. Whereas BotW feels more like an open sandbox where the fun is left up to you to discover and story seems like distant background music.

Haven't finished TotK and while it's improved, it's still a similar sandbox game. If I could only own one it would be TotK since it's fun, unique and there's so much to do. However as a complete adventure game, still the OOT is king.
 

peronmls

Member
A lot of Nintendie children mad that people still like OoT better than anything past Twilight Princess. Has nothing to do with nostalgia. Zelda peaked at TP.
 

MagnesD3

Member
Ocarina felt the same way when it was released. Botw already feels aged compared to totk.

Totk will feel aged just like all the others.

Keep in mind, Ocarina isn't just an old game, it's an old game in the infancy of 3D adventure games. That was an awkward time when devs were still trying to figure out everything.
Doesn't matter if it was the beginning I played Ocarina like idk 16 years after it was released for the first time at 23 years old and it still was amazing. After finishing it I understood why it was so hyped up and I knew that it was on the same tier of quality as Twilight Princess but it did it years earlier.
 
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For some reason I thought the OoT reverse engineering was complete and I could rock it at high fps and upscaled textures, but apparently that isn't the case?
High FPS in console games of that era always hits upon the wall that they weren't designed for framerates over 30. Sometimes they weren't designed for framerates over 20. I believe that's the case with OoT, as I'm sure OoT3D Iwata interviews touch on that. 60 FPS are harder, arbitrary FPS are worse.

I'm sure it'll be fixed at some point, but it always takes time.

As for HD texture packs, Ocarina of Time has had HD textures on emulators for ages now and while it's easy to do HD textures for them, let's say that it is a game with a minimalistic texture library. Change the textures on the shield and you'll change the textures on Lon Lon Ranch door frames. Going forward they'll have to separate those textures, to allow for them to be different from each other. Textures get re-used a lot on that game.

I'm unsure Ship of Harkinian is the answer as it was part of a race to see who would get the game running on PC faster (and I remember it took some shortcuts against some other projects), In reality in the long run it shouldn't be about running the game, but modernizing it's overarching structure altogether. This said it supports 60 fps, just not hd textures.

EDIT: Ship of Harkinian now supports HD Textures:

Spock Alfa (7.0.0)​

April 27th 2023

New Features​

  • Support for high resolution textures!
  • Support for custom models!
But they'll take time to be made.

This said, you can look at some assets being done right here:

-> https://twitter.com/OcarinaRemake

I also read that Render96 guys might be helping here and there.

In the end we'll probably have new 3D models for every enemy and NPC and new HD textures for the menu. If I was involved I wouldn't invest time doing texture packs for the existing 1998 assets as I wouldn't be able to reuse them on new models. This said, if it gets done faithfully, it'll be based on this (and if they do a faithful do-over, the same applies, but on better models which changes how they are separated and mapped).

I'm sure some team will separatelly also rip OoT 3DS assets and re-implement them on this port, then at some point some other guys will add some extra detail, but the tone of the 3DS game is typical handheld port, they brighten up a lot of things to make it more readable in the light. On a TV/Monitor it's not that faithful to the original in that sense.
To me the flaws of WW become very clear in the last third of the game, and one of them was super annoying and bad game design. The other is simply not having enough dungeons. Fantastic game overall, and my favorite Gannon, and my favorite ending.
They fixed it on the Wii U port, which, unlike all other Zelda ports was done inhouse. (so it wasn't Aonuma exchanging emails with someone of what he thought was wrong with the game and sometimes borking it, instead it was the Zelda team actually fixing their own game).

I don't know why didn't port it to the Switch years ago.
or play Twilight Princess, it's like OoT's big brother except better in many ways
And worse on what matters.

It matches the blueprint, but it fails with a horrible initial tutorial that feels like a chore, a barren overworld, lack of well implemented cities, next to no NPC's and interesting quests, a feeling of being unfinished everywhere and a final boss swap that felt like I was playing Starfox Adventures all over again. It aged worse than OoT imo.

It's one of the worst Zelda's for me, needed one extra year and a bit more joy from the people who were making it.
 
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OOT needs a few things to improve the controls. The water Temple boots juggling for instance.

Otherwise it's a perfect Zelda game (for the hardware).

It's great if you also want better graphics but i feel like the 3DS remake did a bad job because they altered the art direction in many scenes. So yeah, better graphics but keep the same art style and tone please.
People always complain about water dungeon and having to go into the menu to toggle iron boots, but it’s even more time consuming in BotW/TotK because you’re always menuing in order to swap out for the most optimal gear for whatever environment you’re in. Zelda has always had menu juggling.
 

Danjin44

The nicest person on this forum
I enjoyed OoT both the original and 3DS version. I’m also type of person who enjoys both linear and BotW style Zelda games.

After playing TotK they have my full trust and they can do anything they want and I’m there day one.
 
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Sojiro

Member
The 3DS version is enough imo, I don't think we need to focus on remastering every game under the sun no matter how great they are. Even OG OoT is still very playable despite some early 3D jank (by today's standards), which is still far better than other games released around the same time.
 

Laieon

Member
I've never been a Zelda fan, and the franchise didn't grab me until BotW and TotK.

I've been a Zelda fan as far as I can remember and the franchise started to really lose me with BoTW. TotK is a bit better, but still not what I'm looking for.

A Link Between Worlds is a far better way to do non-linear Zelda imo.
 
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After playing TotK they have my full trust they can do any they want and I’m there day one.
This.

Games are getting more and more pidgeonholed, writing has been getting worse (As OP says, OoT is still well written today, as is any classic snes and beyond) I feel we're not pushing the medium. And reading text is a chore, because it has seemed generated in chapGPT for years now, probably because of how they have lots of people writing at different times without communication and how revising everything takes time.

ToTK both pushes the envelope (gameplay wise and such) and still feels like OoT writing. Reading it is a pleasure. If anything I have the tendency to skip it because of recent muscle memory.

That's an achievement in itself, they get it. I only dislike the voice-overs, but I can live with them.
I've been a Zelda fan as far as I can remember and the franchise started to really lose me with BoTW. TotK is a bit better, but still not what I'm looking for.
I understand. BoTW was impressive structurally and got a lot of things right (imo) but the open formula didn't do any favours to it's story, the whole barge in and beat ganondorf from the outset made that every game set piece was optional and didn't have to be experienced in any order. And this is a hard conundrum to fix. In the end they tied it up, but it still felt like a collection of pieces on that front.

I still haven't beat ToTK, but it seems like they did a massive effort to negate those "bads". Of course there's probably still a path to evolve, but it feels like Zelda through and through for me. Again, the text and NPC's make it for me even if they had forgoten to do the rest of the game. But I don't think they did this time around.

But I get your point. Thing is I don't think we can go back without it feeling stale. I miss old dungeons, but I don't feel like they have anything to achieve on the old footprint. (I would still like them to make those games, as if they were portable games, but not with lenghts over 30 hours now) - the Zelda games I'd like most to see remade right now are Oracle of Ages and Seasons, as I have really fond memories of them. But haven't played them in 20 years.

It's also where the current Zelda director started, so there's an interesting dichotomy to observe there.
The 3DS version is enough imo, I don't think we need to focus on remastering every game under the sun no matter how great they are. Even OG OoT is still very playable despite some early 3D jank (by today's standards), which is still far better than other games released around the same time.
Community remasters are more interesting on that front. For me.

One, you know they're going to be 100% faithful or be criticized for it and two, you won't have to pay everytime they do a new itineration that gets further away from the source material.

In the end it'll be the best way to play the game and it'll be free from the N64 hardware.
 
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balgajo

Member
Water temple equipment switching imo is much easier to handle than need needing to menu all the time as in BOTW and TOTK, the latter being the worst offender.
 

E-Cat

Member
The 3DS version is basically that

or play Twilight Princess, it's like OoT's big brother except better in many ways
TP is a disjointed mess. It can only dream of being as coherent and iconic as OoT. And it was not revolutionary for its time, just another adventure game.

It's the little things, the lack of attention to aesthetic detail... like the horribly invasive, almost game-breaking battle music. And music in general is tinny and uses horrible samples. The gerudo desert chant was horrendous. And do I need to be reminded every goddamn time with a jingle when I pick up 5 rupees as if it was the first time? Amateur stuff.
 
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RavenSan

Off-Site Inflammatory Member
OoT is the greatest video game ever made. I will die on that hill.

THERE ARE DOZENS OF US, DOZENS!

On topic -- yeah, I would LOVE a remake with a modern (botw/totk) engine. Just keep the gameplay the same (i.e. don't shoehorn weapon durability, or abilities or stuff. Pure remake, with classic tool-per-dungeon gameplay design)
 
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MagnesD3

Member
TP is a disjointed mess. It can only dream of being as coherent and iconic as OoT. And it was not revolutionary for its time, just another adventure game.

It's the little things, the lack of attention to aesthetic detail... like the horribly invasive, almost game-breaking battle music. And music in general is tinny and uses horrible samples. The gerudo desert chant was horrendous. And do I need to be reminded every goddamn time with a jingle when I pick up 5 rupees as if it was the first time? Amateur stuff.
TP is just as good as Ocarina if not better, I'll never get the people who love Ocarina and dump on TP. They have very similar strengths.

The only real complaints with TP are the tutorial village is slow and wolf link combat could use more depth.

Tears are fine, Wii controls work excellently, Overworld is fun and Wolf Link stuff is cool. It has arguably (only rival is Ocarina) the best dungeons/bosses/ost, atmosphere and story/characters of the series. It does have the best side character with Midna. Yeah I will never understand any hatred towards TP unless you don't like Ocarina or don't care about incredible Dungeon design.
 
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E-Cat

Member
TP is just as good as Ocarina if not better, I'll never get the people who love Ocarina and dump on TP. They have very similar strengths.

The only real complaints with TP are the tutorial village is slow and wolf link combat could use more depth.

Tears are fine, Wii controls work excellently, Overworld is fun and Wolf Link stuff is cool. It has arguably (only rival is Ocarina) the best dungeons/bosses/ost, atmosphere and story/characters of the series. It does have the best side character with Midna. Yeah I will never understand any hatred towards TP unless you don't like Ocarina or don't care about incredible Dungeon design.
People have different preferences, y'know. If I could some it up with one word, it would be "atmosphere". Nothing in TP rivals the Forest Temple, that whole dungeon is just a mood. TP dungeons are fine mechanically, but I just don't like them as much.

Also, just so you know how this works for me, if TP is considered "just as good as OoT", it is not as good by definition because it came out a whole generation later. I judge games based on the context of their times as well, so that's basically asking for TP to be transcendent in some way, which it wasn't. And, like I said, I aesthetically prefer OoT. There's nothing anyone can say to that, it's merely how I feel. It's not "hatred" to say I prefer something over TP, either -- it's a fine game.
 
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MagnesD3

Member
People have different preferences, y'know. If I could some it up with one word, it would be "atmosphere". Nothing in TP rivals the Forest Temple, that whole dungeon is just a mood. TP dungeons are fine mechanically, but I just don't like them as much.

Also, just so you know how this works for me, if TP is considered "just as good as OoT", it is not as good by definition because it came out a whole generation later. I judge games based on the context of their times as well, so that's basically asking for TP to be transcendent in some way, which it wasn't. And, like I said, I aesthetically prefer OoT. There's nothing anyone can say to that, it's merely how I feel. It's not "hatred" to say I prefer something over TP, either -- it's a fine game.
Oh man the Sky temple in TP has some of the best atmosphere I've ever seen, the way the music and loneliness makes you feel like your going crazy. I love OoT temples too tho, it has great atmosphere as well that Shadow Temple is very spoopy with its creepy drums.
 
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E-Cat

Member
Oh man the Sky temple in TP has some of the best atmosphere I've ever seen, the way the music and loneliness makes you feel like your going crazy. I love OoT temples too tho, it has great atmosphere as well that Shadow Temple is very spoopy with its creepy drums.
I do like the trippy atmosphere in Sky Temple, as well as Temple of Time (I love how obsessive it sounds, like trying to solve a riddle) and the Water Temple (water temple vibes in Zeldas in general are excellent, like OoT & MM, too). But I cannot stress enough how much the battle music takes me out of it. For some reason, the "danger" music in OoT, MM and WW doesn't bother me at all, but here it is a grating immersion-killer. It gets triggered so far away from the enemy, too. And even during Midna's Lament! I may be in the minority, but my tastes can be very particular.

I'm really big on music overall, and OoT dungeon music is just on another tier. Koji Kondo really outdid himself here, and that's saying something. I would classify Inside the Deku Tree, Forest Temple and Spirit Temple as some of my all-time fav minimalistic background music.
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
If Ocarina of Time was a fighter they would be unbeaten, it makes other Zelda games look embarrassing.
 

MagnesD3

Member
I do like the trippy atmosphere in Sky Temple, as well as Temple of Time (I love how obsessive it sounds, like trying to solve a riddle) and the Water Temple (water temple vibes in Zeldas in general are excellent, like OoT & MM, too). But I cannot stress enough how much the battle music takes me out of it. For some reason, the "danger" music in OoT, MM and WW doesn't bother me at all, but here it is a grating immersion-killer. It gets triggered so far away from the enemy, too. And even during Midna's Lament! I may be in the minority, but my tastes can be very particular.

I'm really big on music overall, and OoT dungeon music is just on another tier. Koji Kondo really outdid himself here, and that's saying something. I would classify Inside the Deku Tree, Forest Temple and Spirit Temple as some of my all-time fav minimalistic background music.
Interesting, I probably didn't notice since I don't remember it being an issue (maybe I liked the battle music, dont remember, although the Twilight attack music was stressful if I recall). I'm big on music too and love both games soundtracks.
 
It's one of those mediocre games that started the whole idea of reviewers being paid to inflate scores with the growth of the web back then. In the USA the N64 was at it's best salewise and OoT was one of those games that was pushed extremely hard to try and close the widening gap with PS1, but wasn't able to accomplish that. But, a lot of the fables about the game still are in peoples heads today. First 3D rpg was a fun marketing gimmick that was going around then, and the game wasn't even an rpg.

It did feel like Nintendo gave up afterward. They stopped N64 full-scale marketing on big releases after that.
 
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FStubbs

Member
Played it twice.
Ocarina of Time is overrated as hell. It's good, but it's not as good as some people make it out to be.
Although, to be fair, I've never been a Zelda fan, and the franchise didn't grab me until BotW and TotK.
Ocarina of Time should always be remembered for the pioneering title it was. But I think these open world interpretations of the first Zelda was what they were trying to achieve even back then; OoT was just the limit of what the N64 would allow at that time. The franchise then IMO made the quite reasonable but ultimately mistaken decision of going in the overall direction of "let's make a better Ocarina of Time" up until BotW.
 
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