Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Another game review. If you aren't interested in someone talking about video games in a wierd fashion, then considered yourself warned.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Review? p.s. spoilers...

PROS) The good...
1) Another Zelda game. w00t. Standard Zelda formula is always fun. Progress through the game fighting bosses, searching dugeons and saving people from evil. It's always fun to make your character better by getting pieces of heart, bigger wallets, bigger bomb bags, arrow bags, extra magic spells, extra attacks, and all other cool upgrades and items.
2) Cinematics... very good. Some scenes in the game seem like they came straight out of a movie and are extremely well done.
3) Graphics - Very interesting art style and such. No more comments. here.
4) As always with Zelda, great music. And it's fun how they blend music into the gameplay with the ocarina.
5) Sidequests - fun stuff. Getting biggoron's sword and selling masks were pretty cool. Though I thought the Biggoron's sword was a tad too easy or short.
6) Day/Night system. Majora's Mask had one too, and this system is pretty awesome. Seeing the sun set over hyrule field, riding on your horse at the top of the cliff... just awesome.
7) Z-Targeting system is always awesome. A feature that seemed truly innovative.
8) Some of the boss fights were truly epic, especially with Z-Targeting, awesome music playing in the background, and a truly gargantuan enemy to fight.
9) The ending sequence, (basically the whole Ganon Tower thing) was just kind of pure awesome. Running up the long staircase, fighting mini-bosses, and then finding Ganondorf playin the organ??? That was just pretty cool, and awesome. Final fight was tight and the whole ending was cool.


CONS) ...The Bad... (Legally, this should not exist since a horde of people claim this game is a 10.00 [perfect] and is the best game of all time [maybe perfect too?]. Maybe I'm just pushy...)

1) It takes too long to do things - e.g. in the old 2D zelda games (Let's take Zelda a Link to the Past for example), things worked much faster. By this I mean everything in general. For example, just going into a shop in LttP (Link to the Past) requires you to run up to the door and you just open it by walking into it, and then you get in that door in about 1/2 a second. In Ocarina of Time, you have to go up to the door, press use (not a bad thing), but then you have to watch a "enter door" animation, and once you get inside the building, an "entering room" animation. So each time you go in the building it takes about 3 seconds (I think). This is 6x slower than LttP!! Also still on the slowness issue, it takes much too long to walk around on foot. I probably spent hours walking around Hyrule. At least in LttP they had sprint boots which allowed me to run at lightning speed.
2) And yes, I know about Epona, Link's horse. This does provide a faster mobility for much of Hyrule. But, but... Epona is very clumsy. I found myself battling with the controls to get Epona to go through this narrow spot. Epona would keep messing up and going left and right and backwards... all the ways didn't want her to go. And also, Epona could not get into many places in Hyrule, such as Villages, Deserts, and Forests, and other Dungeon like places.
3) The story was... good. But, it was very shallow or sort of. I was interested in the story all up until Link got transformed into Adult Link. Shortly after that, I defeated the first Adult Dungeon. Then suddenly the story seemed to be put on hold all the way until after the last dungeon. It wasn't a really BAD thing, but I would've like to see more story progression with the dungeons. (I am aware this problem [i consider it a problem] is something that is in almost every Zelda game, but it struck me harder in this one.)
4) Regarding Money (or rupees if you prefer) --- I would constantly, over and over, and over... and over, and over again, fill my wall up to the max (whether this be 100, 200, or 500). At these times I wanted to put my money in a bank account (like Majora's Mask) or buy something that costed alot. Trouble was though, there was no bank system, and the only things that cost alot of money were either completely useless, or I already had them. Because of this, I never wanted to collect money anymore. I almost always had the max amount for my wallet.
5) Repetiveness... Some of the dugeons I found more as a chore than interactive fun. The moment I entered one dugeon, I knew I was in a for a hour ride of puzzle solving, biting my brain from confusing labyrinths, fighting hard bosses, and trying to make it out alive (this only happened once or twice to me I think). I guess this isn't a fair comment from me though, because I think I played Zelda about 5 hours straight when I did that. Maybe it was just the boredom painkiller setting in...


After thoughts...
Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is a very good game. Classic Zelda formula for the first time in a 3D enviroment with some very revolutionary features. There were some few things that bothered me though (and i probably mentioned them up there).

Random Afterthought #1 :: In the desert collusus dugeon (the Spirit Temple I believe), I entered the dungeon as a kid and was happy to find another person in there. The person then sent me on a quest in the dungeon and I thought it was pretty cool. I mention this because I thought it would've been more interesting to have more interaction INSIDE the dungeon with NPCs other than going RAMBO and attacking endless monsters and solving contraptions. Like, maybe find other people in the dungeons and do other quest stuff like that, because I thought it was fun.

Afterthought # 2 :: I wish there were more sidequests and items you could collect. LttP had a bunch of crazy extra items (if i can remember correctly...). And more sidequests could've been nice (like Majora's Mask).


FINAL SCORE :::
Um...
I'd give it 9.2?

Anyways, it was a good game but I had a few nitpicks about it.

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3 Comments:

At 12/07/2005 2:45 PM, Blogger ifedajay said...

Well, well, well...JBurger, you sound like a very experienced gamer. I think that your analysis was exceptional.

So, there was a young Link, I mean "JOshua."

 
At 12/07/2005 2:46 PM, Blogger ifedajay said...

I didn't finish. I think that there is not supposed to be much of a story in these games.

However, for the sake of the gamer, and to attract more buyers, companies probably should invest more time developing their story.

.

 
At 5/03/2006 3:52 PM, Blogger TheJBurger said...

"My analysis was exceptional..."

This is a good thing right?

 

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