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 Kokiri Forest |  Sheikah Stone |  Lon Lon Ranch |
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 Hyrule Castle Town |  Cathedral of Time? |  Down a hole |
 Running Man |  Hyrule Field |  Surrounded! |
When the only boy in the whole forest without a fairy is suddenly called before the Great Deku Tree, things must really be getting bad. Armed with a child-sized sword and oaken shield, Link has to face down all the evil in the world and assemble the keys to the Door of Time. But, that's just kid's stuff! The real challenge starts when a guy with a mustache gives Link a medallion in a weird waterfall type of room somewhere in, like, negative space or something, and tells him to awaken the Sages. Great! You want the parsley, rosemary, and thyme, too?
But seriously, folks—Ocarina of Time 3D was the first of 2 games (the other being Super Mario 3D Land I got for my Nintendo 3DS, along with the console itself, for Hanukkah 5772. The first thing I ever did with my 3DS was play Ocarina 3D while my mum was watching a Danny Kaye picture on DVD. Anyway, I don't remember much else, because that was my first Hanukkah back from college and things seemed to be happening in my extended family that were souring me toward the childish pursuit of videogames. Promptly in February 2012, I put my 3DS back into its display box and exiled it to my closet for the next 11 years. After I jailbroke my 3DS in December of last year, I started playing it again, but not extensively. I'd just finished a longplay of the N64 original before Hanukkah '84, which had only ended about 2 weeks ago at that point. I was more interested in playing the stuff from my abandonware datahoard, like Mario Kart 7 and Animal Crossing: New Leaf, as well as DS ROMs on TWiLight Menu. Yeah, suffice to say, my love for games returned with a vengeance that December.
This current session is actually only about 9 months after my first longplay, which happened in January and ended in early March, when I realised the final gold Skulltula was probably inside Ganon's castle, so I quit. That was my motivation for playing—I wanted to see if GREZZO decided to fix up the House of Skulltula if you killed all 100 gold spiders (probably not, but I wanted to confirm this through ground-truth). I'd only ever made it to 100 gold spiders on the N64 original with a GameShark code (and it wasn't the N64, it was the GCN reissue sent to people who pre-ordered The Wind Waker, and it wasn't the GameShark, it was the Action Replay). The puzzles don't seem quite so insurmountable as they did when I was a kid; I remember having the worst difficulty with the Shadow Temple back then. A, I was lowkey afraid of ReDeads and you won't find more of them in a single map than the Shadow Temple; B, I was totally incapable of linear thought back then. I couldn't conceive that this dungeon had a linear progression; I figured you had to run back and forth like Doom to get anything. Also, I was a champion sequence-breaker in my childhood—if there was a bit of the map I didn't want to do because it was too hard, too time consuming, or too scary, I'd find the one thing the developers didn't test for and use it to advance beyond that bit. This was easier to do in the Shadow Temple because of the hover-boots and the longshot. Whatever didn't get my blood sucked by a ReDead. In February 2024, though, the Shadow Temple was decidedly unchallenging and I was in and out of there in 2 days. It would have taken me 1 day, but my 3DS ran out of battery and I got onto playing The Sims whilst it was charging. I haven't gotten to the Shadow Temple in this current session, I only just finished the Bottom of the Well last evening, now I'm doing the Happy Mask Shop sidequest and planting as many of the Magic Beans as I can find plots for (I know one of them is next to the Desert Colossus, so we won't be planting that one for quite some time).
One of the things I used to do back when also was walk, rather than run. Something my gran said: "That little man must get tired from all that running you make him do." I decided, if I were in Link's Kokiri Boots, I wouldn't want to run everywhere. After all, Mr. What's-his-nuts made us run in PE class all the time and it tired me out. Not because I thought Link was real and he was puffed from all the running about, but because I found I could use Hyrule as a substitute for the nature park that I liked to go to but was too far away to get to regularly. So, I'd take scenic walks in the country as Link walking from point A to point B in Ocarina of Time. This time, I've started doing that again. It makes my hand surprisingly numb, holding the pad forward as little as that, but I enjoy the walks more now that it's in high-def. Sometimes I'll get a little impatient and jog down a hill or something, but it's fun. For me, anyway.
On to more practical matters. I know I'm going to get a lot of knee-jerk disagreement on this point, but the Water Temple isn't hard, actually. The 3DS version uses additional textures and lights to ensure a more harmonious progression, but nothing about the mission has changed. The 3DS version hasn't made anything easier, just more visible—and I'm willing to bet we all thought the Water Temple was hard because we were kids who couldn't think in a straight line. Anyway, just follow the lights and, if you get stuck, that's what the Sheikah Stone is for. Just remember to cast Farore's Wind before you warp to the Temple of Time.
10/10, would recommend with no reservations. You can play this, then you can play the N64 original, or the other way around. That's why Nintendo has been consistently re-releasing this game in some form or another for the past 22 years, with most incarnations being the 1998 original. It's one of those games that is still fun, no matter what you play it on. If someone put the question to me, "Which one is better? The N64 version or the 3DS version?", I would answer the N64 version. Obviously, the 3DS version was supposed to be the system's killer app, so it's got the Spectacle, but the gameplay is only slightly different from the N64 and the progression of 1 dungeon has been demystified. Otherwise, they're precisely the same. The only thing the 3DS version does better than the N64 is the ability to physically aim at things by moving the console, which, for players who have crap-ass fine motor skills like me, is a saving grace, especially in the Forest Temple, where fast aiming is a necessity.
