I played Ocarina of Time for the first time — and immediately played it a second time
Hello everybody, Breath of the Wild is the only 3D Zelda game I had beaten before, and I hadn’t even played a single minute of Ocarina of Time before this year. At first, I kind of hated it. I liked the music, story, and atmosphere of the game, but I could never figure out where to go or how to solve the puzzles. It was almost embarrassing how bad I was. I was constantly hearing the low-heart beeping noise, and running back to the boss room to try again with only three hearts (due to my lack of healing items) was infuriating. I also missed a ton. I never got Epona’s song, Sun song, fire arrows, ice arrows, any item capacity upgrades… the list goes on. And to top it all off, I finished this playthrough with 26 deaths.
I beat the game, put the cartridge back in its box, but realized something — I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept thinking about the world, the characters, the puzzles which I now knew how to solve… so, I booted it up again and started a new profile.
This time, I had a three missions:
- Try to beat every dungeon without a guide (being that they were fresh in my memory).
- Achieve 100% completion. I wanted to see everything the game has to offer.
- No deaths. I found out between playthroughs about fairy fountains and I intended to use them.
And I did it! Almost. The one dungeon I still needed to look up a guide for was the water temple, but only once, because I forgot about the bomb-able wall above the room where you find Ruto in.
Overall, what can I say besides this is a very special game. It blew my mind in 2026 as a 25 year old; I can only imagine what it would’ve been like to play it as a kid when it came out. Contrary to what a lot of people say, I think the original version of this game has aged incredibly well. Nintendo was so ahead of the times with this game, setting the standard right out of the gate for what a 3D action-adventure game should look, feel, and play like. It even looked great visually on my small tv. I never understand why people want to play N64 games in higher resolution. They look best when they’re a little fuzzy, not when you can see every sharp polygon.
And you probably noticed, but I played the Japanese version of this game on original hardware. It’s great being into retro gaming here in Japan, considering I think I only paid around $15 for my copy of Oot in box. It was also cool getting to play the first edition of this game, with the fire temple chanting, Goron moon emblem everywhere, and seeing Ganon’s face gush red blood as Link stabs him — which totally caught me off guard! I think I finally get why so many people adore the Zelda series, and can’t wait to play Majora’s Mask once I can find it at a store!