Pretty much any gamer worth a lick of their salt lick is familiar with the multi-generational classic series The Legend of Zelda. It’s one of the most prestigious names in gaming, and while there are many titles that are perhaps more recognizable (Mario, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, hell, maybe even Madden), none of them appear to illicit the kind of emotional reaction that the name Zelda invokes. Maybe it’s because of the epic fantasy elements, maybe it’s the romanticized storyline of a clear boundary between good and evil, emphasized destiny, or maybe it just so happens to be a series particularly vulnerable to the trappings of nostalgia and the phenomenon of rose-tinted glasses.
My particular journey with the Zelda franchise started with the once considered to be magnum opus for the series, if not gaming in general, Ocarina of Time (which I will occasionally refer here to as OoT). Released in 1998, just a few years after the mass implementation of marketable 3D games, OoT was universally hailed as a mastapiece, and exemplar of the genre, and possibly video games’ answer to Citizen Kane. For me, it was the ultimate escapist fantasy. The template that the protagonist Link set influenced my own creative endeavors, and it was no coincidence that for several years, nearly all of my top 10 favorite games were Zelda games.
I could go on for days about the historical impact that Ocarina of Time had on the video games industry, from its impact to influencing epic scale adventures like Dark Souls and Shadows of the Colossus, or the waves sent out through the critical aspect. I could also pontificate for a similarly unnecessary length of time about its impact on my personal development and growth. But being widely acknowledged as one of the greatest video games of all time means that this article wouldn’t be any more insightful than what’s already been written countless times by people much more eloquent, knowledgeable and probably more handsome than me.
Instead, I’d like to repurpose this discussion as a point by point refutation of one of gaming’s more polarizing figure’s infamous dissents of the Ocarina’s near universal high appraisal. Egoraptor, real name: Arin Hanson (this is a Bond movie now, and you’re along for the ride) is an animator who rose to fame in the early 2010’s as one half of the successful Let’s Play duo, Game Grumps. Around this time, he also wrote and animated a short video series called Sequelitis, whose primary intent was to analyze successful video games and compare them, for better or for worse, with their sequels. Sequelitis, as a trope, typically refers to a successful work in media that suffers from a lackluster sequel, usually because rehashed concepts become less palatable when reused. True to form, the series typically criticizes these tropes, but it’s not all negative. Fortunately for Mr. Hanson, his previous videos had either criticized an already particularly maligned game (Castlevania II) or heaped praise upon a well received one (Mega Man X). This allowed the series to build up a positive reputation, with Hanson’s exuberant articulation merely eloquently putting to video what so many people were already thinking. But going against the grain of cultural consensus by unfavorably comparing Ocarina of Time to A Link to the Past would reveal flaws in this setup. He will later allude to this, but attempting to dismantle a game as lionized as Ocarina of Time would truly put him in the public’s crosshairs. Is this fair? No game is perfect, certainly. OoT is over two decades old now (I weep as life passes me by). He certainly is entitled to his opinion. Where I think the ole Raptor erred was largely in his logic and how he arrived at his conclusions.
It is true that the video is about 6 years old now, but the sentiment is certainly still alive that Ocarina of Time is an overrated game. I believe this video was a rally point of sorts for people who disliked the positive praise that OoT has garnered for years and now mainstream acceptance of Ocarina as either overrated or even a bad game has reached a zenith that was unprecedented beforehand. As a certified, registered, and licensed Zelda fanboy, I feel it my duty to toss my own hat in the ring, and weigh the criticisms levied against the game, and see if they’re arguments made in good faith, or merely a representation of hype backlash. Hype backlash is a trope where, in response to overwhelming critical acclaim, people end up setting their expectations too high and come off experiencing the work as overrated. Or, alternatively, they willingly fight against the acclaim due to their own biases, as they see the work as “undeserving”. Are these apt descriptors of Arin’s critique of the game? Let’s analyze point by point, (I suggest checking out his video here for context if any of my points appear to feel too nebulous):
It doesn’t take long for Arin to show preemptive defensiveness towards his argument’s opposition. He imagines OoT’s supporters as a strawman, projecting qualities of close-mindedness and emotional fervor as they type their “preemptive counterargument to why you’re wrong.” The irony won’t soon be lost on you, although, being fair for a sec, he is right that fanboys typically argue utilizing confirmation bias. That is, the tendency to come to a conclusion about a topic first, then devise argumentation to support it later, as opposed to analyzing the arguments first and coming to a conclusion that is supported by those arguments. Everyone is guilty of this at some point or another, including me, but we’ll get back to the issue of confirmation bias later.
I’m not really sure what he alludes to in his introduction. “Everyone who plays a Zelda game can tell you what it consists of, but is that an apt description and is that missing the point?” Well, first we’d have to know what exactly you think a Zelda game consists of, right? Helpfully, he illustrates his view by telling us that the original LoZ was an ill defined quest about a guy finding random shit in a style of wide-eyed adventure-dom, and goes on to say that regardless, of how it is now, this is how it started. It might seem innocuous, but Arin is already telegraphing the philosophies that form his opinion.
I think it important to note here that video games conveyed story differently back in the ancient olden days of 1986. Developers often chose to leave little or no exposition in the game itself to save room for all the action. But this didn’t mean that these games had no story at all. Rather, a good deal of story and other information was left for you to read in the accompanying game manual. Today, due to the rarity of in-the-box copies of older games, it’s common for those looking to play these classics to get the cartridge without the manual, or play it on a simulator, where the manual doesn’t accompany it. Thus, newer players lose the context that these manuals provided and mistake newer games for codifying story elements that had already existed in previous games, but in the manual. This phenomenon is greatly expounded upon in the TV Tropes article for All There in the Manual, which I recommend checking out. You might ask why any of this is important, but one will notice a habit for the Raptor to disregard anything not spelled out in the game itself. This dogma is evident when he passes over mentioning the Adventure of Link(in. Park).
It’s well known that Zelda II is not exactly looked at favorably amongst the Zelda community because of its relatively odd nature, what with the RPG elements and side scrolling nature. But passing over it I believe is emblematic the foolishness of believing that Zelda needs to be a certain way or bust. While Zelda II definitely stands out as an oddball today, with very few Zelda titles even adapting a smidgen of its concepts, one has to realize that up to that point in history, there literally only existed two Zelda games. Who was to say which way was the “right” way to portray the gameplay? Now Zelda 1 would end up being the game vindicated by history, and would go on to codify later 2D installments, but that didn’t mean Zelda II’s style was inferior. But it did show that perhaps there was more room to breathe innovation than other, more static franchises, like Mario or Mega Man. Essentially, Arin is letting the viewer know that he believes there is an objective style that is preferable to Zelda, and other ways are “wrong”, even if he wouldn’t say such as boldly.
He is right to acknowledge that A Link to the Past (henceforth ALttP) expounded upon the greatness of the first game and dramatically increased its content and scope. But again, he falls into the trap of thinking that a game straying from some element of the original is inherently some kind of sin. Here, he talks about how ALttP railroads you into linear objectives, as opposed to the free roam, “do whatcha want, ion care” mentality of the first game. Now I’m a huge fan of open-ended gameplay myself. But linearity is not on a dichotomous line graph in the same way that good and evil is. It’d be more comparable to a line-graph measuring from an apple to an orange. Both styles have their own pros and cons and one style is not superior to the other, so long as the execution is of quality. And while Zelda 1 is certainly to be lauded for its freedom, it’s not all sunshines and unicorns and candy wizards or whatever that phrase is. Wandering into an area far beyond the player’s ability sucks! It might be cool, but it’s frustrating, especially if the challenge is not something that’s doable but is locked to you because you don’t have the correct item to proceed. Later titles in the series made the dungeon process linear as to allow the chance to complete a dungeon on its first sitting, instead of having to backtrack to find the plot coupon necessary to proceed. Even the games that focus on a less linear experience, like A Link Between Worlds, and Breath of the Wild give you the ability to access all the tools you need to succeed at the start.
After this we get to the meat and potatoes of Arin’s argument. He accurately describes OoT as legitimately altering the video game landscape by the shift in style of 2D to 3D. As Super Mario 64 showed us, this was an exciting and simultaneously terrifying change in gaming. By the time of the Super NES, 2D style games were essentially being perfected, and it seems like the industry was compelled to move forward in the name of progress. But Mario 64 proved that not only was this change viable, but Mario 64’s vast profitability meant 3D WAS the wave of the future and could produce games that could not only compete with the classics, but perhaps even blow them out of the water. Implementing these massive changes wasn’t going to be easy, as Arin correctly pointed out, but bringing up Sonic presents its own host of issues, not the least of which is the clip he showed of Sonic glitching out was one you deliberately had to trigger, and not necessarily a prime example of the broken gameplay he alluded to…
He then makes a point about how frustrating it is to try to hit the bat-like enemies in OoT because the Z-axis makes it clear where they exist in space…because ALttP didn’t really have a Z-axis and so you were allowed to basically hit them easily. His point here is that by making the game more “realistic”, you have to create more limitations to adhere them closer to what’s expected. Personally, I don’t see how it’s a negative for a game to have increasing complexity, and grow out of the limitations of the hardware that previously allowed you to cheat, as it were. His argument that being able to attack a flying bat is better in 2D because of ease of attack, which I don’t feel is a strong point. In a 2D space, flying enemies essentially perform exactly as grounded enemies would and provide no additional challenge. Creating a 3D world will definitely create new problems, but OoT did not disallow new solutions, as ranged weapons certainly circumvented your ranged weakness, and the first person mode allowed you to effectively aim from a distance if you took advantage of it. Being able to engage enemies with different properties, be they grounded, or flying, or aquatic or whatever, should be seen as a plus for an action game. It creates diversity in enemy challenges, which should be the goal for any game featuring a robust combat system. That the 3D system is inferior because it annoys Arin strikes me as primarily an aversion to challenge, or simple laziness. Arin’s personal gaming style affecting his view of OoT will crop up later.
Arin does allude to how the revolutionary Z-targeting system was in transforming combat into 2D space, but takes a shit on the concept nearly immediately. His rationale is that the combat and outer world exploration are divided due to how the Z-targeting switches your broad camera angle to a more focused affair. I can understand that interacting with the world in the same vein as combat may be preferable and stepping into a whole new world for the combat can jar the pacing. However, I feel as though the shift is not as drastic as he makes it out to be. Nothing changes about the world or the gameplay when you lock on to an enemy. It’s a tool to make combat less chaotic. Of course, if you’d like you could always choose to fight without the lock-on system, but I think you’d find THAT version of the game to be even more disorienting. Again, his argument is that the lock-on system makes battle more complicated, and thus more challenging. He almost makes a good point in that, theoretically, being unable to manage all the enemies in a room could lead to fake difficulty (that is, difficulty that can’t normally be accounted for by the player’s input or skill, and thus is cheap). However, the clip that he uses to illustrate this is of a tektite (think alien water spider) jumping on him from the top of a vertical room. While it can be argued that him getting hit by this was an example of a cheap hit, (which is arguable, since every enemy I can recall has audio cues to let you know that they’re in the room) the aforementioned hit was nowhere near combat, and can’t really be argued to be the result of the cheapening of combat with unknown threats.
This is just an aside but, if you’re not already aware….Ocarina of Time is a pretty damn easy game, puzzles aside. I don’t mean to say that as some elitist gamer who could beat Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls on my first try or beat the entirety of I Wanna Be the Guy with dual eyepatches on. I want my blog to be accessible to gamers of all experience levels, so I enjoy talking about games regardless of their difficulty level. But I’d like to think that Ocarina of Time is a fairly easy game that’s accessible to gamers of any skill level. I think when I was about 12 or so, I beat Ocarina of Time with maybe six deaths throughout the game. To put it in perspective, Arin played the entirety of OoT on his Game Grumps channel and died at least 30 times throughout. As an adult. With adult hands and adult brain. Again, I have nothing against gamers who identify more casually, but when you profess yourself to being some arbiter of good game design, I expect you to be a little more experienced. Thus, when you complain about difficulty on what’s usually understood to be a fairly easy game, that in my mind shrinkens credibility somewhat.
Arin’s next point is going to be the overall crux of his thesis against Ocarina. You could rename his video “A Treatise Against Waiting”. I will agree that many of the enemies in Ocarina do have combat encounters characterized by waiting for an opening to strike and then counter attacking. I would further concur that too many of these enemies rely on this to the point that it decreases enemy diversity. But is this an inherently bad kind of combat encounter? I’d say it’s not. The challenge here is largely one of patience, which is quite honestly how combat in real life goes down. If you have an itchy trigger finger, you will get punished, of course. Unsurprisingly, if you watch Arin’s experience with the game, you can see his impatience in action. His idea of a successful combat encounter is to button mash the sword button until every enemy collapses from exhaustion, apparently. It’s no wonder that he died so often when he gives enemies free hits. And if you’re not a patient person, you’re not cosigned to sitting through long boring fights if you don’t want to. In Ocarina there exists a multitude of items that can stun enemies if you use them correctly, which circumvents many of the waiting issues and puts the ball into your court. While I agree with his point that more enemies could have been like the Iron Knuckle, where the enemy dictates the pace of the fight, his insistence that every enemy be like that and OoT’s combat “could have been even better” strikes of magical thinking.
His point about the eyeball puzzle also supports an interpretation of Arin as someone who’d like to do a lot less thinking and a lot more doing. True, merely identifying the presence of a switch in a room is not much of a puzzle, but it does test your spatial awareness. With Ocarina of Time essentially being the first 3D action/adventure/puzzle grab bag that the Zelda series is associated with, it was actually a clever way to test players’ first foray into this new realm of gameplay. They’re supposed to be a relatively simple introduction into being alert with your surroundings in this new, scary 3D space. You may argue that the puzzle cropping up in later dungeons is somewhat superfluous, but at least in the Forest Temple it’s a great way of getting you in the head space for that dungeon’s boss fight, where you must quickly scope the room for your arrow target.
I disagree with his assessment that puzzles are always these rigid affairs where all the pieces are made clear to you. Sometimes finding the piece you’re lacking is a huge component in creating a multilayered puzzle. I mean, I’d hate to see what he thinks of those old adventure games like King’s Quest which were infinitely more cryptic with their absence of information. And believe me, I get the feeling of exasperation when you’re being roadblocked in a game because you don’t have some item or ability needed to proceed in some other far distant realm. I’m currently playing through Banjo Tooie and that game has that shit in spades. But the key difference here is that Banjo’s separation of the puzzle and its solution could span multiple areas or even multiple worlds. In Ocarina, the separation is at most, a few rooms within the same dungeon. The game gives you all the tools to figure these things out by introducing unsolvable elements early in a dungeon to pique your sense of wonder and by giving you a map to be able to quantify what progress you lack. If you’re stuck in one room, just move to another. The game very rarely, if ever, presents multiple roadblocks in the same dungeon. The clip he plays to illustrate this is in a late game dungeon where you have the option of tackling six different paths in whichever order you want. The puzzle in question is simply solved by going down a different path to acquire the item necessary to get past it. Arin should have had enough experience throughout the game to know not to get hung up on one path trying to brute force his way through.
The next example of a “good” puzzle design is one of the most egregious errors of the entire analysis. He begins talking about an encounter in the original Zelda where in order to open the door, you have to fight a room full of Darknuts (I tried to fit a deez nuts joke in, snail mail me for tips and tricks to make it work). He proselytizes enthusiastically about how engaging it is to “find vantage points, ins and outs, manage your health, dodge them when they gang up”. Maybe my more experienced readers can identify the issue with this. Don’t worry, I’ll cue the Jeopardy music. Find it yet?
This is not a puzzle!
This is a combat challenge and is really no different than a lot of combat challenges in Ocarina, or most games for that matter. We can’t really fault the original Zelda for its more basic approaches to creating adversity being so old and a progenitor, but that doesn’t mean we should be complimenting it for that approach and thinking games should return to that mode of thinking! And just in case you think Arin was simply making a divergent point to talk about something unrelated, he almost immediately ties this back into complaints about the puzzles.
We have to get something straight before talking about the next point. For good or bad, compliment or insult, it’s really not fair to compare 1:1 the design of 2D games to that of 3D ones. Adding a single dimension adds so much complexity that they can’t even be said to be alike enough to compare. Even separating them by 2D vs. 3D isn’t enough. What we have to analyze is this: what is the perspective? A 2D sidescroller has a different perspective than a 2D top down. The former has your perspective locked far away, as if viewing a portrait, whereas the latter has you hover above it, as if viewing the contents of a box. A 3D third person view is radically different than a first person view. Each of these perspectives are going to require you to analyze challenges in different ways. A 2D top down game might not ask as much of you as a 2D sidescroller, as with a topdown, you have vision of everything you need. A sidescroller has obstacles off screen that may be coming up rapidly that you need to deal with. A good sidescrolling gamer is not upon death going to scream “I had no idea that was coming, that’s bad design!”, they’re going to adjust their reaction time to compensate for upcoming obstacles that they can’t see yet (note: I do realize that there can be instances where obstacles can approach too quickly as to be cheap). Similarly, in a third person view, you accept naturally that there could be obstacles around that you may not immediately see. Ocarina actually has a remedy for some instances of limited vision actually. You’re free to stop and go into a first person perspective mode to get a better view of some rooms. Knowing all this, it’s absolutely baffling to hear Arin complain about these obstacles that you can’t supposedly see.
The clip he uses to chide these apparently invisible obstacles is a rotating saw blade around an ice arena. The blade orbits in a very obvious pattern and would be immediately apparent to you as you enter the room. If you get hit by it when you can’t see it, it’s not that you were hit by an unforeseeable object, it’s that you failed to utilize object permanence. Humans learn at a very young age, maybe even as young as 4 months, that when an object disappears out of vision, that the object has not stopped existing. Rather, we intuitively can sense the approximate location of that object depending on what direction it went and how fast it was going. If you’re traversing across this room with the blade, you should keep a mental note of how fast it’s going, and you’d probably have a reasonable sense of when the blade could possibly collide with you. This isn’t a case of bad design, but a failure of Arin to account for the additional challenges 3D space affords. Arin continuously makes the mistake of basing his criticism of Ocarina, not on independent failings, but how they compare to experiences of the 2D Zeldas, which are incomparable. Again, we see his dismal view of OoT being informed by confirmation bias towards a regression to older Zeldas.
It’s rather arrogant of him in the next sentence to chide this concept as “being a formula that doesn’t work and needs to change” especially since it’s an argument of assertion. Why does it need to change? Why doesn’t it work? Because you failed to understand it? Because you felt punished for it? That’s not objective criticism, that’s an emotional reaction to something that challenged you. It’s actually amusing hearing Arin rant about how developers need to be adaptive and not resistant to change when this video, and a lot of Arin’s opinions in general, are tied to an appreciation for mechanics of the past and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge change moving forward.
Speaking of moving forward, he insults sections of the game that provide no difficulty because “all you do to jump is move forward”. I’m not sure these sections are meant to be difficult per se, but you coulda fooled me when you watch clips of Arin attempt these easy jumps and fail to do so because he didn’t line up his camera to make the jump. Honestly, it’s somewhat aggravating hearing Arin oscillate between calling sections of the game too easy while simultaneously complaining that it’s too difficult. This is just from personal experience, but whenever I hear someone complain about easiness in the same game where they moan about difficulty, I can’t help but think it comes from a desire to over scrutinize a game they’re displeased with. If you really think about it, these complaints of easiness make no sense. Every single game, regardless of difficulty, has periods of down time where there’s no challenge or a reduced challenge. What happens when we see someone mow down skeletons and rats in Dark Souls and brag boisterously yet turn around and die twenty times to a boss and swear off the game for being “unfair”? We laugh at their hubris, don’t we? These miniature complaints are so petty that they’re essentially invalid for proper criticism of a work. Playing armchair psychologist for a bit, it’s almost as if the player feels himself to be a truly skilled gamer, so anything too easy for them they rationalize as beneath their time, while they sweep up anything too difficult as “not being an example of fair difficulty”. By this completely un-self-aware worldview, any insurmountable challenge is simply the designer’s fault.
One thing Arin does that completely destroys his credibility as design analyst is his own attempted forays into design suggestions. None are more hilarious than the next bit, where in order to spruce up these mindless excursions, he suggests implementing an obstacle that sounds nearly identical to the dreaded rotating blade that he just said was exemplary of poor game design. If the video weren’t a whopping 31 and a half minutes long, I’d say you can safely dismiss this very critique as being as useful as a response to A Modest Proposal, criticizing the savagery of poor people selling their children to feed the rich. Of course, any of Arin’s ancillary comments about Ocarina prove that this video was dead fucking serious.
Ok, fine, the bit about Bomb Bowling in Skyward Sword is funny, but it begs the question of why exactly Bomb Bowling is this egregious concept? I definitely see shades of JonTron here as the joke is “haha this thing is so obviously bad” but it’s not obvious at all what’s supposed to be laughable about it. It’s like he has this closed off worldview that’s unable to interpret any conflicting presuppositions as anything but incorrect. Again, we all have confirmation bias. It’s human nature. I have a bias towards OoT myself, as my earlier disclaimer states. But you can’t expand your knowledge base by simply reinforcing beliefs you already hold. I’m not perfect on this, but I really do enjoy seeking out what the opposing side is saying, and if it makes sense, I might adjust my view based on how it’s presented. Maybe every once in a while I’ll do it solely for the purpose of seeing how dumb the other side is, but hey that’s showbiz baby! In all seriousness, it’s perfectly fine to listen to what the other side is portraying, but if the argumentation is egregious, then giving it a fair shake may be secondary to addressing the flaws in the position.
At any rate, he goes on to complain about how Skyward Sword, and by extension, Ocarina of Time handles one of Zelda’s hallmarks: the exciting affair of acquiring items through chests. His argument here is that ALttP’s setup of letting you acquire the key to open the chest for the dungeon item and making you walk to the chest containing the item is “the most suspenseful thing ever” and likens it to running downstairs to unwrap the presents under the Christmas tree. This might be true if your stairs more resembled the endless ones in Super Mario 64, as often it can be quite the commute to pick up your item. He places great importance on how the feeling of suspense makes the reward all the more sweet. Okay, that’s wonderful, but how is OoT’s setup of showing an intense short cinematic with inspiring music any less suspenseful? It seems his argument here is a completely subjective one. Indeed, that commute to the chest probably takes exponentially more time than the chest cinematic, but to Arin, all that suspense goes out the window when he figuratively sees the toilet from across the room and can’t hold it in. You can see how contradictory this logic is when he plays the “look at how many chests I can open in this time” clip. All the ALttP footage features nearly no walking to the chest. Yeah, of course OoT chests take more time to open when you actually arrive at the chest, but this is like saying that a bike got you down the street quicker than a car because the car had to stop for gas first. It’s true, but misleading.
Suddenly, he begins to bring back the “waiting” argument as the source of his horrors. Since he rattles these off rapid fire, I think it’d be more efficient to do a call and response section here rather than rant for a paragraph:
“You gotta wait for a door to close”
Isn’t that that suspense you talked about? By the way, it literally takes 2 seconds.
“You gotta wait for a character to stop talking”
I guess this is an issue if you don’t like to read, but not one unique to OoT, and it’s the same in ALttP.
“You gotta wait for the dialogue box to tell you how to use bombs for the 47th goddamn time”
Ok, this one’s fair. Later games would only show the box once. In OoT, it only shows it once if you come back to the game after a saved session and find more bombs. But still, it’s unnecessary.
“Wait for the switch to make a music tone and open a door across the room”
This camera actually zooms to the door in the room in question in an attempt to not disorient you. I can’t see how this is a bad thing. Also 2 seconds.
“Wait for Link to go flying backwards and get up off the ground”
Ah yes, the intersection of “this game has too much waiting” and “this game’s combat is too hard”. Well that sounds like good motivation to get better at the game.
“Wait for bombs to blow up”
I mean, would you rather them blow up in your hands? They’re on a fuse for a reason. Again, no different from other Zeldas.
The argument against the teleportation spells is a bit more involved. Basically, he involves every single step under the moon as an argument for how long it takes to go from one place to another, but to pad his argument, he adds in the time it takes to go from a child to an adult. To contrast, he says that in ALttP, “you just equip the Magic Mirror, press a button and you’re there” ignoring that the mirror doesn’t transport you to any location, it just switches you between the dark and light worlds. You’re standing in the exact same spot in a mirror imaged world. You can develop quite an effective misleading argument by leaving out all this information. People who haven’t played Ocarina (which are numbering greater as the game becomes considered retro) might be convinced to think ALttP is superior in this regard just due to the glaring omissions.
Contrary to Arin’s philosophy, exploration is not some high speed affair. Exploration, in my mind, is more of an adventure at your own pace, without something rushing you. I love Majora’s Mask, but that game’s time limit may suit him more with his GOTTA GO FAST DON’T STOP DON’T THINK mentality. But of course, he hates that game too for no other reason than it’s popular.
Speaking of gotta going fast, he introduces new topics at breakneck pace. Not but a few seconds later he’s complaining about the routine monotony of the dungeon process, namely that you find an item in the dungeon, use it to kill the boss and do so in a pattern of three times. Now, granted, Zelda games have been known to be guilty of abusing these tropes, but largely because OoT codified it. I personally have no problem with this arrangement, but I understand it’s not everyone’s preference. What’s baffling, however, is that this trope was not noticeable on OoT’s release; his annoyance is stemming from his experience with newer Zeldas copying OoT’s formula. If you hadn’t picked it up earlier, I’m a huge fan of TV Tropes, and in the in revolutionary words of Apple, if it exists, there’s a trope for that. Seinfeld is Unfunny describes any time when a work displays some feature that when in retrospect has been done to death, but those experiencing it may not realize that it wasn’t done to death by the time the work came out, because the work was the one that first displayed that feature. And because that feature was well received or popular, it became proliferated in other works. Then people who experience it later chide it for being samey without realizing it was the progenitor. When Arin came out with this Sequelitis, he had played the game anew to gather complaints for it. That’s why you see so many references to Skyward Sword, a game that came out closer to when the Sequelitis was in production. You can read this criticism as more of an extension of his hate for that game as opposed to OoT.
“Can you please tell me, what about this world is interesting, if I know before I even finish the dungeon what the boss battle is going to be?”
This is pretty reductionist, as just because you may or may not use the dungeon item on the boss, doesn’t mean the battle will be telegraphed. Let’s take Bongo Bongo for example, the boss of late game Shadow Temple. You don’t use dungeon item Hover Boots on him at all, unless you want to make your life more difficult. Instead you use in tandem the Lens of Truth (which, granted, is an item that features prominently in the temple) and the bow. Let’s go a step further and talk about a boss where you do use the dungeon item on, Phantom Ganon. Yes, you do indeed use the dungeon item bow on him, but are you going to know exactly how to execute it before you fight him? He’s actually one of the most interesting fights in the game, as he rides his horse through paintings on the wall and you have to be alert and keep up with his movements to get a good shot on him. In the second part of the fight, you don’t even use the bow, as Phantom Ganon challenges you at Wimbeldon, throwing balls that you must bat back at him. Point being, while some bosses are guilty of predictability, it’s not to the scale or degree that he makes it out to be. One of the clips he uses to illustrate his point is the very first boss in the game, which would naturally be the result of the game wanting to teach you early that the dungeon item will be key in defeating a dungeon’s boss.
Now while his clip here of the Ruto king is a legitimately infuriating “roadblock” (dude takes about a full minute to waddle over to let you through), I feel like he’s missing the point. Ocarina wants to do a bit of worldbuilding and so it makes sure you are actively engaging with the inhabitants of the world instead of allowing you to ransack their kingdoms and blow by without even stopping to say hi. You could argue that the game should allow you the freedom to make that decision or not, but even the more freeform Zelda games like A Link Between Worlds and Breath of the Wild force you to talk to people to progress at junctures. It’s a fair restriction because Zelda games absolutely care about developing a world and allowing players to skip over that would make the story quite disorienting. Of course, it makes sense for Arin, who is impatient and doesn’t care about important things like story elements, to want to blow by all of this.
His complaint that a random hole in the ground won’t lead to a complex affair with a miniboss is funny for two reasons. One being that there actually is a hole in the ground that leads to a miniboss, it being the Well in Kakariko Village. Yes, there’s build up and you’re essentially told to go into it, but it’s not a main dungeon proper and it’s technically optional. Secondly, Majora’s Mask would experiment more with holes that lead to more interesting encounters. I believe there’s a hole early in that game where you can square off against a few Dodongos (pretty tough enemies) for a heart piece. I mean, aside from just being wrong, this complaint strikes me of that wishful thinking that demands even more of a good idea. It’s not good enough that there exist these optional side paths, noooo they have to have a whole-ass boss in them! Here we see another shade of Arin’s wannabe game designer tendencies.
Arin then proceeds to rant about how the game shouldn’t force any story on you and the player’s sole motivation should be wanting to adventure. Ironically, he’s forcing his own motivation on you by saying this is the direction the game needs to go because of his preference. Throughout the video, it becomes clear that Arin can’t be bothered with anything that restricts his freedom in the slightest. He has no patience for waiting in combat, he has no patience for waiting in dialogue. He wants self-gratification by the fastest means possible, and he thinks you should reflect those desires as well. I can’t lie, I’m a guy who also favors non-linearity in games. But complete non-linearity is directionless and usually becomes quite boring. Maybe some of my readers can feel this: how long have you played Garry’s Mod or the creative mode in Minecraft? Unless you have a specific project you want to accomplish creatively, it gets kinda boring right? Omnipotence runs out of steam as with too many options, it ironically leaves you with little. Resistance creates options. Even the most non-linear of games need to line it with a coat of direction in order to keep the train from going off the rails and just becoming a wreck. If Arin doesn’t like the story elements and it attempting to realistically build its world, that’s fine; he has the option to ignore those elements if he wants to. But he can’t force that on players who do like it or don’t mind it, and him having his way would have destroyed the backbone that made Ocarina have the coherence necessary to be that complete package. If Ocarina was just a compilation of set pieces, there’s no way it would have had the impact that it did at the time. Another aside, but bosses having a pattern is a complete non-sequitur to him not caring about the story! It just comes out of left field.
So then he goes on to preach that you’re not a hero because you have noble intentions, but you become a hero because you just like having fun fighting enemies and exploring. Now we’re getting a bit meta. Yeah, the player’s goal is to have fun, but a game featuring a protagonist who saves the world to have fun wouldn’t be viewed as heroic, in fact, he might look like a psychopath. I’ve been reading about Don Quixote recently and for those who don’t know, it’s essentially a satire on the glorification of chivalry literature of the time. A figure like Quixote, who goes around proclaiming himself a hero and fighting illusory monsters wouldn’t be revered, he would be pitied. I can’t help but think that when Arin speaks about fun being your sole motivation, that he would admire a Don Quixote unironically. It’s a fatal misunderstanding of Link’s character. Link doesn’t start off a hero, or even an adventurer. He’s just a normal boy, and seeing how he can’t talk, he might even be a bit shy. Zelda incorporates a lot of elements of fate and destiny into its narrative. Link is called to the task of being a hero, not because he necessarily wants to, but because it must be done. He reminds me a little of Spider-Man in this regard. Now I get that he’s also meant to be somewhat of a blank slate, so it makes sense that Arin would project his ideal of a hero as someone who solely cares about the adventure and to hell with all that saving the world bullshit. But I think this is him taking himself out of the fantasy of the game and regarding it more as a program of 1s and 0s that set off the dopamine receptors in his brain. You can demystify most games if you refuse to immerse yourself in the game’s world.
Here he comes dangerously close to implying that games just shouldn’t have stories or that they shouldn’t focus on them, because that’s the job of books and movies. If anything, video games as a medium should incorporate their stories to advance the medium beyond media representation of it being solely for barely literate children. Although I can agree video games are in a unique position to deliver their narrative organically due to player agency, that doesn’t mean a removal or downplaying of dialogue. Even movies that are defined by blitzkrieg action scenes are still primarily driven by dialogue. A movie that is just 100% action scenes would be a chaotic clusterfuck. If you had steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, it’d quickly get boring. You have to partition it with something else, bread, potatoes, orange juice and toothpaste, whatever to break up the high sensory meal or else it’d lose its luster.
Does a game not need dialogue? There are a few case studies we could talk about that do indeed feature no dialogue, but they are the exception rather than the rule. We can point to two examples of games that have no dialogue and sense a pattern: Limbo and Super Metroid. Similar in that respect yet diametrically different. Limbo is a bleak game where you traverse a dark scary world as a toddler. The narrative is sparse, but essentially the world is telling you that all that exists are predators, even the approximate humans are out to kill you, if for no other reason than to survive. Limbo does in a way seek to tell you a story, but in as minimalist of a way as possible. To contrast, Super Metroid is more in line with Arin’s ideal adventure. You are a bounty hunter with a mission to eliminate your targets. You drive your own goals, and as you traverse alien planets, you seek to grow stronger to be able to vanquish them as easily as possible. The narrative is ultimately secondary to the actual action. But while these games play and speak radically differently, the reason they have no dialogue is for a reason that’s easily tied together: they’re dark, imposing worlds nearly uninhabited by humans. That’s how they can afford to eschew dialogue; their worlds have no one to dialogue with. This is the antithesis of the living, breathing worlds of Hyrule that are composed of individuals. I mean, you will find areas of the game devoid of intelligent life, but it’s clear that these sections are to contrast the vibrancy of civilization. If you don’t want dialogue or narrative in your game, you’re essentially cosigning yourself to just one feasible setting: post-apocalyptia.
The game doesn’t stop for you to complete story tasks. Those are every much as part of the game as the puzzles and the combat. And since Arin doesn’t like the puzzles or the combat, it begs the question of what exactly he’s in such a hurry for! While Ocarina of Time was a remarkably free game for the time, it’s actually not an open world game. Again, it’s a free game binded by boundaries for stability. It’s like a mass of wet clay poured into a bowl so it doesn’t get clay every fucking where. It’s ironic that all the time he spends nitpicking minor complaints that he spends so little time addressing one of more reviled features of OoT, namely Navi and her constant annoying suggestions.
Arin then proceeds to “correct” what he sees as one of the central flaws of OoT, being the forced story elements, by making a suggestion to incorporate a character that fights with you. The only problem is what he’s describing is essentially an escort quest, a concept nearly universally reviled by gamers, and especially him. In fact, I want to say you actually do escort a Goron in his hated Skyward Sword, though not to the level Arin describes. This is another example of Arin attempting to backseat design, and reveals that if he was in charge, would almost certainly make OoT worse. I’m not even sure his escort Goron solves his issue with caring about characters, because just having an extra combatant wouldn’t suddenly get him to care about a world he’s intent on ignoring. The Goron could be a nameless robot for all Arin cares; what he’s interested in is the gameplay benefit a helper would afford him. Unfortunately, the way Arin describes it, he would almost certainly come to resent this theoretical Goron helper, as he would be tied to ensuring its survival. With as little patience as he seems to have with everything else, I doubt babysitting this dude would do anything but further frustrate him. As he sees all the game elements as merely working to provide him enjoyment, I doubt he’d be too pleased to have to work to not be crippled by such a mechanic.
That Arin doesn’t see his analogy of walking across his house back and forth three times to turn a page in a book to be similar to exactly what I mentioned about the walk to the chest in ALttP shows how arbitrarily he chooses his logic. He talks again about ALttP adding a story (despite this being untrue) and it’s an exercise for the reader for how this is ok but not when OoT does it despite them using nearly the same exact story elements. He attempts to do a montage of clips that feature the same thing being done in both ALttP and OoT but they’re such vague elements that I’m sure you could get clips from another non-Zelda series to accurately recreate it! I mean, some of the examples are so ubiquitous in gaming to be nonsensical to use as examples of “not changing anything”. There’s clips of Link getting a key, pushing a grave over and pulling a sword from a stone! The nitpicking has truly reached critical mass.
The entire next section is just an author tract against Skyward Sword, based on his personal misgivings with the game. As irrelevant as it is, you can kinda get the impression that Arin’s criticisms of OoT are rooted in a projection of his anger against Skyward Sword. And while Skyward Sword definitely should be criticized for, in some instances, falling back too hard on the Zelda formula, it isn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, a lot of complaints with Skyward Sword were rooted in how different it was from modern Zeldas! Not too many were happy about the inclusion of a stamina meter, or raising the starting hearts from 3 to 6, but they definitely weren’t examples of regression to the status quo. He has an incredibly petty, and frankly stupid, complaint of a completely optional side quest in the starting village where you get a cat off someone’s roof. So unimportant and non-forced upon you was this side quest that I beat the game before ever realizing it existed. So much for his argument that this is some example of the deterioration of freedom in Zelda when one of his primary complaints is this overblown. He then makes a throwaway line about the Wii Motion crippling the entire game. Hold on sir, I’ma need you to give more than one sentence defending that serious of an accusation! I didn’t play the game without the Motion Plus attachment, so I can’t speak to whether the experience is indeed crippled without it, but I can say that if that is a serious concern of yours, I suggest you simply get that attachment. I mean, we know this is just a throwaway line to pad out his list of complaints against Skyward Sword. He’s even admitted to barely playing the game before ranting about it, which shows his commitment to critical integrity!
Now with his uncritical fanboyism towards ALttP, it should be no surprise that he presented the opposite of his tirade against Skyward Sword for the then upcoming ALttP sequel, A Link Between Worlds. I like ALBW, so I think we could probably find some common ground in praise for it. The wall merging mechanic is indeed beautifully integrated, but it’s laughable to say “it’s second nature, like jumping in a Mario game”. It’s more of a secondary mechanic that’s used contextually, not unlike the bevy of items Link finds in dungeons. For it to be the equivalent of Mario’s jump, it’d have to be something that’s used constantly in primary gameplay, like the sword. While the buying of the typical dungeon items was a controversial decision that alienated players who felt like they were cheating their way into power at the start, Arin is right that never before had Rupees had as much of a role in a Zelda game. 90% of the time or more their only use is to buy specific items needed to proceed, and the rest of the options for purchases are replenishables that never need to be bought. Yet, his irrational hatred of Twilight Princess’s Magic Armor dismantles this goodwill with another argument by assertion. “You should also think this is stupid because of course you should. Any questions?” It is fair that not providing the weapons in the dungeons makes them feel less tied to a specific dungeon. While I appreciate this approach, it’s not one I’d prefer to be the standard of Zeldas. I love when game series experiment, hell I even enjoyed Triforce Heroes, which may be one of the most panned Zelda games. But I certainly wouldn’t want all subsequent Zeldas to follow in its footsteps.
Another unsolicited shot at Twilight Princess consists of him bashing the Spinner item, saying it doesn’t change anything about the world. First off, he’s comparing an item to ALBW’s secondary mechanic, which is apples and oranges. Secondly, the Spinner changes how you view traversal in dungeons that feature the tracks. Yes, it is contextual, but it transforms the normally static Zelda puzzles into rooms that are more dynamic. It’s like you’re riding a roller coaster that you posses the controls for. Saying it’s just a teleporter is just not accurate, because you’re making decisions while you’re riding. The climatic boss featuring a decked out arena of tracks wouldn’t be nearly as awesome if it simply teleported you to its weakspots. Instead it creates a fight where you not only are interacting with your target, but a changing arena as well. The Double Clawshot actually changes how you interact with the typical Hookshot puzzles. Typically in a game with good design, you’re introduced to a mechanic at its most basic and are fed puzzles of growing complexity that change how you view that mechanic. What’s genius about the Double Clawshot is that it teaches you this growing complexity not only over the course of the game, but throughout the franchise. You learn how to use Hookshot mechanics in other Zeldas, and your knowledge is turned on its head when you solve puzzles with the Double Clawshot.
Though I agree that a shift in how people perceive Zelda is not a bad thing, we have to be clear on what that means. Innovation can be a very beautiful thing, and stagnation can ruin great franchises. But innovation for the sake of it is not inherently good, and repetition of tropes is not necessarily a bad thing if the tropes are executed well and strengthen the continuity of the franchise. Ocarina of Time revolutionized the Zelda franchise by successfully broaching the realm of 3D, advancing the concept that the 2D games set, while retaining the themes that made the 2D Zelda games successful in the first place. For all this, Ocarina of Time on release was almost universally lauded as one of the best games of all time. Even to this day, no other game is consistently at the top of numerous “Best Games Ever” lists.
While Ocarina still holds up as an excellent game in its own right, the main legacy of Ocarina is the sheer impact that it had on its release that can’t be understated. Because of the fact that it was vastly influential and far beyond its competition on release, it’s developed a reputation that some are eager to try to supplant. My hypothesis here is that Arin is among the most vocal critics adamant to try to attempt this by mounting a weak case against the game. The problem here is that really solid objective criticisms are few and far between, and Arin has to pad out his confirmation bias with distortions, misleading statements and images, minor nitpicks and some clearly asinine critiques from personal preference. I respect Arin’s work; he can be a genuinely funny guy and he’s been creating video game centered content for over a decade. But I think we can establish that his achievements may have gone to his head and lead him to believe he was uniquely qualified to slay the dragon that is OoT without possessing the tools necessary to lead a successful attack.
What do you think? Are my analyses off the mark? Am I too harsh? Did I say everything you were thinking? Do you agree that Arin was wrong but my points didn’t effectively prove it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I hope to continue to pepper my reviews with more of these longform critiques from time to time. The Ghost lives on!
The Ghost of Game History 