Okay, this (along with Final Fantasy 7) is the biggest fanboy following game ever. Yet I was never able to get into any of the 3D Zelda games at all. I’ve tried, and they just seemed LAME to me. I quit Twilight Princess after I finished the lava dungeon and was totally DETESTING that game by that point. However, it’s been a while, and I’m thinking about giving OoT one more shot. The question is, since this game has been re-released so many times, which version would you recommend for a “first timer”?
Well, get the N64 version. It worked fine and was the original way to play it.
However, I don’t know why you think you’d like it now. If you didn’t like other 3D Zeldas, I doubt this one will cinch it for you.
What didn’t you like about Twilight Princess?
The Gamecube edition is well done and it contains a Zelda 1 style “Master Quest” for it.
Still if you didn’t like it before I can’t see you liking it now. It’s going to have the same shoddy controls and weak environmental design that dragged it down originally.
Things I didn’t like about Twilight Princess:
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The wolf mode, where you had to run around town finding the little glowing bugs
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The anime-fairy-thingie which follows you around (I hear the OoT one is even more annoying)
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The fact that each dungeon (at least the forest and lava) took HOURS to get through, and if you wanted to do a save-n-quit, you’d have to come back and backtrack the whole thing again
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Those weird purple glowing twilight monsters which were nearly impossible to kill
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The escort the caravan mission. THIS is actually the point where I stopped playing. The stupidy of the driver was too much for me to take, especially after I failed it 15 times in a row due to the caravan driving straight into the flames.
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The nerve of Nintendo to remake the game in mirror mode, rather than letting me actually play it left handed.
For the record, the farthest I ever got in Wind Waker was that dungeon escape mission where if you went anywhere near a spotlight, you’d have to start over. Never touched Majora’s Mask, Minish Cap or Phantom Hourglass.
Alright, let me see if I can address your complaints one by one and see how they compare to Ocarina of Time.
Nothing like this at all in OoT. You’re a person the whole time. I’d say it’s about 40% kid Link, 60% Adult Link.
Yes, Navi, your little helper fairy, is annoying as fuck in OoT. She is always going “Hey!” or “Listen!” to tell you something you probably already know.
I wouldn’t say the dungeons took hours to do in OoT…maybe the Water Temple would take a couple hours, but the others should be maybe an hour, hour and a half tops. If you save in the middle you do start back at the “start” of the dungeon, but everything you have done up to that point is still done, and most of the dungeons in OoT operate on a sort of wheel principle, where there’s a main room and all the other rooms branch off of it, so it never takes long to get back to where you were.
Nothing like that at all in OoT.
There’s no escort mission, per se. There is one dungeon where for about half it you have a little princess to carry around, but she never takes damage so it’s just used as a gimmick for some puzzles, not a true escort mission type of thing.
Well, I’m of the opinion that who really gives a crap that Link is right handed. The way some people talk you’d think they made Linkthe bad guy, or something. But if it makes you feel better, he is left-handed in OoT.
Nothing like that in OoT either. The only time you are swordless is the very beginning before you get the sword.
Though there is one small part where you have to be sneaky, but it’s not entirely like WW, cause you can shoot the guards with a bow and arrow from a distance.
Not sure if there was another Minish Cap that wasn’t for GBA, but the GBA one is lots of fun and its 2d top down.
No, that’s the only one. It’s fun, if you don’t mind ‘non-standard’ Zelda games. Phantom Hourglass is well worth playing too, even if you don’t like Wind Waker. I didn’t, and I love PH. It uses 3D models, but the gameplay is the 2D top-down view typical of the series.
Except that it’s short and relatively easy. You only get 6 dungeons (and I’m being generous in counting one of those), and all the puzzles are pretty obvious: you just have to wait to get the tool to use it.
Don’t get me wrong: I had a blast playing it. But even Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy was longer. I have to admit, though, that time sensitive part right before the last battle is quite difficult.
In the GameCube version Link is left-handed.
It’s a good thing you quit early then, because you would have hated the sailing with the fury of a thousand whiny fanboys.
In fairness to the whiny fanboys that was a lot of pointless downtime with crappy controls and a particularly horrendous mechanism for reversing direction.
I suppose it could have been worse, though. They could have made you repeat the same dungeon eight times.
Um yeah that doesn’t sound like whiny fanboy. Whiny fanboy is the left handed vs right handed debate. Or flipping out over cannon (especially if the cannon is actually only hinted at in game and fanboys made up their own cannon to fill in the gaps then get pissy when it’s violated).
Being angry about a crappy sequence or poor controls or a game mechanic you don’t like is just having an opinion.
I remember getting an N64 just for this game. I played through the first dungeon and I was already annoyed by the poor controls and the game just didn’t feel right to me (whiny fanboy part of me Zelda is not 3D). I put it on a shelf for months I finally got it out again and managed to make it I’d guess roughly halfway when I was finally defeated by…a ledge. No kidding. I couldn’t get across some ledge that had a sharp right turn on it. I tried and tried and tried to maneuver around that ledge forever falling off of it. It wasn’t even a trap as such there was no consequence for falling off of it. I’m sure I would have got it if I had just done it a few more times but at that point I was already raging about how I struggled to stay on any narrow path and that was just the final straw.
I actually booted this game up a couple of months ago. I played about 20 mins before I gave up again. It was even more annoying then I remembered. It’s sad because I really would have liked to continue to enjoy that series but it just wasn’t what I wanted.
I liked the sailing from island to island. But WindWaker was my first Zelda. You never forget your first.
This might be the first time I’ve heard someone complain that the controls in OoT were bad. Seriously, the 3D Zeldas have some of the best 3rd person 3D controls ever made. I guess I’m just not sure why you were having so much trouble…I mean, if the camera ever got in a bad angle, you just tapped Z and it would snap back to being right behind you. If you wanted to keep it behind you and not wander, keep Z held down.
Er the third post in this thread mentions the shoddy controls. I’m willing to admit however it might have just been a brain block on my part. There’s some games I just can’t seem to get to work. They’re few and far between but this was one of them.
The locking was a good idea given the imprecise nature of a console controller. The way Link moved was terrible though (he was unresponsive to movement and constantly overran things as a result) and the N64 controller never sat well in my hands. It was even worse than the Playstation design in that regard and I find those style of controllers uncomfortable. So one good idea doesn’t make up for the flaws in the fundamentals.
Just to add, I won’t complain about the control scheme for Link in Windwaker; they got the bugs out by that point and smoothed things over. On the other hand they added stopping one interface, then switching to yet another, playing a song, switching interface again, then slowly rotating if you wanted to just turn around with the boat (with potential menu access in the middle of all of that) so apparently they still felt the need to add some ugliness to the control scheme.
God, I hated the N64 controller. The first time I played OoT was when it was released with MM on the Gamecube and could use that controller.
Oh, me too. Wind Waker is one of my favorite video games, period. But I can appreciate that (and why) most people hate it.
Exactly my point. I, like Link, am left-handed. Nintendo actually remade the Wii version to make Link right-handed so that you would be swinging the Wii controller with your right hand, which meant mirroring everything. That’s minority discrimination!
I’m at the tail end of Dragon Warrior 3 and still have a ways to go in Final Fantasy 8, after which I’m getting starting on OOT, the emulated N64 version.