Is Nintendo still capable of making a 3D Zelda game on the level of Ocarina of Time.

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Drathnoxis

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moggett88 said:
Drathnoxis said:
I think that there was a flaw in the logic here: 5 year olds can't read
Wait, what? Kids are in school by 5, of course they can read :s
Kindergarten, which is when they would start learning to read. But even if their parents had taught them some words previously, I doubt they would have the reading comprehension to understand 3/4 of the text in a Zelda game.
 

StormShaun

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For me, I played in a certain list.

The Gameboy games first,
then Twilight Princess as my first 3D Zelda,
and finally Ocarina of Time on the 3DS.

Well to be honest, I preferred Twilight Princess to Ocarina of Time. The style was interesting, somewhat dark, but it dragged me in. The story felt more personal to me/Link, or at least the side-characters/childhood friends made that addition. Of course, Midna was a big plus, and was useful when other character were bad.

The combat was rather... Unique, at least back then when I played it on the WII. That fighting made the boss fights just interesting, since sometimes you were swimming frantically in a paranoid mood, jumping from ledge to ledge on a spinning top, avoiding a flying skull, and finally, it made the final boss battle all the more fun. Naturally, sometimes this turned into a wiggling frenzy, especially when I tried to do certain moves.

If I remember though, this was many years ago, and back then I was scared of the Baba Serpent.
So this could be my nostalgia talking.

Back on topic, I believe Nintendo are still capable, but it depends on so many things. So many that it makes me rather cautious. It makes me scared, to be honest.
 

SmallHatLogan

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FillerDmon said:
Zaltys said:
It's just nostalgia.
The first Zelda you play tends to be your favorite. I haven't seen many younger gamers say that Ocarina is good, but I've seen many say that the game is tedious and controls are bad. And objectively speaking, I'd be inclined to agree: Twilight Princess is a better game by today's standards.
I dunno, I was there for the original Zelda and I definitely prefer the modern versions to it. I definitely wouldn't bet someone would defend Zelda 1 or 2 over basically any of the solid console ones since...
I have no nostalgia associated with The Legend of Zelda for the NES and it's one of my favourites. The fact that it just dumps you in an unforgiving world and leaves you to figure it out for yourself really rubs me the right way. Kind of has a Dark Souls feel to it.

As for the OP's question, I feel like Ocarina of Time gets a bit too much credit. It was a technological marvel for its time but it was basically just a 3D retread of A Link to the Past. I have a lot of nostalgia for Ocarina, I enjoyed it just as much as I always have when I played the 3DS version and I think it has aged pretty well. But is it really the masterpiece people claim it is? I don't think so. Majora's Mask was far superior in my eyes. And Wind Waker almost surpassed it for me, but was let down by some tedious dungeons.
 

bificommander

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I personally rate Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time about equally. To me it's the difference between putting a highjumping bar at 1 meter and jumping over it in a beautiful graceful jump with 30 centimeters to spare (OoT) or putting the bar at 1.5 meters but knocking the bar off as you scrape just over it (TP). More specifically, OoT had an incredibly basic fantasy hero story which it played out beautifully. TP set up a much more complex story but let half the threads it set up fizzle away by the end. Also, as someone else already noted, TP really should've been called The Legend of Midna.

In my book Windwaker is slightly below those two, and Skyward Sword is only just tolerable thanks to the still entertaining dungeons. The sky overworld is uninteresting and immersive-breakingly unrealistic, two thirds of the ground overworld are boring as fuck, repeating bossfights might've served the narrative but were a gameplay copout, the story is a mess*, whomever decided that a Zelda game should have you grind resources for upgrades to your items should be fired, and while I didn't hate the silent world as much as some players, there was no need to go through that stuff 4 times.

But at the end of the day, that means there's only one real mistake in the Zelda mainline as far as I'm concerned. So I'm not despairing over the next game. And anyway, I don't own a Wii-U yet, so I can just wait and see if it'll be any good before buying. Although the 10/10 reviews and praises of "Finally something that tops Ocarina of Time" Skyward Sword received means I'll have to be careful who to trust when making that decision.

* There is exactly zero in-story justification for the game to continue after the third dungeon, other than the goddess' plan being assinine. The worst part about that is this: Skyward Sword shows us the origin of Ganondorf and why he always comes back. Every evil in almost every other Zelda game has it's origins in the end of this game, when Demise is awakened in the past and speaks his curse... which never needed to happen. At the end of the third dungeon, all time portals are destroyed, but Impa orders Link to assemble the mastersword so they can build another one. And when they have it, Link travels back in time... to learn some exposition that Impa already knew about. The time portal served no other function in the plan.

The portal happens to be useful to grow medicine for one of the three dragons who knew parts of a song you needed. (Because even in the past when he was still alive, the sickness spoils his singing voice. Couldn't he have just written down the notes for you?) But the only reason you need that song at all is because the godess, in her infinite wisdom, decided not to just give her chosen the entire song up front.

I guess Ocarina of Time also featured a dumb mistake after the first three dungeons prolonging the game. But y'know, that was from a ten year old girl who hadn't read the fineprint about the mastersword and the temple of time guarding the triforce. It wasn't made by a goddess who hid the damn triforce in the first place.
 

The White Hunter

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As incredible and revolutionary as Ocarina was at the time of it's release, as somebody who never played it back then, I had a lot more of a fun time with Wind Waker and Skyward Sword, despite the flaws of both of those games. But I'm not the biggest Zelda fan by far so meh.
 

BoredRolePlayer

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Well Majora's Mask did come out...and so did Wind Waker. I think Nintendo beat OoT already pretty well, because honestly OoT felt like a LttP remake missing a lot of charm. It did do a lot of firsts to mold that genre, but it felt lifeless and bland outside of the dungeons.
 

Amaror

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My answer is no and the reason is that your admiration for OoT is clearly nostalgia-motivated. As a person that didn't play nintendo games in his childhood, when i played OoT for the first time it was clearly a very good game, but it was not THAT good.
It has tons and tons of issues. It was revolutionary for its time and as i said is clearly a very good game, but time and nostalgia has many people describing it like the second coming of jesus. And that's the reason why, at least for a lot of people that think like you, there will most likely never be a Zelda game that you will like as much OoT. It's just an expectation that's not possible to achieve.
 

Chaos Isaac

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Considering Twilight Princess is potentially my favorite Zelda, even though I dislike the forced Wolf segments. (I don't enjoy the wolf gameplay too much, and they last just a tad bit too long.) So, yeah, I think they can. Especially that now they're away from the horrendous motion controls that made Skyward Sword, partially, so terrible.
 

Hero of Lime

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I think so, but both Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are my two favorite games in the series, followed by Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, and A Link Between Worlds.

Surpassing the N64 duo in the eyes of fans would be pretty difficult. Sure, nowadays people's opinions on the best Zelda game are scattered. A lot of people do not have a super favorable opinion of Ocarina of Time anymore, but many others still do. People like myself who think Ocarina is still the best will not have their opinion changed easily, but there are many others who believe Ocarina has already been surpassed.
 

Silvanus

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WhiteFangofWar said:
The only one I would consider objectively bad is Skyward Sword (the Silent Realms were pretty much my least favourite thing about a Zelda game ever and the sky 'overworld' had nothing going on)
Interesting; while I generally agree that Skyward Sword is a pretty weak entry in the series, the Silent Realms were a solid highlight for me.

OT: Yep. Windwaker already matched or exceeded it according to a good chunk of players (admittedly not including myself), and Twilight Princess was very solid. I have faith they can do it, but they'd have to get the tone just right to convert me: OoT and MM both had heavy doses of both mystery and melancholy that I don't think has been successfully matched since.
 

moggett88

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Drathnoxis said:
moggett88 said:
Drathnoxis said:
I think that there was a flaw in the logic here: 5 year olds can't read
Wait, what? Kids are in school by 5, of course they can read :s
Kindergarten, which is when they would start learning to read. But even if their parents had taught them some words previously, I doubt they would have the reading comprehension to understand 3/4 of the text in a Zelda game.
Maybe it's different in your country (presumably USA, since you call it kindergarten), but at 5 I was in primary school (next step after kindergarten) and could definitely read - I remember my dad had bought me a Gameboy with Links Awakening the summer before I started primary school, and I could cope with the text in that.
 

CaitSeith

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Level of Ocarina of Time? That's a really arbitrary measurement. Maybe you're meaning if there will ever be a new 3D Zelda that becomes the best game of the year (or at least best action-adventure console game). I dare to say, probably no. The industry is not the same as in the past, and Nintendo evolves very slowly. But, who knows? Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (and Skyward Sword had several good concepts that could be applied to improve the new games).
 

09philj

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Depends what you're asking.
A game as good as OoT? Yes, they've bettered it several times.
A game with as much impact as OoT? No, but I don't think anyone will be able to do something like that ever again.
The best Zelda game? Sure, why not.
 

CaitSeith

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crf_stewarje said:
CaitSeith said:
Level of Ocarina of Time? That's a really arbitrary measurement. Maybe you're meaning if there will ever be a new 3D Zelda that becomes the best game of the year (or at least best action-adventure console game). I dare to say, probably no. The industry is not the same as in the past, and Nintendo evolves very slowly. But, who knows? Even a stopped clock is right twice a day (and Skyward Sword had several good concepts that could be applied to improve the new games).
You dare to say no? What about Zelda U? I'm actually surprised that no one has brought that up. Obviously it's still in development, but the fact that it's taking the Zelda series in a completely new direction with a lot more freedom than past games, means that it has potential to be something amazing. Of course, we will have to wait and see if it actually lives up to the hype before we can see what the game will be like, but my point is that Zelda U could certainly be game of the year.
I don't like to hype myself over games (personal reasons). But even so, I'm not sure they have shown enough to assure it's a completely new direction. They are going open-world. Great! Now they just need to make it better than Skyrim, and it's the game of the year for sure.
 

Tilly

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Yes I think they absolutely do. I think Nintendo are still very much at the top of their game with the software side of things.
That said, I don't think any other Zelda will ever get to the level Ocarina did because so much of that was down to the time it was released and it was the fact that it was the first game like that yet they pretty much perfected it in the first attempt. The number of gameplay approaches they invented for that game was insane. Unless they make a Zelda with the Occulus Rift or something equally pioneering, I doubt any other Zelda will get the same kind of acclaim.
I'm happy with just another 90+ on metacritic though really.
 

BarryMcCociner

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Maybe?

The thing about Zelda is that the basic mechanics of the game (what should you call them, Gameplay tropes?) have been solidified.

You go to a dungeon, you get a cool item, you use it to solve a puzzle, wa-hey move on to the next. To step away from this would require a restructuring of what fundamentally makes a Zelda game a Zelda game, to continue doing this invites stagnation. And I won't even say they're bad *gameplay tropes*, they're good, they're effective there's a reason they became solidified in the first place. It's just that they're tired, they've been exhausted. Played one Zelda, you've played them all.

Now, you yourself are probably never going to be hit by a Zelda game as well as OOT (Which had its own glaring flaws, let's just say it was fairly obvious they didn't quite understand how to make a 3D game... work at that point. They were still operating with 2D game mechanic ideas.) But someone much younger than you or I, a little kid probably picked up Skyward Sword and felt all the same things that you felt about OOT.

Just some food for thought.