The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the anti-Breath of the Wild

There were few moments as iconic during the birth phase of 3D gaming as the first time Link entered Hyrule Field in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was 1998, and games like Virtua racing, Fate, Originand Nintendo's Super Mario 64 had already made groundbreaking advances in graphics technology and the possibilities of 3D space. But this was something different.

After completing the tutorial portion of the game and navigating the first dungeon, Inside the Great Deku Tree, Link leaves the narrow, misty confines of Kokiri Forest, walks through a tunnel, and steps out the other side. The sudden, expansive blossoming of the world of Hyrule around him is breathtaking. There's a rolling plain, castle towers behind a wall, a farm on a hilltop, the bleak peak of Death Mountain. There are sight lines to destinations that could be dozens of hours of gameplay away.

Ocarina's Hyrule Field – so elegantly viewed in the game's quiet, elegiac menu screen – was no technical first and was achieved with a certain amount of smoke and mirrors. But it was perhaps the most compelling translation yet from the coded iconography of a 2D game to the realism of a 3D game; it turned a map into a landscape. It hummed with promise, scale and a romantic sense of adventure, creating a world that felt vast yet tantalizingly within reach.

That moment distilled the promise of what would eventually become the dominant form of both action-adventure and role-playing games in the 3D era: open-world games. Still, it would be almost 19 years before the Zelda series itself fully embraced open-world game design Breath of the wild. Despite OcarinaDue to the Zelda series' outsized influence on the next two decades of game design, the Zelda series followed a parallel path until 2017.

In 2023 we return to this revered classic – for the first time in person since then Breath of the wild exploded the Legend of Zelda tradition – it's stunning how different it feels. It is the key text of what you might call Zelda's second era (the pre-Breath of the wild 3D games), and to a large extent it defined them all – even games like the sunny one, by the sea The Windwaker who writhed as fast as they could to get out from under his shadow.

Ocarina of Time was produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, who led a team of younger directors, including current Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma. Miyamoto's vision was for a sophisticated, filigree, deeply written game that would be as intricate as it was expansive. For Miyamoto, entering 3D space wasn't about sending the player hurtling across a vast area. It was an invitation to take a closer look, to crawl into the cracks, to… Real learn the environment.

So Ocarina of Time unfolds like an epic, three-dimensional Metroidvania. You explore the world of Hyrule in a looping, backwards manner that is non-linear, but guided by a dense network of paths, locks and keys – as well as rumors and stories.

Link's progress is not measured in statistical increases, but in the steady acquisition of new tools that increase the player's power over the environment. You gradually learn to manipulate not only space and material, but also time itself, turning day into night or advancing through the years. And every new tool or power is an invitation to go back and search the world again, constantly comparing it to your growing toolset. What can I achieve now? Where can I go? Or when?

This is doubly true once Link learns the Song of Time, which allows him to step between the sunlit present and the dark future. As in A link to the past for the, Ocarina of Time tasks the player with switching back and forth between connected worlds, carefully studying the differences in their landscapes and seeking the wormholes of cause and effect between them. Link's personal transformation as he moves between a wild childhood and a sleek adulthood gives this time-travel mechanic a poignant, intimate dimension: every time you play the Song of Time, you feel like you're leaving a part of yourself behind.

In response to this intricately designed space, Ocarina of TimeThe game's gameplay is heavily loaded with puzzles and secrets. The fights are dramatic and impressive, but surprisingly sparse. The game is defined by its eleven fantastic and terrifying dungeons: dark, dense and gnarled labyrinths that pushed Miyamoto's exploration of 3D space to its limits. Sometimes, Ocarina crosses that line in a series of unforgettable, dreamlike, impossible spaces: the moist, organic recesses of Jabu-Jabu's belly; the room of paintings from which Phantom Ganon attacks in the Forest Temple; the bright, misty limbo in the Water Temple where Link confronts his own dark shadow.

These dungeons dominate Ocarina of Time, and not just because you spend so much of the game in it. In a sense, the game is one huge dungeon, full of traps, mysteries, secret doors and mazes, like the Lost Woods.

For almost 20 years, every mainline 3D Zelda that followed was Ocarina of Time was created in his image, but none of them quite managed the organic density of the design. They're all brilliant games, but somehow they all feel more compartmentalized: Majora's mask with its barrel-shaped, clockwork diorama; The Windwaker with its busy islands and empty sea; Twilight princess with its strong narrative flow; Heavenly sword with its discreet pocket universes, visited from above.

It was only until Breath of the wild what the Zelda series dared to break with Ocarina's template. Nintendo may have been late to the open world party, but don't underestimate the courage it took to destroy the rules written for a title that still regularly tops lists of the best games of all time.

In Breath of the wild – and even more in the future, Tears of the Kingdom – the landscape is a continuous wilderness where obstacles occur naturally and events seem to unfold without any script. Link has many of the tools he needs early on, and the player's ingenuity is expressed both in improvised responses to a crowded world and in unraveling the solutions to carefully constructed riddles. Dungeons, and the dozens of micro-dungeon-like shrines, are not the dominant tone of the design. Rather, they are punctuation marks that break up the free exploration that truly defines the experience.

It turns out that, to return to the road Ocarina of Time made us feel like it was necessary to dismiss almost everything about it. That's one way you know it's a masterpiece. Another is that it still stands up to imitation, even by Nintendo itself. Ocarina gave us a profoundly influential vision of where gaming could go, but a specific and unique route to that destination. A quarter of a century later it is still a class of one.