It’s A Relief To Go Back To The Simple Joy Of Ocarina Of Time After A Decade Of Being Overwhelmed By Breath Of The Wild

My friends, put the tomatoes down. I haven’t even gotten to speak yet. I, like most people who own a Nintendo Switch 2 and are killing time until Grand Theft Auto 6 launches next week, am playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and I’m having a pretty good time going back to a game that was once an elementary school obsession for me, especially because it’s been a long time since I really felt a constant sense of progression in a Zelda game after a decade of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah, the game is incredibly simple by modern standards, and Nintendo has done a lot to ensure that by making the game demonstrably easier in dozens of small ways that add up, but I think that relative simplicity is what draws me to it. I’ve been chipping away at the game in short sessions, usually finishing a temple or two before putting it down for the rest of the day, and the tangible feeling of momentum is what keeps me coming back to it just about every other evening at this point. © Nintendo / Kotaku Over the years, especially with the rise of open-world games, I have identified that I am a goal-oriented person when it comes to how a video game can hold my attention. There’s just so much competition for whatever spare hours I have that if the bulk of my time playing a game is spent getting to the things I care about, I can lose interest fairly quickly. I want to see where the story goes, I want to reach the end of a quest line, and I loathe tedious open-world traversal more than most video game activities. I can’t entirely avoid open-world games in 2026, but if a game doesn’t have a quick or engaging way to get around a giant map, it actively deters me from playing it. I often cite the Infamous series, with all its superpowered movement and interesting environmental interactions, as a great example of a game that makes its open-world map tolerable to me. A car or a horse is probably not going to cut it. There are exceptions from time to time, such as Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City entrancing me so much that I’d gladly take in the view as I drove around on my motorcycle. But if I can help it, I want to spend my limited gaming time on things that aren’t simply moving from one side of a giant space to another. Breath of the Wild and its excellent sequel, Tears of the Kingdom do a lot to break up the tedium of simply moving through a space. The survival sim-esque friction and gizmo-building mechanics are brilliant evolutions of the original Zelda formula, and Nintendo’s ability to still draw water from the well of a decades-old franchise is commendable. I really enjoyed my time with both games, despite them grinding against a lot of my ingrained gaming sensibilities. The puzzles in the shrines, the constant feeling of discovery in its giant open world, and the colorful casts of weirdos and heroes you meet throughout the games maintain all that same Zelda spirit, but with a meaningful expansion of what a Zelda game looks like. © Nintendo / Kotaku But man, is it a relief to go back to Ocarina of Time. I want puzzle-solving and discovery that I can get to quickly, that doesn’t need me to meaningfully prep a survival bag so I can trek to the other side of the map while hoping my melee weapons can last me the whole trip, and what Ocarina is delivering feels downright breezy. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know it’s regressive of me to say I’d like for the series to strip away all the cool things it’s done in the past nine years, but I haven’t had a Zelda experience that feels like this in so long. The top-down 2D games are similar (at least those that came after the pretty open-ended and opaque original game), but they don’t have the targeting and swordplay of the post–Ocarina of Time era that rounds out the vision I have of what makes a 3D Zelda game. I don’t really hold any illusions that Zelda is going to go back to the structure of Ocarina of Time, but it is refreshing to be handed the tools I need to accomplish things without worrying that my weapon is going to break from battle damage or that I’ll run out of some vital consumable before I reach my goal. The Legend of Zelda is gonna be fine no matter where it goes moving forward, but for as dated and small in scope as Ocarina of Time might feel compared to Tears of the Kingdom, it sure does remind me that there was once a time when I didn’t feel like I was fighting against the elements just to get to where I wanted to go.