Ocarina of Time

Published on: 2012-09-05

I was thinking about happiness yesterday. My main point of anxiety in the last few weeks — passing on the practical exam to get my driver’s license — is gone. I had a life changing trip depending on that and it would be a whole extra month of anxiously waiting had I failed it. But I didn’t. At the moment the examiner told me I had passed I was very happy. My eyes filled with tears and I had to control myself to not start sobbing in front of the examiner and my driving instructor. I called my family, told the news and I couldn’t stop smiling the whole day. The weight was gone from my shoulders and I could finally have peace of mind again and relax waiting for the trip.

When something happy like this happens, it gives you this jolt and then leaves a transitory sensation. It has been about a week after the fact and I realized it’s completely gone. I’m not happy for passing the test anymore. I think about it and I can clearly recognize it’s a great thing that I did and I can appreciate all the good consequences of it. But I’m not happy for it anymore.

While I wondered about the why the happy feelings from positive events can’t be lasting, I started thinking about another recent rewarding experience, namely The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.

I consider myself a Zelda fan. While I’m not the fanatic collector kind of fan, I remember clearly the sensation when I first played A Link to the Past. I had a Megavision at the time — a cheap knockoff of the Sega Mega Drive, a.k.a. Genesis — and I played the game at the house of a friend that had a SNES. I’ve begged that he lent me the console for a weekend with the cartridge, which he did. After that, I spent the whole weekend playing, barely stopping for eating, sleeping, and going to the restroom. I don’t know why that game was so appealing to me, but I just felt linked to it, it just made sense.

Some years later I went to some other friend’s place and played Ocarina of Time for the first time. It was ridiculous. I remember at the time how truly 3D it was. The levels were designed in 3D, as opposed to the 3D rendition of 2D gameplay a lot of games of the time had. For a long time I had this longing sensation about the game. I would sleep thinking about it sometimes and dream that I got a N64 and I could play it. Then my birthday came. My mom and my stepfather manage to get a good deal to buy the N64 used — it was very expensive for us at the time — from the same friend that showed me the game for the first time. I had to play it immediately. When I turned on the console I’ve seen the 3 save slots of the game, with the names filled like this:

Feliz
Aniversario
KAO

(which means: ‘Happy Birthday, Kao’)

I couldn’t make myself erase it, so I just started the game on the KAO slot. I spent hours running around Hyrule, killing monsters, finding secrets, solving puzzles, and even fishing.

Which gets us to now, about a year after I bought my Nintendo 3DS in San Francisco with the new glasses free 3D rendition of the game. I’ve picked up the game again recently and continued from Jabu-Jabu’s Belly, the dungeon where I stopped the other time, and I’m just past the Temple of Fire. I’ve got to say: I’m surprised by how much this game still delights me. I’ve dismissed the game for a while on the basis that I bought it from nostalgia and I would play again sometime just for the memories, but then, when I finally picked it up again, I got hooked again.

This game is an experience that only games can give. The plot by it self is rather silly and as deep as a puddle and I would probably hate to watch a feature film or animation that closely followed it. It’s living the story that makes the difference. The story is told by the exploration, by the secrets you find, the puzzles you solve. You wouldn’t read a book about it, but experiencing it is meaningful. It’s not meant to be literary, it’s a different language, a language that’s made of interaction and feedback. Collecting new items is meaningful because they give you new means of interaction, new verbs to talk in the language of the game. Collecting the Spiritual Stones and the Sage’s medallions becomes meaningful when you know the hardships you had to endure to acquire it — swarms of enemies, challenging bosses, mind-bending puzzles; all interactive experiences.

The progression of the game is amazing. You start powerless and unarmed, then slowly and steadily, you grow into this powerful and resourceful hero. Each new item is a thrill, an invitation to new explorations, to find which limits you can now transpose with your new gained skills. Finding this weird place and realizing you’ve got this instinct that tells you that there’s got to be something hidden in there. Then you pull out your Ocarina, play the Song of the Storms and a secret unveils.

Everything that you see in the game is serving game design. While the plot might be shallow as a story, it’s tied so tightly to the game and to the experience that the deepness of game play enhances the plot. Characters you meet are rarely insignificant. Most of them serve a purpose one time or another through side-quests and tips about the game itself.

I see a lot of the mainstream games that try to look like movies, try to tell deeper stories, try to simulate real life sports with the maximum fidelity possible, and that’s fine. But my deepest love for video-games lies in games like Ocarina of Time. A game that talks to you through simpler graphics and sounds, simpler plot, less realism, but tied together with such a masterful design that the result ends up being greater than anything else.

I love video-games is too broad of a sentence nowadays. The part of the universe of video games that I do love is represented by the likes of Ocarina of Time.