In 1998, I got a Nintendo 64 for my birthday. My parents got me the system, but after I opened it, they took me to a local store to pick out a game. I picked a baseball game, not even sure which one at this point. It was fun enough. I played a few other games in the coming months, but the one I REALLY wanted to play came out that November: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Now, this may seem like sacrilege, but I liked The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, but I did not love it. As years have gone by, I've grown to love it, but I didn't at the time. Ocarina of Time seemed so, well, epic. I had to play it.
When the game was released, the city I lived in was being hit by a blizzard. Being the very smart thirteen year old I was, I decided I was going to walk a few miles to the local video store without A) checking to make sure the store was open, or B) making sure they even had the game and C) letting anybody know I was going out! So after the coldest, windiest and snowiest walk of my life at the time, I found myself at the video store. Thank God they were open AND they had Ocarina of Time. I rented that game and hurried home, that blizzard was really starting to get bad.
When I got home, nobody had even noticed I had left. When I told my mom what I did she wasn't exactly happy, but didn't punish me. My punishment was that I got really sick and had to stay home from school for the rest of the week. Oh darn, I had to stay in bed and play Zelda all day. The game was amazing, one of the best experiences I've ever had with a game. I continued to rent that same copy for about a month, my stepdad finally said "Let's just buy the damn thing, it will be cheaper than renting it over and over!".
Not since Chrono Trigger had a game captured my imagination so completely, this was one of a few games that I felt totally transported to another world when playing. I've played most of the Zelda games released since Ocarina of Time, and there are some really great ones (A Link Between Worlds was awesome) and even though I've liked some, not really gotten into a few more and really liked others, there just hasn't been an "Ocarina of Time" experience for me since. I'm sure there's some nostalgia, and the very few detractors the game has are loud (and wrong), but the game is simply a masterpiece.
I hold out hope that the upcoming and yet to be named "Zelda Wii U" will be that "Ocarina" type experience. In fact, I hope it's so good that I don't refer to the experience as "Ocarina" like, and it gets it's own level of awesome. Later today I've got The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD coming in the mail and that got me thinking about where the Zelda craze truly started for me. I hope you enjoyed my rambling.
Score: 36 Eponas out of 36.
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