Zelda: Ocarina of Time vs. A Link to
the Past – Does it matter?
People love pitting things against
each other in gaming. Nintendo vs. Sega, Microsoft vs. Sony, Old vs. New, and
so on and so forth.
But very few game rivalries match up
to the internal battle between Zelda fans:
which is better, the Super Nintendo classic A
Link to the Past or the groundbreaking N64 title Ocarina of Time? It’s a question posed countless times over the
internet and everyone has an opinion on it one way or another.
And today I’m here to ask a new
question: can we even compare the two?
Don’t get me wrong, they’re both very
similar games. They’re both from the same franchise, thematically they’re pretty
alike, and their storylines are pretty close to each other. But for me, that’s
where the similarities end. Once you get past surface value stuff, the games
completely diverge from each other.
A
Link to the Past is still considered by many to be the absolute pinnacle of
the 2D top-down flavour of Zelda over
25 years after its initial launch. It took the initial game on the NES and
built on it a thousand fold, creating a linear storyline-based adventure that
would become the base formula for the franchise until Breath of the Wild turned everything on its head in 2017. It added
new weapons and tools that remain series favourites to this day, and the strong
gameplay mechanics still holds up.
On the other hand, we have Ocarina of Time. The first 3D Zelda ever made, to date Ocarina of Time is still considered by
many as not only the best Zelda ever
made, but the best game ever made period. Taking the formula A Link to the Past established and
adapting it to a 3D setting, Ocarina is
a nostalgic milestone for many who grew up in the 90’s, featuring a (for the
time) large open world full of secrets to explore, some pretty groundbreaking
graphical feats, and the first real in-depth combat system in a game.
So those are our two combatants. And
honestly, I think it’s about as fair to compare them as it is comparing a
director’s first ever work in a brand new setting with their absolute
masterpiece in a genre they’ve honed and perfected.
The thing with Ocarina of Time is that yes, it’s an amazing game that pushed the
envelope for its time and yes, it’s just as replayable as A Link to the Past, but it’s not the absolute perfection of 3D
Zelda that the people who are on Team Link
to the Past seem to think people think it is. Ocarina of Time can be clunky, cumbersome and slow at times,
especially when you’re playing the original N64 version. It just doesn’t feel
fair comparing a Zelda that’s the
first of its kind in a 3D environment with a polished and honed 2D Zelda that had a predecessor to draw
inspiration from.
Perhaps the culmination of this
argument happened when the now infamous “Zelda
Sequelitis” video launched. Although most of this video’s points have now
been debunked thanks to creator Egoraptor displaying a profound lack of
understanding of how Ocarina of Time works
in his full Let’s Play of it, while the video initially suggests that it will
serve as a platform for positive, safe discussion about which game is better
than the other, it quickly devolves into 30 minutes of nothing but screeching
about how Ocarina of Time sucks,
godlike praise being given to A Link to
the Past, and…Skyward Sword complaints.
For some reason.
Instead of examining both games
thoroughly and exploring their strengths and weaknesses like it initially says
it will, once the façade is down it becomes clear that this video is just a
platform for Egoraptor to say that anyone who likes Ocarina of Time is just nostalgic while he is ironically defending A Link to the Past to the death.
At the end of the day I still think
it’s basically like comparing apples and oranges. Why not compare A Link to the Past against a Zelda game that has a predecessor just
like it and is a more honed experience? Like, why not Wind Waker or Twilight
Princess vs. A Link to the Past?
Or if we really want to compare A Link to
the Past against a more archaic game, why not talk about how it improves on
the first Legend of Zelda?
There’s no real answer, but that’s my
two cents. What do you think?
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