Why Ocarina of Time Can't Be Recreated

The eternal paradox of Zelda fans...explained!

Last week Eiji Aonuma was interviewed by IGN about Zelda, and was asked about what he thought about fans wanting a more traditional Zelda experience in the vein of previous 3D Zeldas. It ultimately boiled down to “we won’t do that” anymore, which got me thinking about: what would it take for there to be another Ocarina of Time? Is this something even possible or worth pursuing?

(For background on me: I’m a game designer who’s made multiple long games! Some that even vaguely engage with Zelda…)

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What do fans really miss about Ocarina of Time?

If you’re already on board with the idea that OoT/MM have something that TotK/BotW do not, you can probably skip this section - I walk through my argument on why they differ.

Aonuma: So I am in complete agreement with what Mr. Fujibayashi said in that games where you need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order are kind of the games of the past. Whereas currently the games of today are ones in which that can accept a player's own decisions and give them the freedom to flexibly proceed through the game, and the game will allow for that.

Interviewer: It's interesting to hear you say that because one of the discussions that I've seen among Zelda fans is, "Gosh, I miss the more traditional linear Zelda of the past." And I'm wondering, how do you feel about that given the direction of the series toward a very free-form, open-ended kind of design?

Aonuma: Well, I do think we as people have a tendency to want the thing that we don't currently have, and there's a bit of a grass is greener mentality. But I also think that with the freedom players have in the more recent games in the series...there still is a set path, it just happens to be the path that they chose. So I think that that is one thing I kind of like to remind myself about the current games that we're making.

But also, it's interesting when I hear people say those things because I am wondering, "Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you're more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?" But I do understand that desire that we have for nostalgia, and so I can also understand it from that aspect.

I think when someone says they want, say, something like Ocarina of Time (OoT), it’s not the relatively simple combat or puzzles they miss, but how emotionally focused of an experience OoT is. There’s a feeling of unraveling a fairytale as you step through that, and balanced with the variety of side quests and wandering you can do. You have a degree of freedom to explore, but it’s still contained within a very deliberately laid out world, where the focus is the next main landmark to reach - the next chapter of the fairy tale.

Source: VGCartography Twitter

(Source for picture: https://twitter.com/vgcartography/status/1734560102395388102)

Now while Tears of the Kingdom is more open than OoT, and has its fun moments, this openness still comes at a cost. Let me tell an anecdote to illustrate:

I decided to ride to Hateno Village to upgrade my Purah Pad. I started riding my horse and it felt epic and exciting! But along the way 2 or 3 NPCs yelling for help distracted me. A horse stable told me about a bonus point system. Multiple enemy camps tried to attack me but I ignored them. I passed like 4 Koroks asking me to find their friend. Various shrines and towers called out in the distance: “Melos, come get more map data! Come get 1/4th of a heart container!”

Meanwhile, mushrooms and flowers of all varieties were there, with the sense they ought to be picked up because I might want a stealth elixir some point in the future and it’d be a pain to look up their location online if I can’t find them on my own. By the time I reached Hateno there were another 3 NPCs trying to start side quests with me. It’s only through willpower that I managed to remember my original goal at all! Which I couldn’t even succeed at in the end - the quest wouldn’t progress - apparently because I needed to advance the main story. All I really accomplished in an entire hour was being bombarded with stuff I didn’t want to do yet.

Amongst all this, it’s ironic that Aonuma wants to avoid past where you “need to follow a specific set of steps or complete tasks in a very set order”, because the whole way a crafting system works is by baking fetch quests into the entire game. If I want a speed potion, I now have an inherent quest to go find the ingredients. Quests spiral out into fractals of quests. The result is a distracting game, throwing recommendations one after another at you, like a tempting bread-baking tutorial in the middle of a 4-hour video essay on Mario 64 A-presses.

I think when fans want a return to the past, they want a more focused experience - one where the world has a more holistic gravitas, vs the buffet-like theme park of TotK.

Why Ocarina of Time can never be recreated

Now, I think it’s possible for a set of game developers to make a game that has a cool sense of world, strong and memorable, like OoT or MM. Nier Replicant comes to mind. But is it possible to recreate something like OoT exactly?

(From a tweet thread by HyruleInterview)

In the above quote, Miyamoto mentions an ‘emotional immediacy’ to Ocarina of Time’s world. Whether or not OoT’s puzzles are good (I think they vary wildly and can often be tedious,) the dozen or so challenges that make up its dungeons, collectively, create this sense of place to the dungeon that convincingly fixes it as a location within the story of OoT. I think this is something that gets harder to do the more people you have working with you.

Read enough Zelda interviews, and you’ll always see employees grappling with “what is Zelda?” To be sure, it’s a tough position to be in - answering that and needing to please fans and make a profit. This question - “What is Zelda?” - and how future Zelda directors answer it - is the essence of what drives the change in the series. To illustrate, let’s look at this interview with the Twilight Princess (2006ish) directors. Red highlights in particular.

(Source: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/twilight_princess/0/0/)

Kitagawa feels the “gradual stepping up of puzzles is the essence of a Zelda game.” Nishimori says “the essence of a Zelda game is the feeling […] to solve puzzles in their own way.”

Kitagawa and Nishimori focus on the puzzle-solving as a core experience of Zelda. There’s even faint traces of the open puzzle solving in TotK. This is very different from what Miyamoto says is the core - “emotional immediacy” as more important than “finding secrets and solving puzzles”. This is why Ocarina of Time is a game that I’ve replayed despite not really liking its combat and puzzles, but I have trouble even wanting to start Twilight Princess again. I like puzzles as a means to establish a game’s world: not as something that’s there for me to do. This is why I bounce off of TotK’s shrines - they don’t collectively create a sense of place, they’re just isolated challenges or tutorials.

To me, this reinterpretation of puzzle elements is core to why the series changed. The younger directors view puzzle elements as a more modular thing - something you can just drop into a game, rather than something that exists because of the need to establish emotional immediacy. “Fun Puzzles” is more modular and communicable to future developers than the vaguer artistic notion Miyamoto gets at. It’s easier to get a team of 100 or more to agree that “yeah we should put in some fun puzzles!” but it’s more unclear to communicate a single person’s artistic intuition.

To be sure, it’s not like Zelda developers have forgotten everything from that period. There’s still a definite odd charm and whimsy to aspects of even TotK - a cave entirely packed full of rocks, a side quest about a fashionista trying to gentrify BotW’s farming town. However, these elements don’t exist in harmony so much as they’re packed in with a ton of other things. Kyogoku, another TP director, later talks about the subtle details that can make Zelda game worlds come alive, who always wanted to “[try] to think of subtle things that might or might not be noticed by players”:

So, then - it’s not like Nintendo has lost the skills or understanding to make something on par with OoT or MM. Why can’t they make it?

I think it boils down to Nintendo being a stable place to work at!

As I read more Zelda interviews, I really get the sense that Nintendo is huge on letting younger developers input their ideas - and actually have them make their way into the game. This, I would imagine, makes it a relatively welcoming place to work at. Combined with the fact that Nintendo doesn’t seem to lay people off as often as Western studios, it seems like a stable place to work at. I respect Nintendo’s dedication to their history even though their games aren’t that interesting to me anymore.

That working reality, to me, relies on an extremely strong control of their brand and series, and the requirement of making hits. In other words, every Zelda game has to sell tons of copies. Or, Zelda games have to play to the Twitch/streaming/social media-focused market. The priority can’t be placed on some artistic intent of Miyamoto or other directors - the game has to prioritize workplace harmony (through coexistence of design decisions that might feel kind of too-many-cooks) as well as profit (through appealing via addicting/retention-heavy design styles where you have a million different things to do and ways to do it.)

On one hand, it’s of course great that it’s a good company to work at (just guessing, here.) - it means old directors and workers can input ideas from their experience on past Zelda games. But on the other hand, the position Nintendo is in means they can only put out games that feel sort of artistically bland compared to earlier works, because the younger generation’s idea of Zelda is far different from that of the people making OoT, and they have desires and ideas of their own.

I think the best a fan insistent on playing something with the exact magic of OoT or MM could hope for is a remake of OoT or MM. But it’s likely that, due to intergenerational change and priorities, those would likely lose something of the originals along the way. And I would actually suggest that it’s probably better to just try to like new things rather than hold out hope for an impossibility, as I think even indies couldn’t make one.

Can’t Indies Make It?

This is a really complicated question. The short answer is that no indies can ever make another Ocarina of Time. HOWEVER, I believe indies - or bigger studios! - can still make games as interesting or more interesting as Ocarina of Time. And perhaps they can make a sequel to their own game that is as interesting as Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina.

Every game is a product of its time and circumstance. The biggest issue is that there is no indie studio even in the position to try something with the same economic and historical conditions as Nintendo. By the time Nintendo took on Ocarina of Time they already had their own 3D console, 15+ years of working history and shared game design. If you try to grow to that scale in today’s space you end up working with popular IPs or having to pump out a roguelike or other profitable game.

But, it’s true, there are already indie games that play sort of like an early 3D Zelda. I’d argue that these games run into the same problem as the later Zelda directors did, which we can boil down to this grass-cutting anecdote from the TP interviews:

If you try to copy a game piece-by-piece, you’ll quickly run into these kinds of questions. What matters, and what doesn’t? Unless you’re just recreating the whole game exactly, stuff is going to change. And no matter how critically you think about the game you’re copying, it’s impossible to fully get at the artistic motivations and improvisatory decisions between how a game came to be. Why are the temples in the order they’re in? Why are there rupees on top of the drawbridge chain? These are simple questions to ask, but it’s impossible when you consider that the OoT development team life experiences and other influences to draw on - I suspect that Japanese myth or stories like Tono Monogatari had influence on these games’ worlds.

But there’s much more to OoT’s world than the Z-lock targeting, Ocarina and and hookshot puzzles. Even if you study OoT as hard as you can and copy stuff accurately, you won’t get the same result because you’re not working from the same team dynamics and sets of inspiration as OoT’s team. Even if you got the same team back together and made them make a game it’d be different!

Games are artistic products of humans - they’re not factory-line reproducable products (although I guess recent games and their copy paste designs have me questioning that sometimes…)

If you copy just a very loose part of OoT, like “I want my world to have this mythic sense to it,” or “hey it was kind of funny putting cows in a hole” it’s definitely possible to get a good result. But once you’re doing that, you’re no longer trying to recreate OoT, but making your own artistic work with one of many influences. You’re no longer engineering a product, but you’re giving over control to the collective influences and experiences you and your team have. And I think it’s only giving yourself to that power that allows game developers to make truly timeless and artistic works.

Put simply, as cool as it would be to play some game and have it feel just like OoT somehow, I don’t think it’s possible. It’s like asking to clone a human. Games are different, humans are different… and that’s what makes them so appealing! I think the healthiest way to be a fan of this series is to accept that the N64 period is over - but we may be able to enjoy new things which have slight echoes of the past games we love, rather than holding up OoT as an impossible standard.

Likewise, as a developer - it’s okay that you can’t make something equal to OoT. The closer we try to copy the game, likely the worse result we’ll get. But if you just keep OoT as one of many influences… you can totally make something unique that succeeds in its own sensibilities and merits, something that has aspects of OoT in its DNA.

In the meantime, consider this your fate if you dare try to merely copy these games…

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