Wow! The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is beautiful, yes, certainly the loveliest game Nintendo has ever made. The details, the colors, the sounds, the constant movements of individual leaves in light breezes, the ripple of water…wow! It’s dazzling! The stitching on Link’s tunic. All the unique bits of foliage that rustle as you walk through, the way nothing seems to obviously clip into anything else. The gentle reactions when you bump into NPCs. The attention to detail, everywhere, in the characters, the pacing, the way dungeon mechanisms work, everywhere you look, so much.
One of the Kokiri has a line at some point about how they and the fairies all sparkle and shine, and these visuals have committed to that descriptor. I didn’t want to leave the forest. But also I really, really did, especially after a little over an hour playing last night. Because it almost feels extravagant, like a just slightly uncomfortable excess, especially after having played the sparse original so recently. This new visual density fills in gaps where the imagination used to do the work. I stop more than short of shaking my fist at this, decrying kids these days for having no creativity. I think the abundance of Kokiri Forest, rendered this way, is wonderful, but it also leaves me with a wistfulness for something a bit less much. I don’t know where the line of “exactly the right amount of everything” is, and I certainly think toeing it would be a worse decision than this.
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