For me, "as a kid" was Zelda 1 and Zelda 2. I played some of the intervening Zelda games, and I liked them well enough, but they were fine. Which isn't a knock on Zelda in particular, 99.9% of games I thought were, well, "fine".

And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.

I don’t know man. Compare the ambience of Zora’s Domain, music and all, to the equivalent area in BOTW. Compare the divine beasts to literally any temple in OOT. BOTW doesn’t even come close to the magic of Ocarina imo. The story in OOT was also much better imo. Seeing Hyrule as a kid and beginning to love it, then seeing it waste away as Adult Link, and being motivated to defeat an enemy with clear character development, Ganandorf, as opposed to a vague dark force. BOTW substituted magic for tedium. I didn’t have fun running around (because my horse is too far away and can’t be summoned), breaking weapons, running out of stamina constantly, and completing grindy uninspired shrines, all with almost no music. There’s enough there that I’ll finish the game…eventually. 7/10 at best

For me the magic of BOTW was the way its design encouraged you to approach the game more as an environment for free form play. My best experiences with BOTW were when I turned the HUD off and just enjoyed the world, finding Koroks, clearing enemy camps, but mostly just wandering. There are a lot of design elements that come together to make this play style really rewarding and fun like the density of Korok placements and the way you can easily spot shrines from a distance. I think it's hard to compare BOTW to OOT since they have such different designs. OOT is like a carefully constructed theme park ride where BOTW is more like an enormous playground filled with toys. But BOTW succeeded at giving me the same childlike sense of wonder I had with OOT (despite now being an adult).

Exactly. I played the hell out of BotW, but I never came anywhere close to beating it. I spent countless hours just running around and seeing what I could see and do.

I think I might have beaten one or two of the beasts and probably about half the shrines. And most of that came in the tail end of my many hours of gameplay. Yet I'd been all over the world, and had all kinds of fun adventures.

That's how I played Horizon Zero Dawn. I am playing Botw at the moment but it lacks that Alttp or Oot or Link's awakening spark. I guess the zelda novelty wore off along the years because I can see how BOTW has better mechanics than Horizon (but I prefer Horizon settings much more).

Again, ‘as a kid’ is what’s going on here.

I also grew up with OoT, absolutely obsessed and life-defining in many ways. Now I’m a certified Old, and while BotW didn’t click for me initially, I grew to love it and soon understood it to be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

That did require me to consider the context though, and force myself to play it with a type of ‘beginner’s mind’.

A few months ago, I decided to give Ocarina a play via the Nintendo Switch Online N64 emulator and—I couldn’t do it. With modern games to compare it to, the graphics, the frame rate, the controls, etc. was just not a good experience and I had to stop.

Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

The kids growing up on BotW/TotK will have the same rose colored glasses for those games as many of us have for OoT.

I can’t wait to get off work today and fire up TotK.

> Same thing happened with Goldeneye. I can’t believe this was tolerable way back when. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

I played dozens of hours of Goldeneye back in the day (a friend had it, and I spent a lot of time at his house) but it very nearly wasn't tolerable to PC gamers. Its sole redeeming feature was that it was far more social than PC shooters. Playing it felt like going backwards 5-10 years in graphics, level design, gameplay, et c., plus the controls were astonishingly terrible (unless played in dual-controller mode, but that was no good for multiplayer). About the only feature it had going on that was up-to-date for the time were the multiple hit-zones on enemies (different animations and amount of damage depending on where you hit them).

Perfect Dark was a huge improvement in every way (and in many ways is still unsurpassed), and with modern controls on the XBox 360 port, I still play it to this day. Going back to Goldeneye from Perfect Dark, though? Oof. Even at the time, Perfect Dark's release seemed like it straight-up obsoleted Goldeneye, aided by the fact that it included renamed clones of some of the best Goldeneye multiplayer levels and many of the weapons (though, why would you play with them when you have Perfect Dark weapons available? They're so bland)

You didn’t have to use two controllers. You could do the preset where you use the D-pad to strafe and the stick to turn. It’s basically the same as PC.

That's just a flipped mapping of the default, which used the c-pad (just another d-pad, really, but with discrete buttons) for strafe, right? I wouldn't think that's an improvement, since A and B are on the c-pad side.

[EDIT] I mean, I was just nostalgia-playing a little Goldeneye on the Switch like last week for the first time in years, and checked the mappings because my god is the default bad, and if you know one that can put look + turn on the stick, and forward/back/strafe on the c-pad... that'd be great. It didn't look to me like any did that, so I just stuck with the default.

I have the same feeling about OoT but I find many old games to be extremely playable. I think the difference is that the highly replayable games have very responsive controls and throw you into the action very quickly. I could probably replay original Legend of Zelda and enjoy it, but I actually did try with Skyward Sword and the game is too much in the player’s way too often. BotW was very good at getting out of the player’s way and letting the player do things.

Personally I'm never put off by old visuals, and find that as you go along with it you stop noticing. However, I avoid replaying games like this. Once it's finished, it's finished - you won't get the same experience ever again. Instead I go through old catalogs of games I missed.

Same here. And so far with TotK I've got the same feeling. My original zelda experience was a link to the past on the SNES though, so maybe I enjoy the "openness" aspect more? LttP lets you go around pretty much wherever from the beginning, while OoT is pretty linear, especially at the start.

For me Zelda was always more of a puzzle game than an adventure game, and I feel like those puzzle aspects are much more amplified in the last two entries, though in a much more "freeform" way.

Glad someone mentioned link. It was open ended but the world was limited, thankfully. I spent a year stuck checking each square until I met someone who told me to walk through the forest a certain way to obtain the letter/scrolls I needed.