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Our Lord Ditto died for your sins so that His prophet, this regular ordinary human child, could rebuild a society for Our Blessed Trainers to return to.
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this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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(this comment covers all the time I've played since the last one—been adding bits and pieces to it as I go, so it's long and a bit jumbled)
I wouldn't blame him! But I guess that's why he's the Hero of Time and I'm not.
Stone Circles
Wow, that seems like a pretty random assortment of things! I've been interrogating every NPC and Sheikah Stone I come across with the Mask of Truth and haven't seen anything about that, but I'll keep my eyes peeled. I'm definitely after the truth thing that's in the Kakariko well (alluded to by one of the old men taking refuge from Hyrule Castle Town), but I haven't managed to get at it just yet. In the small bit that I've played since my last comment, I got the Golden Scale from the fishing hole, but to my surprise, it was still juuuuust short of letting me get to the bottom of the well and enter the opening (although I did get a surprise Piece of Heart from the lab in Lake Hylia as a consolation prize). And as Adult Link, the well is dry but appears sealed off. I haven't tried that hard to get in, though, so for the time being I'm not asking for any hints, especially since it might just be something that changes as I progress through the dungeons....actually, speaking of which: is the Song of Storms something that will just come in due time? Judging by its placement in the pause menu, it does come after the Song of Time chronologically, but I'm a bit mystified at what I need to do to get it. As Young Link, the guy mentions that he's trying to write a song about spinning, but neither my spin attack nor my boomerang seemed to entice him. Full disclosure: I accidentally spoiled myself when looking something else up (which is why I really try to avoid doing web searches for things) which indicated that the Song of Storms may be the key to opening those secret holes, but I guess I'll have to wait and see.
[a few days later] Aha! The solution ended up being pretty simple, but I really enjoy how with this kind of game it's not like, "Get quest, go to marker A, talk to person X, go to marker B, talk to person Y, complete quest." Instead, I remembered that there was a guy in Kakariko who mentioned that the windmill was used to draw water from the well, and then when I talked to the guy in the windmill he talked about how he was annoyed by some kid who played a song. The mental block I had was that I expected to learn the song as a kid, but instead I had to learn it as an adult and go back in time! First puzzle that I had to solve with time travel, but I suspect it won't be the last.
As for the Lens of Truth—I wasn't expecting a whole dungeon! I thoroughly enjoyed being trolled by all the invisible walls and floors. Leans pretty heavily into horror, what with the piles of flesh and the torture implements—definitely seems like the kind of thing that would stick with you if you played it as a kid back when it first came out! It was my first encounter with a Like Like, which I remembered from its Melee trophy eats shields (put together with what at least one person mentioned, specifically Hylian shields), so I kept it stunlocked with my boomerang and escaped unscathed. Also did a cheeky little skip past a pit by jump slashing across the corner, which made me feel smart.
In the end, it is the Song of Storms that opens those secret holes! It worked on every single one of the non-bombable ones that I'd written down. Entirely possible that there's a third type (or even more) in OoT, but that's what I've found so far. Surely must be somewhere in the game that hints at this...I know that NES-era games were more likely to require you to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, but in this game it seems like everything is pretty carefully laid out.
Also, is it just me, or is the timing with the frog minigame ridiculously tight? I consider myself to be pretty good at rhythm games, but it took me about two dozen tries to get the fixed song that they start out with and I found the changing ones after that impossible. Wonder if it's a bug in the original code—I notice that there's a tweak in Ship of Harkinian to give you unlimited time to complete it (because of course there is!).
Oh, and regarding the Lens of Truth: can you give a general idea of how frequently it'll actually come in handy? Knowing me, I'll probably end up scouring every last inch of Hyrule with it regardless, but it'd be nice to know how often I should be hitting paydirt.
commentary
Yeah, I was definitely getting lost with her dialogue as well as the sages, which is kinda problematic when that's where most of the core story is.
200 Rupees?! Well, I act indignant, but I'm basically always maxxed out even with the Giant's Wallet, and if I were ever strapped for cash a single three-bottle run to the Ice Cavern for some Blue Fire to sell to that person who wants to buy stuff in bottles would basically fill it up in one fell swoop. So I'll just take it as Link being a Job Creator™. One thing that I was expecting to need to spend my money on was the tunics, but I got both of them for free, so there are no other big ticket items to spend on (not that I've seen yet, anyway). I even delayed the last part of the mask trading quest because I didn't want to waste the money, but in the end I sold it for 0 rupees
(also, I see that Biggoron has appeared at Death Mountain's summit, but it looks like I need to advance further before he'll forge anything for me. The comment about "Hylian carpenters praise me for my skills" makes me wonder if I need to chat with the carpenter from Kakariko, who I spotted across the broken bridge in Gerudo Valley (another nut which I've yet to crack, but all in due time, I'm sure))
I do really want to go back and play some of the 2D Zeldas. I bounced off of the original game when I tried it a little while back (might have to cave and use a patch to tweak the difficulty or use a guide or something), but A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening (DX) are more modern so maybe I'd have better luck with those (although that'd probably make it even harder to go back and play the original). Super Mario Bros. is still pretty accessible if you're into platformers as long as you know about how to continue from the Start screen, but The Legend of Zelda is pretty brutal when it comes to not holding your hand, so it'll take a mentality shift to fully enjoy it. Might want to go back and read some contemporary coverage of it, since that always gives me perspective.
Ah, I missed this, but when I returned to the Lost Woods as Adult Link I was happy to see that they were there, just hostile, and Navi explained about how they didn't like adults. I don't mind being heckled as long as they're okay!
...of course
Well, I'm still missing some Skulltulas in both the Lost Woods and Kokiri Forest, but I at least managed to rustle up a few more (the one on said elevated part of the room in the Lost Woods as well as one on top of a building in Kokiri Forest), and overall I managed to juuust scrape together 50 Gold Skulltula Tokens. There were two weird ones, though, which I suspect I may have collected in an unintended manner. In Dodongo's Cavern, after running to and fro I finally spotted one in that corridor with the teeny Dodongos (not sure of their actual name). It was up on a ledge that I couldn't climb up to nor reach directly with my hookshot, so I ended up dragging one of the statues used for pressing a button all the way over, backflipping onto it (since you can't climb on them), and then pulling myself onto the ledge. The other one was more straightforward: in Zora's River, there's a Skulltula on the wall a bit before the entrance to Zora's Domain, and while it wasn't there as Young Link and was out of range of the Hookshot as Adult Link when using a normal approach, but by precisely standing on top of the fence I was juuuuust able to reach.
It really does have quite the atmosphere! Amazing what they were able to pull off with the relatively primitive hardware—just goes to show that it's art direction that matters, not polygon counts or texture resolution.
I normally go on a walk first thing in the morning, but when I went on a walk late at night a few days ago, I was thinking about how different the same environment looked and felt and then had the thought, "This is just like the night/day cycle in Ocarina of Time." I voluntarily submit myself to be sent to the gamer gulag
I've been playing very small bits here and there over the past few days (no more than an hour a day), but as soon as I get a big chunk of time to myself (possibly tonight??), I'm gonna finally tackle the Water Temple, which I'm really excited about!
pure commentary
I strongly feel this game gives you enough hints to know what to do. Part of that is the vast majority of NPCs have a purpose, if only to hint at what needs to happen. You don't have to slog through dozens of taken an arrow to the knee generic dialog just to find the nugget you need.
That's why I was a bit cagey about the Permalock, since it could spoil some mechanics like the time travel, but I felt the game would tip its hand soon enough for you that it wouldn't hurt.
SSB has spoiled more of this game than just about anything else, which is why I don't feel too bad revealing some things for a three decade old game. It's also fun intuiting how far and by what path you are taking in the game just by telling me something as innocuous as your first Like Like.
I don't recall there being a trick, but I did only play it on Emulation or original hardware, not the Ship of Harkinian release. It's entirely possible it's a bug.
It's definitely necessary to complete the game as there are several puzzles you cannot complete without it, but it's not a scour-the-map-like-a-metal-detector necessary. On the flip side, it drains mana slowly and I found mana refill bottles drop only slightly less frequently than Rupees. Feel free to just let it run if you feel the slightest bit suspicious. Most of the stuff are small chests with rupee rewards, hidden walls/floors like in the Well, or it can make some minigames significantly easier. One trick I use is to turn it off and on quickly, seeing if anything flickers (chest, wall, etc) when I do it. If you are strapped for mana or want piece of mind, a green potion in a bottle will restore all your mana and it's another money sink.
The whole NES catalog has a well deserved reputation of being brutally hard, so don't feel bad for skipping it. I treat Zelda much like Mario; they are all kinda the same (yeah I said it!) so I (a) don't feel bad about skipping one or two titles, and (b) I approach each entry curious about their unique gameplay mechanics. I never beat the original NES Zelda, it took me over a decade to play Wind Waker, I didn't play Breath of the Wild until a couple of years ago, and I haven't yet played Skyward Sword or Tears of the Kingdom at all! That said I got my Zelda start on Link to the Past and Link's Awakening (OoT was my third), and both come with my strong recommendation.
The dynamic day/night cycle was genuinely a revolutionary feature at the time. Few contemporary game had it, and it would take years for the industry to mainstream it. Riffing on my gameplay curiosity, going back to old games is an interesting lesson in cultural archaeology to see how they adapted and converged on some mechanics and styles, and seeing what experimental ideas were tried that ultimately never made it out of the 90s.
Challenge: IMPOSSIBLE
If anything, I have to waste money or else I will open a chest with a purple rupee and a full wallet. :all-my-apes-gone: but for rupees
Honestly yes. Nice job! It shows that sometimes not knowing the 'official' answer means you don't know it is hard. For the first one, try the Scarecrow song... As for the second, the Water Temple's item makes collecting these a LOT easier. In fact I'll go so far as to say the Water Temple item is the most valuable item in the game as it unlocks quite a bit.
Well, it took me (checks) three and a half weeks, but I'm back and excited to get back on the Ocarina of Time horse! Gonna have to break this reply over two comments:
gameplay diary
Okay, since I ended up writing this waaaaay later it's unfortunately going to be lacking in a lot of detail, but I'll do my best:After entering the water temple, I flailed around ineffectively for a good 20 minutes or so before even finding Ruto and changing the water level for the first time...I can definitely see how kids would have gotten completely lost in this place. I think I accomplished nothing on the first cycle of water level changes, but after that I started keeping careful notes, with a section for each level and four subsections for each cardinal direction, flagging things that I should return to once the water was at a certain level or once I received some new equipment (which I'd later discover was the longshot!). Once I got into a groove, I got through the temple fairly smoothly, I'd say. However, I think a major reason why I made smooth progress was the quality-of-life upgrade of being able to toggle the Iron Boots on the fly. Not only did that make the process much less painful, it also enabled techniques I'm sure the developers never intended such as feathering the boots on and off to travel in a straight line through the water, which definitely made light work of some obstacles (although no sequence breaks or anything like that).
With Dark Link, I realized what the fight was a moment before it actually happened—beyond the general vibe, I think the room also reminded me of the boss room for that same fight in Zelda II, which is one of the only parts of that game I've actually seen. After the requisite ineffectual flailing and taking a bunch of Peter Pan flip kicks off the Master Sword straight to the kisser, I eventually settled on blocking and then immediately attacking with a jump slash, which seemed fairly consistent and made pretty short work of him. But even then, he still took 11 hearts off of me! I didn't end up needing a fairy, in the end, but it was a close shave.
The final boss had a really great and scary intro cinematic—felt like something out of Alien or something! It's really amazing how games like Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid (from what I've seen and heard) innovated on the use of cinematic language in video games. I was just reading earlier today in Super Nintendo (new book from Keza MacDonald that's a cultural history of Nintendo's biggest franchises—pretty good read so far!) that the use of in-game cinematics as opposed to pre-rendered cutscenes was not so much a conscious aesthetic choice as it was a necessity due to how much the game was changing right up until its release; I'm glad it ended up that way because pre-rendered cutscenes would not have aged nearly as gracefully, and even when well-executed I found they kind of took me out of things...glad we've generally moved past FMVs, as important as they were during the transition to full 3D games.
Anyway, as for the actual fight, I'm not entirely sure I approached it in the intended way since I basically never stepped on the central four pillars other than to start the fight, but I basically just stayed out of range and spammed the longshot so I could get in a few hits here and there. Did get flung about three times, though.
After finishing the temple, I immediately looked through my notes and hit the spots that I thought I could use the longshot. First, I hopped onto that roof in Kakariko to talk to the poor fella who's been stuck on the roof for seven years (Heart Piece Get!!), and then I clambered up onto the upper floor of the windmill. I was a bit confused, though—I assumed the purpose was to stunt on the guy who's on the watchtower and mentions that he can't stand anyone being higher than him. I grabbed the Cucco and flew at him a few times, but his dialogue never changed...am I barking up the wrong tree? Is there some other way to get higher than him to trigger an event, or is his dialogue purely flavor to call back to him standing on the balcony in Hyrule Castle Town? I couldn't really see a use for the Cucco (beyond fun) otherwise, since you can longshot directly to the aforementioned roof.
In a subsequent brief play session, after learning the Bolero of Fire (...definitely could have saved myself a lot of time if I'd done this earlier—was it really as simple as just talking to the kid again after getting the Goron Tunic? Or did I just miss/ignore that the first time I talked to him?), I headed over to Gerudo Valley and Longshot my way across the broken bridge. After immediately getting spotted by a guard and breaking out of prison, I started very clumsily exploring the fortress, getting spotted a whoooole bunch of times and cheesing some guards with Longshot spam. The Biggoron Sword made short work of the Gerudo warriors, but it was only after rescuing three of the four carpenters that I realized I could knock out the guards with arrows! On my next play session, I'll hopefully find that elusive fourth prisoner and see where things go from there.
commentary
Yes, that's absolutely it! Each NPC adds their own flavor and nearly all of them point you towards something in game, all with just a scant few lines of text. Even the few that don't (or at least, that I haven't discovered the purpose of yet!) are still unique and don't wear on you. It really contributes to that strong sense of place that I feel when playing Ocarina—the vibe of the different locales and all the people in them.
Man, I'm super curious...might actually dig into the code when the spirit moves me, although it'll take a bit of effort to parse through it.
Noted! I won't run around spamming it everywhere, then, although I have been using that quick toggle technique, and as far as potions go I just spring for the blue potion since my wallet's always bursting at the seams. For minigames, I actually got super lucky the very first time I did the chest minigame and got the Heart Piece on my first try! I was actually planning to use savestates to cheat it, since trying over and over again and farming rupees isn't my idea of fun, but I sailed straight through. I can't remember how many doors it was, but I think it might have been 5, making it a 1/32 ≈ 3% chance. I actually thought I had accidentally enabled a cheat in Ship of Harkinian, so I went back in and failed on the second door, at which point I also found out that the savestates break certain doors (and thought I had borked my game...wouldn't be the first time).
Yeah, if I do go back and play NES Zelda, I may end up playing the PC port with some tweaks to make it easier, since I don't think NES difficulty is generally for me (outside of the aforementioned SMB1+3). But some frustration aside, I did enjoy what I've played of it. I can't remember if I mentioned it, but while I really enjoyed BotW I sorta bounced off of TotK...I just found the building mechanics too distracting, I guess. I wanna give it another shot eventually, but I'm more interested in playing the linear Zelda games first, which I think play more to my strengths.
Oh, and right around the time I made my last comment, v1.0 of a PC port based on the Twilight Princess was released which looks really promising. I'm not planning to tackle TP until after Majora's Mask, (finishing up) Wind Waker, A Link to the Past, and Link's Awakening, so by the time I get to it I'm sure it'll be even more polished. These are very exciting times to be playing old Nintendo games!
It really does make a huge difference in immersion, and while a real-time clock isn't a good fit for a Zelda game it's a huge part of why Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal and the original Animal Crossing enraptured me so. I wonder if anyone's written a good article detailing the history of day/night and/or RTC systems in games.
A kindred spirit! It's one of the reasons that I love reading old video game magazines—even for the eras that I remember, I really didn't start thinking very critically about video games until well into adulthood, so there's a lot that I've forgotten or didn't pick up on. The Video Game History Foundation recently put out a video looking at the first FPS game to feature modern dual analog controls (which we now take for granted), and it's fascinating to see the wide range of reactions people had at the time. Can't remember if I brought them up before, but they have a free archive with fully searchable OCR'd magazines (as well as design docs and other developer materials), so it's really great for doing deep dives or even just quick fact checks.
Me when I opened the chest I found in my first Stone of Agony secret hole to find a yellow rupee with my wallet full
Absolutely! Totally different scale, but I'm reading a book about the history of Blizzard Entertainment (Play Nice) and there's a bit where they talk about seeing this sick demo for a game at E3 and realizing they need to up their game for Starcraft, and later on they found out that it was a completely phony pre-rendered demo that the presenters were miming along to so that it'd look like they were playing it.
I went back and tried it and was like, "oooOOOOOHHH that's what it does!". Well, now I know what I need to do if there's a weird spot where it seems like I need a hookshot point! This is another mechanic which has me wondering if there's an in-game hint or not, because even with you encouraging me to learn it I'm not sure when I would have thought to actually bust out the Scarecrow Song.
Separately, I've been enjoying reading through issues of Nintendo Power from 1996-1998 (using this page as a reference to skip over the sparse earlier months) and seeing the hype building for Ocarina of Time (as well as Pokémon Red/Blue from May '98 onwards). It's also interesting to see things that changed (or were misreported) even as the game hurtled towards its release date, such as this description of the beginning of the game (all misspellings theirs):
Nintendo Power Issue 103 (December 1997)
Link Comes of Age
The outline of the story for Zelda 64 comes straight from EAD, the chief game development department at Nintendo Company Ltd. in Kyoto, Japan. Although EAD considers everything "tentative" until the final version of a game is completed, much of what you read here will be a part of Mr. Miyamoto's greatest epic.
Long ago, before Gannon stole the Triforce and kidnapped Zelda, Link set out to his coming-of-age ceremony in the Maze Woods. It was the custom of his tribe, the Kokiri family, that a young man would receive a guardian spirit or fairy who would stay beside him and guide him throughout his life. But as Link walked through the woods, he discovered that a monster had captured one such fairy. Gallantly, Link came to the rescue and defeated the monster, but the fairy was mortally wounded. In her dying breath, she warned Link not to allow Gannondorf to possess the Triforce and to seek out a wise man and his spiritual stone.
At the same time, Gannondorf, the king of the thieves, was searching for the legendary Triforce so that he could steal its power. In time, Gannondorf stumbled into the Maze Woods and neared the secret place where the Triforce was kept. Link went to Hyrule Castle for help. Princess Zelda knew of the Triforce's hiding place, but to reach it they would have to find three magical stones to unlock the secret. Thus begins the adventure.
Brings me back to being a kid and poring over those tiny screenshots to glean every last bit of information I could. The biggest difference now is that I can actually read the Japanese now! And I love seeing all the cute envelope illustrations that kids made. Nintendo Power has a good amount, but the Japanese equivalent (64Dream, later Nintendo Dream) is absolutely packed with them—here's an example from the May 1998 issue, which devotes two full-page spreads to reader illustrations (and has a little corner specifically for kids under 10!). That same issue has a nice feature on Ocarina of Time, which is basically the writer going, "God, these delays are agonizing but holy crap Ocarina of Time looks like the coolest game ever" and I'm like, "Buddy, you have no idea!". The piece is titled, "Is this really [my] final love letter"? since the game was (at time of printing) slated to release in late April 1998, but in the body of the article they're like, "Honestly, we think it's gonna get delayed again, but however long it takes, it'll be worth it" (right on both counts!).
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: