There are two types of people in this world.
Those who think *Ocarina of Time* is the greatest video game ever made, and those who are wrong and also probably own a Wii U.
Twenty-seven years after it dropped on the Nintendo 64, the internet simply cannot let this one go.
Every few months some brave soul on Reddit posts "unpopular opinion: Ocarina of Time is overrated," and the comment section immediately turns into a scene from *The Purge*.
People are out here defending a game with graphics that look like a pile of polygons got into a fight with a fog machine.
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: the Water Temple.
If you claim you breezed through it as a nine-year-old without a guide, you are lying, and your pants are also on fire.
Nintendo eventually patched the whole thing in the 3DS remake because grown adults were still having stress dreams about iron boots and rising water levels.
The time-travel gimmick, the ocarina songs you can still hum on command, the sheer audacity of Epona just casually existing — it's a formula that modern open-world games keep trying to bottle and keep failing to. *Tears of the Kingdom* lets you build a functioning aircraft out of a fan and some scrap metal, and somehow a horse you whistle at still hits different.
The nostalgia industrial complex is real, though.
They've re-released this game more times than Mariah Carey has re-released "All I Want for Christmas Is You." N64, GameCube, Wii Virtual Console, Wii U Virtual Console, 3DS, and the Switch Online expansion pack.
At this point, if you haven't bought *Ocarina of Time* at least three times, are you even a gamer?
The younger generation, bless their hearts, will load it up on Switch, squint at the frame rate, and ask why Link controls like a shopping cart with a broken wheel.
It's not their fault they grew up on 120fps and ray tracing.
But there's a reason every "best games of all time" list still has this dusty cartridge sitting at or near the top, and it's not just because middle-aged millennials are running the websites.
This is the game that taught a generation what an epic quest actually felt like.
No "season two update." Just a kid in a green tunic, a spooky tree, and a boss called Ganon who turns into a giant pig monster because why not.
It was weird, it was hard, and it didn't hold your hand. **Our take:** Is *Ocarina of Time* the objective best game ever made?
Is it the most important one for a whole generation of players?
Final Thoughts
So let the nerds fight in the comments, and let the rest of us go replay the Song of Storms one more time.