There are two types of people in this world: those who think *The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time* is the greatest video game ever made, and those who are wrong on the internet about it.
Twenty-five-plus years after it dropped on the Nintendo 64, grown adults with mortgages and cholesterol medication are still throwing hands in comment sections over whether it holds up.
Spoiler: it does, and I will not be taking questions.
For the uninitiated—or anyone under 25 who thinks "retro" means a 2015 indie roguelike—*Ocarina of Time* invented roughly 60 percent of the stuff modern games take for granted.
Nintendo did it first while your favorite studio was still figuring out how to render a tree.
The game sold over 7 million copies and currently sits at a 99 on Metacritic, which is basically the review-score equivalent of your dad saying he walked uphill both ways to school.
The plot is deceptively simple: a kid in a green tunic gets bullied by a talking tree, sleeps for seven years, and wakes up to a world where everything went to hell.
You travel through time, play a magic ocarina, and collect medallions from dungeons that range from "genuinely clever" to "the Water Temple, which is a war crime." That temple alone has generated more rage-quits than every Dark Souls boss combined.
People still hear that watery music and start twitching.
But here's where the nostalgia goggles get foggy.
The Nintendo 64 controller had three prongs, which means playing this game required the hand geometry of a spider.
The camera fought you like it owed you money.
Link's face was basically a blurry potato with a nose.
The 3DS remake fixed a lot of this, but purists insist the original jank is part of the charm, which is exactly what someone says when they've spent $200 on a boxed cartridge.
What keeps this game alive is the same thing that keeps any 25-year-old piece of media alive: people arguing about it.
She was a good friend and you were just mean.) Every few months, some viral tweet reignites the debate, and suddenly everyone's a game designer with strong opinions about Z-targeting.
Meanwhile, Nintendo just keeps re-releasing it on every console like a parent recycling the same birthday gift.
It's on the Switch via Nintendo Switch Online, it was on the GameCube, the Wii, the Wii U, the 3DS—honestly, if your smart fridge can run it, someone's probably already tried.
And people buy it every single time, because apparently we're all just rats pressing a lever for a hit of 1998. **The take:** *Ocarina of Time* is objectively a clunky, low-poly relic that also happens to be one of the most important games ever made, and both of those things are true at once.
You don't have to play it to respect it, but if you trash-talk it without having beaten the Water Temple, your opinion is legally void.
Final Thoughts
Now go listen to the title theme and feel something.