You can find the first part here!
During the nineties my father worked at Norrköpings Tidningar and they had a collaboration with Bergsala. I periodically received Nintendo games to review and before the release of their next console we sometimes received promo material (On VHS!) On one of these cassette tapes I got to see the first glimpse of Ocarina of Time. Among other things, there was a sequence when Link throws bombs into the mouth of Dodongo, one of the bosses in the game.
I don’t remember if I had played Super Mario 64 before I saw this, but the fact that Nintendo’s most famous game series would now be 3D was something special. Of course, in retrospect, you can become as nostalgic as you like about Link’s three-dimensional transition and exaggerate its impact to the point of absurdity, but I would probably still define it as one of the greatest moments in gaming history, at least for me.
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I had booked the game at a local toy store and during the bus ride home I sat and flipped through the manual several times. What happened when I got home is one of those gaming memories that is forever etched, even though it’s been 24 years since then. I got home and my brother and I fired up the game, instantly fell in love with it and decided we were going to do a 24 hour marathon. But after a few hours we had to take a break because I was going to play floorball. The brother has told me that the wait for my return was excruciating. Once home again, our mutual friend Marcus had come over and we continued playing. Completely engrossed in the magical adventure that Nintendo creates. Sometime during the next morning, Marcus went to bed for a while, and when he woke up, he was greeted by two tired brothers who had been up and playing all night. We were so incredibly tired and stuck in the game, whereupon Marcus asked if you couldn’t dive from a specific ledge in Zora’s Domain, and voila, we got through. Both me and brother realized we needed to sleep for a while before continuing.
We didn’t take as long play sessions after this one but every time we returned we were enchanted by how amazing the game was.
Barely two years after the masterpiece Ocarina of Time, Nintendo released Majora’s Mask. It was a pretty strange game, in more ways than one, but I remember being incredibly happy that we didn’t have to wait years for another Zelda adventure. There are a lot of really good things about this game, even if it’s a little overshadowed for me personally. However, I have a thought to play it again on 3DS soon and somehow it feels good that I don’t remember much of the game because then I can be surprised by the experience again. I’ve played many Zelda games so much that I remember them so well that it almost feels unnecessary to play them again, but I haven’t played Majora’s Mask anywhere near as much as its predecessor. So, while I remember liking the darker tone of Majora’s Mask, the game will be studied in more detail in a future blog, once I’ve experienced it again.
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It would have been easy for Nintendo to follow up the Game Boy adventure Link’s Awakening with a pure sequel, but Nintendo chose a different path – as so many times before. Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages is a rather strange story as it was two games with some connected story elements, it was also not developed by Nintendo but a studio created by Capcom called Flagship. I’ve played through both games when they were released, but never returned to them. However, I would have liked to see remakes of them like the Link’s Awakening we got for the Nintendo Switch. I think they would have fit well as a release with both games in one.
After those games, Four Swords came to the Game Boy Advance, which became the first Zelda game I didn’t actually play. I’ve never been particularly interested in these multiplayer games, and even though they still belong to the Zelda series, they don’t feel like part of the games that I personally consider to be the main games in the series.
During a dark and technically visually impressive demonstration during Space World 2000, we got to see what would follow up Ocarina of Time in earnest. What we got, however, was something completely different. The Wind Waker was released in 2003 and I had moved away from home a few years earlier. I now lived in a small apartment in Trollhättan and received the message that the game had ended up at the wrong delivery point and I was very disappointed. Luckily, mom’s neighbor was going to a store nearby so I got to go along and was able to pick up the game. I remember liking the gold toned cover and sitting and playing all night until the sun came up.
Zelda: The Wind Waker was, primarily visually, a different adventure but I remember liking both the graphics and the music. There were wonderful characters and exciting places to explore, and it’s also one of the Zelda titles I’ve replayed a number of times. In fact, I sat down and played it again quite recently, then with the Wii U edition. Among other things, I love the melody that is played when you go on a boat, and remember that when I worked as a music teacher, I used to stay after work days to learn to play it on the piano. It’s an incredibly beautiful piece, something the series overall has plenty of.
The game was followed by Four Swords Adventures for the Gamecube, which I, like Four Swords for the GBA, have not played either, and then The Minish Cap, which I have played through once and remember as a small cozy but not so memorable adventure. However, I think in the future I will be replaying most of the Zelda games I’ve only experienced once.
The wait between each Zelda game always feels like an eternity. But something similar to what that demon from Space World had been gossiping about four years earlier was what was to come next.
To be continued.
