My earliest memory of Ocarina of Time is seeing my stepdad play it. It was the scene where Link meets Zelda for the first time. Having just snuck his way past a series of castle guards, he listens as Zelda tells her of her nightmarish prophecy. She shows him the man who will bring that prophecy to fruition, Ganondorf, and says that only the Master Sword can stop him. It is a scene that since that day I have probably seen literally a hundred times across many childhood replays of the game. But in my most recent playthrough of the game, I noticed a few things were weird about it.
For one thing, I seem to remember the sequence of Link chasing the guards being a little more involved. As a kid I remember running behind bushes, climbing up on a garden trellis, and generally doing sneaky things. This time Link just kinda skipped all that and showed up straight in Zelda’s courtyard after waking the sleeping Talon. Also, the whole conversation about the prophecy didn’t even really happen. Link just kind of listened to Impa teach a song, which he played on his ocarina – which I swear used to sound like an ocarina and not a harp. In my memories Link’s tunic was green, but in my recent playthrough it was replaced with a deep purple. I’m also reasonably sure that Impa was supposed to teach you Zelda’s Lullaby instead of Bolero of Fire. And I know there’s a running joke in the fandom about Link being a girl but he definitely had a woman’s voice this time through.
This is not of course a case of my childhood memory of Ocarina of Time being faulty. Rather, my most recent playthrough of the game was not of vanilla Ocarina of Time but instead the game’s randomizer. If you’ve never heard of the Zelda Ocarina of Time Randomizer (ZOOTR), it’s a romhack that allows you to manipulate various aspects of Ocarina of Time, primarily the locations of the game’s items and gear. Over the course of roughly a week I explored Hyrule Field once again in a whole new way as I scoured nooks and crannies I had barely even heard of to try to find all of my gear. My first impressions will be a two-parter this week – today I am focusing on the actual features of the randomizer, and Wednesday will be all about the play experience.
Randomizer Features
Listen I’ve filled out a few government forms in my day but holy shit
Settings and Tools
When you first boot up the randomizer itself, the experience can be a little intimidating. There are so many buttons and most of them can have a pretty dramatic impact on your game. Luckily, each one features a tooltip explanation that pops up when you hover or click to explain exactly what it is you’re dealing with. So if for example you think the Scrub Shuffle is the dance you do when you finally beat Queen Gohma for the first time, the randomizer will helpfully explain that actually there are four different settings for whether or not Deku Scrubs can have your required items, and how much those items can cost. It’s also pretty good at organizing information in logical tabs. If you’re like me and you don’t know any speed tech or glitches for the game, you can pretty safely ignore the giant menu of tricks to include in the logic.
“Logic” refers to the way the items are spread through the game and what order they can be accessed in. So if you want to play with glitchless logic (I certainly did), then your bow and arrow can’t be locked behind a door that you need a bow and arrow to open. You can also completely exclude specific checks (discrete interactions in the game that grant an item, such as opening a chest, getting a song, breaking a pot, etc.) if you don’t want to include them in the run. I didn’t do this during my first randomizer run but I probably will in the future for checks that are really hard to pull off on my emulator – the controls don’t work well without a vanilla N64 controller so the precise aiming needed for something like the shooting gallery is more trouble than it’s worth.
The randomizer has a bunch of neat options for interesting types of runs to do. For my first playthrough I decided I wanted to do something a little more challenging, but there were certain types of nuance I didn’t want to deal with. ZOOTR absolutely supports this approach and allows you to micromanage almost any aspect of the game that you can think of. I wanted to include dungeon keys in my randomization, but I was also playing with potsanity, which makes the breakable pots in the game viable locations where necessary items can be located. I didn’t want to chase down every obscure pot in the game trying to find one key for the forest temple, but there was a compromise: I was able to put the keys onto key rings, which make it so that every key for a particular dungeon all come together in a single package. I also set the pots to have a unique texture if I had never broken them before – this made it easy to see at a glance if I had already checked them. The ability to very precisely manage the degree of difficulty within any particular setting means you can customize a randomizer experience that’s suited well to your ability and to the kind of challenge you are looking for.
Quality of Life Changes
One cool thing about ZOOTR is that it incorporates a lot of changes that make the experience smoother compared to the original. Some changes are baked into the system and some are optional toggles for the player. One of the most practical gameplay improvements is the additional of D-Pad functionality. The original Ocarina of Time doesn’t utilize the D-Pad, which means there are four extra buttons on the controller that could reduce the amount of menuing in order to change your gear on the C-buttons. ZOOTR uses the D-Pad for quick-swapping the iron and hover boots, always having quick access to the ocarina, and for being able to quickly put on and take off your mask. This is particularly useful if you, like me, are playing with the optional feature to make the Bunny Hood into the Majora’s Mask bunny hood, giving yourself a boost in movement speed when wearing it.
Other QoL features are focused on making the experience move faster. If you’re playing a Zelda randomizer chances are pretty good you already know what happens in this game. You also might be planning to play the randomizer a lot of times. So cut scenes are trimmed down to the barest essentials, usually removing text boxes entirely or only playing the ones that reveal what item you received. How many times have you listened to the Deku Tree explain Hyrule’s cosmology in your life? You really wanna do that again? Another smaller speed-up that’s still really nice to have is that pushing or pulling objects is faster. Block puzzles take up way less of your time so you can focus on what really matters – figuring out if there are pots in the ravine at the entrance to Gerudo Valley.
Because certain QoL features that make the game faster also technically make it easier, those ones are optional. You can skip certain challenges like sneaking past the guards in Hyrule Castle, beating Ingo in a race to win Epona, and even the tower escape sequence with Zelda between the two phases of the Ganondorf fight. Personally I did skip those things my first time through just because it allowed me to put more focus on what I really cared about: the scavenger hunt for random items. I don’t need to prove myself to anybody that I can beat some Stalfos while Zelda stands in the background screaming. Maybe I’d think differently if I were also playing on Hero Mode but so far I haven’t explored that option.
Cosmetics
Not all of the randomizer’s features are focused on the practical mechanics of the game. Some of them are just for goofing around, altering cosmetic choices that don’t have a significant impact on the gameplay. Cosmetic features are one aspect of the randomizer where you can, at your option, find and download additional fan-made content to customize your experience even more. There are costume mods that make Link into other characters like Anju or Malon, so we can finally answer the age-old question “what if Zelda was a grill?” There are also music mods that play songs from other games. If you want Beneath the Mask to play when you’re wandering Hyrule Field at night and Junes to play in shops – well, you can’t control it with that level of specificity, but you can definitely add those two songs to the random music pool and see where the hell they show up. You have to download all this stuff separately so I haven’t messed with much of it yet myself.
Honestly when it comes to sound effects, I don’t know that I will mess with the game much. I already know from watching other people stream the randomizer that the randomized music just gets on my nerves. Music is really important for establishing tone and having the Ganon battle theme play in Kokiri Forest because “tee hee random!” does not actually appeal to me in any way. The sound effects I did play with, I didn’t actually enjoy. There’s a feature that gives Link a more feminine voice but I personally didn’t care for it and frequently found myself missing the classic voice. You can also make the ocarina sound like one of the game’s other instruments – that one wasn’t too bad but it also wasn’t really worth going out of the way to give it a unique setting. The one audio QoL feature I really liked is that one of the things you can randomize is the noise that plays when your HP is low, and one of the settings is “off.” No more constant beeping! Now that’s what I’m talking about!
What I did engage with were the baked-in cosmetic settings for the visuals, and those I did enjoy. You can change the colors of Link’s tunics, gauntlets, and mirror shield frame, as well as his health and magic meter and the items associated with them (heart pieces, magic bottles, etc.). You can also adjust the color of the buttons displayed on the HUD, either to other controller schemes (like the GameCube buttons instead of the N64 buttons) or to random colors. One of my personal favorite cosmetic choices was being able to change the coloration of Navi – my whole first run I played through with Tael from Majora’s Mask as my fairy, and that was really cool. I’ve always thought Tael had a sick coloration and being able to have him around all the time was really satisfying.
Hints
I would be remiss if I spent all this time talking about the ways in which the randomizer can mess with your run without also talking about the ways in which it guides you along. The randomizer has a pretty thorough hint system built in, and if I have any regrets about my first playthrough it is not engaging with that system more thoroughly when I generated my first seed. There are a lot of hint types I would have really appreciated had I taken the time to read up on them and enable them. By default, the game’s gossip stones give you hints about item locations, but the quality of these hints vary wildly. For example, a statement like “looting Spirit Temple is foolish” is useful – I know that none of the treasure chests in Spirit Temple are necessary to finish my run, so all I have to do is defeat Twinrova. Great! But a statement like “it is said that the Great Deku Tree contains a blue rupee” is deeply unhelpful – there are multiple checks in that one location, so just telling me what one of them is and not even telling me which one is kind of a pain! I think the next time I play I will use the “important hints” setting, which as best as I can tell makes the hints focus on what locations are important and where your major items are located.
There are also ways to get other, more specific hints that I didn’t enable but should have. The biggest one I’ve been kicking myself about is Dampe’s diary; with this hint enabled, you can figure out where one of your two hookshot upgrades is located. Finding the hookshot and longshot was one of the big trials of my playthrough, so having an explicit hint about it would have really made a difference for my run. Another useful hint is the Skultula house – with this hint enabled, each of the cursed skultula’s will tell you what reward they give you when you collect their needed number of tokens. I didn’t have this enabled, which means I ended up collecting 20 tokens that I didn’t need over the course of my run. Thankfully I got gossip stone hints that 30-50 were all foolish, but in the future I want to know what I’m in for skultula-wise out the gate.
Of course the biggest “hint” that the randomizer offers is an optional spoiler log. This is a file generated along with your patched ROM that reveals all the item locations. If you’re doing a no logic run, this is useful for having someone else check to see if your seed is even possible. But even if you’re playing a glitchless run with normal logic like I did, the spoiler can help you find the things you just can’t seem to locate anywhere. This was particularly helpful for me with potsanity enabled – there were pots in this damn game in places that I don’t think I had ever entered or looked in all of the years I’ve been playing Ocarina of Time. I referenced the spoiler guide a total number of three times, and honestly I feel like that’s decent for a first run with both crates and pots all included in the logic. Now I know these locations for the future, and next time I play I’ll probably add in a couple more obscure elements so I can start learning those aspects of the game better too.
Overall, I found the randomizer to be an excellent tool. While the massive list of features and options was intimidating at first, the tools for explaining what each one does were thorough and the information is sorted effectively so that it feels easy to navigate. The built-in quality of life features are useful additions to the game and the optional features for speeding things up are great for customizing your experience. With so many possible adjustments and each adjustment generally having two or three different settings within it, the randomizer feels infinitely customizable so that you can create a challenge suited to your playstyle and interests. I definitely recommend it to any Ocarina of Time fan looking to add some spice to their next playthrough.
That’s it for my thoughts on the randomizer itself – as for my actual playthrough, I’ll have an article Wednesday talking all about my experience in a randomized Hyrule!