Ocarina of Time Hits Differently as an Adult
School has finished, but I won't start my Summer job for another week or so, so I haven't had much to do.
I've found myself replaying The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Even though I'm a little zoomer, this game was a big part of my childhood. My brother is substantially older than I am, and he'd grown up with an N64. I probably spent hours playing on it as a kid, it was my first introduction to video games.
I'm a bit more than halfway through the game, and I've been enjoying it--partly because of nostalgia, partly because it's just a good game. But, I think I've come to appreciate the story in a way I didn't really as a child. And it feels far more melancholy.
You begin the game as a Kokiri, a race of eternal children. You venture out into the wider world, and you find it to be a good and wholesome place. The castle town is lively and filled with happy people. Kakariko Village is a sleepy town at the foot of the mountains. The guy who runs Lon Lon Ranch is a doofus, but he's a goodhearted doofus, and you can't help but like him.
Then, you become an adult, and everything is darker--the castle - town is destroyed and overrun by zombies, Kakariko Village is hiding the government's clandestine torture operation. And you return to the Kokiri Forest, and it's changed too. It's more scary and complicated, there are monsters everywhere. The other Kokiri only sort of recognize you. Your closest friend--Saria--is nowhere to be found. And when you do find her, you find that she isn't the same person you knew as a child, not at all.
This is a surprisingly poignant story about growing up. You are thrust into the real world, and you find that it's far darker and more complicated than you thought. You come home, but you don't belong there anymore. You've grown apart from your old friends, you won't ever see some of them again. Everything is subtly unfamiliar in a hundred different ways. There may not be monsters roaming the streets, but you notice problems you didn't before. You're disturbed by things you didn't notice as a child. Everything flows and nothing stands still.
I didn't expect to be this affected by a kid's game from 1998. To some extent, it's a reflection of my current circumstances. I am a newly minted adult. I have come home and found that it isn't home anymore. But, I'm sure that some of it was intentional. The game was not made by children, after all.