The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

The full Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D opening has been posted online via the official web-site, showing off the famous gameplay intro of Link riding atop his horse Epona through Hyrule Field. The Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D release date is on June 19, 2011.

While the intro is exatly the same as in the Nintendo 64 version, you can tell right off the bat the that the graphics have been improved, as everything looks much prettier than before. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly has changed (I see changes in the moon and the clouds, especially) but overall it just looks much sleeker even though it is essentially the same intro as before.

And isn’t that wallpaper above absolutely beautiful?

Here is the intro video from the Ocarina of Time remake.

Ocarina of Time 3D has also topped the charts as one of the Most Wanted videogames at Amazon. And here are a few words from Miyamoto about what he thinks makes Ocarina of Time such a special game.

Iwata: How should I put it? It seems to me that there were a lot of “first experiences” in those games.
Miyamoto: Ah, you’re right. One of the biggest features of Ocarina of Time may be that it has so many firsts packed into it. And then, this might sound a technical, but the Ocarina of Time game is built, not from a story, but from elements and composition.
Iwata: Elements and composition.
Miyamoto: Right. There are people who wrote the story, and of course, if you have no story, you’re in trouble. But, more than the story itself, I think the various character settings and other factors are what make the fundamentals of the game come to life. In other words, it isn’t that there’s a certain worldview and a certain story around which the characters and items and landscapes are constructed. The heart of Ocarina of Time lies in what the individual designers composed with the elements produced by the person in charge of writing the story.
Iwata: I see.
Miyamoto: The theme of Ocarina of Time is very simple: it’s about a child becoming an adult. There are people who watch over that protagonist. There are many encounters and partings, and the three women. We protected that structure. But if you just scatter that theme and story around a landscape, it won’t make the game interesting.
Iwata: Right, right.
Miyamoto: So, what is it that makes it interesting as a game? The foundation lies in the puzzles that have appeared in The Legend of Zelda franchise since the first game. It’s taking that traditional series material and skillfully transposing it to 3D that really makes the game The Legend of Zelda. When we took series elements and used 3D composition, things just got more and more interesting.
Iwata: I see. That’s how Ocarina of Time was produced.
Miyamoto: Right. And then, there’s really no way around it; we had the most freedom with Ocarina of Time in that respect.
Iwata: Because it was the first 3D Zelda game.
Miyamoto: That’s right. It was the most primitive, and the freest. That’s all there is to it. It isn’t that subsequent games lost that freedom, only that the games which were put out later simply had more things which needed to have attention paid to them. Of course, even Ocarina had traditional elements dating up to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo, so it wasn’t completely free. It’s just that it was the first 3D Zelda game, and we were able to explore what would be most interesting about making it in 3D without worrying about much else. I think that may be a big part of it.

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