Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is EXTREMELY overrated

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Yes, I did state that I think LoZ: OoT is an extremely overrated game. The reason why I think so is that I find that almost every top 10 best video game list has OoT as number 1, and to be honest, I'm getting really annoyed by it, not to mention that nearly every person that stated that OoT is overrated, ends up being chewed out for thinking that way by people that ABSOLUTELY chew you out and constantly tell you about how OoT was extremely revolutionary (Yes, I know about that) and all that. Overall, I personally think that OoT needs to stop getting so much praise even though it is a good game.

I've never been a fan of the Zelda games, although I sometimes wish I were. I once even bought A Link To The Past for my old SNES at a flea market but quickly lost interest. It feels like sometimes fans think you're not a real Nintendo Gamer if you don't play LOZ, even if you like Mario or Earthbound and have played the NES back when it first came out and most modern fans were still in diapers or even born.

Plus the series has Zelda's name in the title and yet there's maybe only one or two games in the series where she's a playable character instead of the typical DID (Damsel In Distress).

I think A Link to the Past is possibly overrated because people look at it with nostalgia (I do). When it came out it was pretty stunning. It was one of the first games for the 16 bit SNES, and it looked and sounded amazing compared to the 8 bit NES I was used to. I liked the design as well, it was a very strange world with weird creatures in it, and it had the whole dark world that was a twisted reflection of the real one, and you could hop between the light and dark worlds. When I was a kid I found it a really great game. When people who never played it start playing it today it probably seems a pretty primitive game.
I didn't play Ocarina of Time, but I did play Link's Awakening. That world was also pretty weird and a bit melancholy in a way. Since it was on the gameboy it looked a bit ugly of course but I still liked the design.

Here's a light and dark world screenshot of the same place. I found it looked pretty amazing in 1990-something.

heresy! unclean words! GET HIM!

I think it's subjective. It's a good point that sometimes "classic" games, films, music etc get praise and accolades because people look at it with nostalgia and are remembering a time and circumstances when they experienced it. I played (and intensely loved) OOT when it came out at around age 19; a time when I had endless hours to play, only worked part-time and had no responsibilities or stress . . . it stands as one of my favourite games ever to this day, but I acknowledge that the reminiscing of playing at that stage of my life it is a part of that.
I never enjoyed the Star Wars movies as a kid, watched them growing up, just never liked them that much; they're undeniably iconic cult classics, but I'd never say they were among the greatest films ever made. I suspect that many who do are recollecting fond childhood/teenage memories of watching them, playing with the toys etc; nurturing a love for them which stayed with them.

Yeah, i do think that nostalgia have a lot of influence on peoples opinion when they make statements about great games from the past that supposedly are the most wonderful thing of the world and i agree that a lot of times it's more the influence of the feeling that the game brings than the game itself that cause this sense of "classical/awesome game".
But i do agree that OoT is one the most amazing games ever made since what it has accomplished is something that even nowadays is not common to see in games. Also there are a lot of other games that were as much or even more popular than OoT was back in the days of consoles like Snes, PS1 and N64 (consoles where a lot of those classical games were born) and still don't have the appraise that OoT have.
But yeah, in the end all this discussion about "most revolutionary", "best game ever", "classic of the classics" will come down to personal opinion.

I can agree with the OP on this one. I've never had any particular love for this game, not even back when it came out.

To me it actually had quite alot of problems. One notable one was the big main open area, Hyrule Field I think it was. This area was a problem because it was bloody EMPTY. The designers clearly focused on "look how big and awesome we can make this, with the N64!! !" rather than focusing on what gameplay elements appeared there. Hell, the game would just randomly fart out skeletons at you during the night to keep you from falling asleep! The combat was waaayyyyyy too easy, with nearly all enemies being dumber (and slower) than a sack of hammers, certain dungeons/areas took "challenging" and replaced it with "really annoying", some characters were also really annoying.... and so on. I compare this game with the previous Zelda titles, which were always filled with STUFF on every screen, and which very definitely focused on gameplay before anything else. I quite enjoy the earlier games whenever I go back to them... my opinions and thoughts on them havent changed. Which is typical for me... I've never been the "rose tinted glasses" type. I can go back even to ancient 2600 games and still think just as highly of them as I did back then. But this game.... ehhh. I've never had a particular desire to go back to it, and when I tried to do so anyway a couple of times, I just lost interest partway in each time.

I mean, the game was still good and all, I guess, but... yeah, I do think it's pretty darn overrated.

Memories of enjoyment can definitely be overrated, particularly childhood ones. Because memories themselves are simply your brain remembering how you felt about something/what happened the last time you thought about it, they can give a false impression. For example, I loved the Movie 'TeenWolf' as a kid, used to watch it, rewind it and watch it again, thinking it was a Cinematic Masterpiece. I watched it again fairly recently and was cringeworthingly embarrassed by how good I thought it was . . .

I think it is overrated, but I also think it stands as one of the most iconic and best games ever. When you watch some WatchMojo videos it pops up extremely often, people get annoyed at it always getting mentioned. Personally I find it an incredible example of what a 3D adventure game can be like, I played the 3DS version and it holds up. You have a number of things people claim to hate about it, but it almost acts as a badge of honour that spurs the community.

Of course games have improved, personally I think that Majora's Mask only improved on everything, and only certain games can get cheers from fans hearing of a port so many years later. But I think that goes to show what OoT meant. It is not even that a game plays well, it is what that game means, that a proper use of assets can impact the game community. And that is what keeps something high on a best game list.

Ocarina of Time was a decent enough game for its time, but I can't really say it has aged well. It has a lot of charm, and it's pretty obvious that they put a lot of work into it, but like many other 3D games of the era, it suffers from issues like awkward camera controls and a low framerate, as well as an insultingly small world to explore. Hyrule Field should be big and epic, but it just feels like it's two steps from the Kokiri Forest to Hyrule Castle. A Link to the Past, a much earlier game in the series, actually did a much better job of portraying a large, diverse environment to explore, especially given the limitations of the SNES. Of course, I'm of the opinion that the SNES was a better system than the N64 overall, and that 16-bit era 2D graphics look much better than 32-bit era 3D.

^^^I agree with that. The world in Link to the Past seemed larger because of the "blockades" and the switching between light and dark worlds. When you got new items like the slingshot, flippers and the gauntlets you could go to places you couldn't go before. And many roads were winding around, all these things made Kakeriko village seem much farther away from Link's house than it actually was.
And the early generation 3d games look absolutely horrible. I also remember Icewind Dale (2d) that had backgrounds that looked like paintings, it was a beautiful game, at a time when most games were fugly fake-looking 3d.

I love both "A Link to the Past" and "Ocarina of Time", along with the first two on the NES. The entries I truly find overrated are "Majora's Mask" and "Twilight Princess". Of those, the first drives me nuts, reliving the same three days over and over. The latter game started out okay, but got confusing real quick...and don;t even get me started on the horrible Wii controller functions. I haven't played "Skyward Sword" yet, but will probably tackle it at some point.

I played Ocarina of Time last year, having zero nostalgia, and found it to be a pretty wonderful experience but I think my favorite Zeldas are still Link's Awakening and LTTP. Ocarina is crafted very well and at the time it came out it did a lot of amazing things so I can understand why people rate it so high. Its more deserving of the spot than all the Final Fantasy games I played as a kid.

Icewind Dale, I'm pretty sure, used pre-rendered graphics. A lot of games from that era utilized the same technique, like the psx Final Fantasy and Resident Evil games. I always found that "style" to be more aesthetically appealing but its basically a static picture, which technically isn't as hard as what a lot of the pioneering 3d games tried to do.

Yes, it was easier but the result was (in my opinion) prettier than many of the early games with 3d engines. And for example doom had sort of 3d levels, but the monsters/guns were all flat sprites. I never had a Playstation, my last console was the SNES. After that I mostly played pc games.
I also think that there are some games where being 3d adds nothing. Heroes of Might&Magic for example, games like that don't really become better. I still played part 3 the most, which was all 2d.
I preferred the 2d in Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate because it was easier to control for me. In Neverwinter Nights 2 I was fighting to control the camera, and I lost my sense of direction all the time. So I like games with tactical combat to have an overhead view like in the days of old.

OoT was revolutionary for video games at the time. All the graphics and gameplay were pretty much brand new at the time. The storyline, the length of the game, the boss battles, the darker side of the game, it was never seen in video games at the time. We only had 16-bit games with cheesy stories to go by, although they were fun and we all loved them, this was brand new. It's probably noted #1 because of what it did for video games and how our generation looks back at it for nostalgia.

Really, I think it does deserve #1 because it is a great game.. these days, with online multiplayer and all the different options I can see why someone would find it over-rated. But me, I'd play Mario kart 64 over mario kart wii U whatever # they're on any given day.

This, I have to disagree with. Having played as many games I have, and having owned as many as I have from that era and before, all of those things aside from the graphics, I'd seen loooooooong before Ocarina ever did them.

The "darker" side of the game, for instance.... already done in the very same series. Link to the Past, and it's "Dark World", which is actually almost exactly the same concept used in Ocarina. Both take the main world, and create an "alternate" version of it that you travel back and forth to in some way; in the SNES one, it was a dimensional shift. In Ocarina, it's a time leap. But in mechanical terms, it's EXACTLY the same mechanic, and I honestly have to say I found the Dark World to be, well, alot darker in tone overall than anything I really saw in Ocarina. It was the normal world, except very corrupted, and there was some really messed up stuff in it. Other games had done this sort of thing too.... FF6, for example, and the ruined world.

Story-wise, ehhhh.... it was typical Zelda. Gannon/Gannondorf is being a jackass. You need to go collect the (insert number here) of (insert mystical glowy thing here) in order to stand a chance of fighting against the evil threatening the land. You may have to do this more than once, with more than one type of mystical glowy thing. Zelda gets kidnapped for some reason at some point. Character dialog tends to be rather simplistic much of the time, and the vast majority of the time, you arent interacting with them... mostly, it's exploration and dungeon conquering. And RPGs honestly were already doing it better, with MUCH more detailed storylines that typically got alot more serious. Even just the FF series alone had already been doing this sort of thing for AWHILE. But not just that, I can think of alot of games on the SNES that already did these things, as the story goes.

Length of the game? No. It's not actually all that long, and I can think of many SNES games that were alot longer (and I mean ALOT longer). And that's if you already know what you're doing, even.

Boss battles, DEFINITELY no. They were VERY typical Zelda. There's a boss in each dungeon, which just HAPPENS to contain exactly the one weapon that will work on the boss and allow you to defeat it. The *first* game did this (just not for EVERY boss). The SNES one did it alot. Other than that, the bosses tended to be fairly simple affairs, often containing the "knock it over to expose the big glowing super obvious weak point" idea that was already abused to death by that point. Other games had also already been doing Zelda-style boss fights for quite awhile at that point. Moreso, the Ocarina bosses tended to just not be much of a challenge, particularly once you inevitably had 20 billion heart containers.

I think that's one of my overall issues with the hype that has always surrounded the game: People are always saying "IT'S SO REVOLUTIONARY!! ! IT DID ALL THESE THINGS FIRST!! !", yet I can make LISTS, as in not just one example, of games that had already done whatever it was (many of them doing multiples of these things, not just one), and many of them doing it quite well.

When I really think about it, the one real thing that was brand new was.... the graphics. And that's really about it. Which is probably exactly why I get so bored with the game if I go back to try it out. Back then, as a kid, I actually cared about graphics, and so a game like that made quite an impression, just by being in 3D. Now? Bleh, not only do I just not care, I also think the game is just not very good looking. With that aspect not mattering at all and thus out of the way, it's very easy to see the problems with the game that I never really acknowledged back then. It also helps though that I never get the "rose tinted glasses" effect with older games, where nostalgia causes someone to remember the game as being much better than it actually was, entirely BECAUSE of the nostalgia effect itself.