Zelda Retrospective: Part V - Ocarina of Time - Day 6

Okay, yeah. It's been a month and a half since the last update. This semester has been pretty busy for me, despite the fact I made this schedule convinced it would be an absolute breeze. I could have gotten to this sooner, but a lot of my down time has ended up being spent with friends, off doing things away from my apartment, watching Hulu or working on my next novel project, so I haven't really been playing much in the way of video games. There's even been plenty of movies and TV shows that I've seen that I could have blogged about but didn't for reasons unknown, like Zombieland (awesome), Surrogates (meh), Stargate Universe (it's trying to be both the next Stargate and the next Battlestar Galactica) and Flashforward (pretty interesting so far, though the writing is a little haphazard at times).
That being the case, I suppose this is really more of an "Ocarina of Time - Days 6-8" entry. Late one night following my last entry, I finished off the Shadow Temple. I got tired and decided to put off the entry until the next day, but things happened, as they often do, and it got back seated. I have since forgotten all the clever quips I had come up with about it.
Then, some time a few weeks ago, I sat down and went through the Spirit Temple. Again, I ended up putting off the entry. Sorry.
Today, however, I played through the entirety of Ganon's Castle.
I always found this section of the game relatively interesting. For one, we get a hodge-podge of the different dungeons from around the game, some of the rooms fitting the theme and some not so much. We get Shadow Temple elements in the Forest Barrier section, for example. Also, we get a glimpse at what the Light Temple, a dungeon originally planned for but ultimately scrapped in development, might have been like. It was very much like the Shadow Temple. Ironic.
I once again fell upon the muscle memory I've developed over the many times I've played Ocarina of Time and breezed through to Ganondorf. A few of the rupee collecting rooms, namely the ones in the Forest, Fire and Shadow sections gave me a few problems due to a few misplaced jumps that led to automatic restart of the room.
One touch that I've always loved about ascending the staircases toward Ganondorf is the way the ominous organ music builds in volume as you get closer to your destination. It's a very nice touch.
Maybe if Ganondorf had invested all his energy into music, he could have brought world peace like Bill and Ted were supposed to with Wyld Stallions? But no, the water pollution ruined that chance.
So, Ganondorf gives his obligatory villain monologue, we had our little tennis match and then he was down. Another detail Nintendo did a good job on is how you can see holes appear in Ganondorf's cape as you do more damage to it. I'm sure if it were an M-rated game, we'd be seeing holes in more than just his cape, but, then, who really wants to see an M-rated Zelda game? It'd be a bad business move for one. But I digress.
As I played the escape sequence, an idea which I bet the developers got from Metroid, I found myself getting typically annoyed with Zelda's incessant gasps as flaming rocks hit me. We passed that one annoyingly placed ReDead and then that part was over.
Then Ganondorf turns into Ganon, I shoot him in the face, hit him in the tail, rinse, and repeat until he's down. Really, after playing this game as many times as I have, fighting Ganondorf and Ganon is just a little boring. All the challenge is gone. Oh well, I still love the game.
One thing that particularly interests me is the ending of the game, wherein two separate time lines are created. There's the one in which Ganondorf succeeds in taking over and is defeated seven years later by Link and Zelda, and then the one created after Zelda sends Link back to his original time and then, presumably, goes to warn Zelda about what will happen. The sci-fi nerd in me loves this kind of stuff.
So from here, it's on to Majora's Mask, which I feel is the most underrated of the Zelda games. Not sure when I'll get a start on that, but I'll try to make it soon.

- Nate