I’m sitting here, trying to act poised and composed, but inside I’m having a parental meltdown. My 5-year-old and I just FINISHED OCARINA OF TIME TOGETHER. I’m abso-fucking-lutely silently screaming and liquifying into blonde nostalgic goo. LIKE HOW IN THE HELL DID I JUST PLAY THIS GAME WITH MY CHILD. Wasn’t I just a child myself, infinitely rolling through Hyrule Field, LARPing a day in the life of Link? Wasn’t I just huddled with friends in my elementary school gymnasium gawking at the Ocarina of Time pamphlet? Wasn’t it just 1998, and didn’t my childhood friend Tucker just call my family’s landline to tell me he had Ocarina of Time in HIS HANDS?
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to articulate how meta it is to finish my favorite childhood game with my own kid. For so many reasons. I mean, shit, there’s a chance my kid wouldn’t even exist if Ocarina of Time hadn’t been something I bonded over with some random dude I met in a dive bar 15 years ago. (Hi, Jayson!)
Life is crazy. Time flies. But Ocarina of Time has remained constant – nothing about the game has changed since 1998. Yet we’ve changed. The lens through which we view and react to video games is constantly evolving because we are. Situations and dialogue that never once elicited an emotional response now hit like a Goron punch to the chest. I immediately think of the woman who lost her dog in Hyrule Castle Market and pleads for your help finding him. It’s a silly little quest. There are all of these dogs barking and running around town – they’re practically identical – but only ONE of them is the missing lady’s dog, Richard. As a little girl I remember thinking, “Ha! Richard – what a silly name for a dog.” But today as an adult who recently had to say goodbye to her first four-legged kid, her best buddy, her derpy 11-year-old Labrador named Rebb? It hits differently. It hurts. It makes me think of my boy. Would he have barked at the in-game dogs?
Anyway, I still think Richard is a funny name for a dog.
It’s little things like that.
A surreal parenting moment for me was turning almost everything we did into some kind of learning experience. And it worked SO WELL. He’d read dialogue boxes. We’d talk through puzzle solutions. We’d chat about characters and why they were acting a certain way – looking at you, Ingo, ya jerk! Honestly one of the coolest ways I’ve been able to teach my kid about, y’know, life and everything it encompasses is by playing my favorite games with him. We talk about morals, perseverance, what drives others, and get into lots of “What would you do?” hypotheticals – I mean, the dude is only five, but I’m constantly surprised by his wit.
So yeah, playing through Ocarina of Time with my son was a fucking trip. Together we tore Hyrule apart: finding every heart piece, slaughtering something like 85 Golden Skulltulas (the final reward for killing all of ’em isn’t worth it—I SAID WHAT I SAID), tearing up grass for the mighty Biggoron Sword, and draining the pond dry by catching who knows how many fish (we named the fattest one Bob – don’t ask). And then we saved Hyrule by sending that pesky Ganondorf packing.
Bonus: I now have another human under my roof just as stoked for the inevitable Ocarina of Time Remake as I am. >:D
