The End of Ocarina of Time’s Remake

I finished it at 6 in the morning, without the post for today made yet, so just a quick one today about the ending. There will be spoilers here, but as I said in the last post, not much that isn’t 27 years old.

this is the space for spoilers this is the spoiler space this space is here to prevent people who don’t want to see spoilers from seeing em if you don’t want to know information about how ocarina of time ends then don’t read beyond this point the story isn’t really the point of it i think but nintendo put a lot of work and cash money yen into the presentation and voice acting i guess so they obviously care about it and maybe you do to okay enough blather the spoiler space ends in three two one now

First a couple of pre-ending notes. The fountain of the last Great Fairy is behind a Golden Gauntlet block, so you can’t reach her until you’ve done the Shadow Temple path in Ganondorf’s Castle, then you have to backtrack out of it. She charges 500 rupees for her health doubler power, and even says “BOY, you’re rich!” if you pay it.

What’d you expect/some magic for free?/a conjuring spell?/wine into tea?

As with the original, by this time in the game the only thing left to spend money on is potions and consumables, so I think it’s nice that you at last have a use for all those big heavy gemstones in your pocket. While many of the rupee awards for finding secrets have been greatly reduced, there’s still so many of them, and I topped out my 1,000-rupee Giant’s Wallet while finishing off the Spirit Temple. I figure most players will probably be in a similar state by the end of the game, so the 500r cost is almost meaningless other than giving a purpose to all that moolah.

The G.F.s in this game put all the cash you pay them into buying more leaves to stick over their torsos.

At the end I had 90 Gold Skulltulas, and no idea where to find the last ten. Now there is no real reason to keep finding them after you get 50, and the best reward, the Giant’s Wallet, comes from finding 30, so it’s not a problem, but I would like to find those last ten. The Skullies are there to be that last completionist task, and if the reward for finding them all is the same then it’s just infinite money, as many gold rupees as you want.

I found all of them from the soft soil patches, and also found the sneaky way to the top of the right tower of the Fire Temple. That whole floor is there basically to hide 90 rupees and one Skulltula! I noticed the World Map shows a count of Gold Skulltulas and Heart Pieces for each region, but it isn’t telling you how many there are left to find, but instead how many you’ve found! I guess they’re directing completionists to the Zelda Notes feature in the smartphone app, meaning, players without a phone or can’t run the Nintendo Switch App are at a disadvantage. Not cool Nintendo.

EDIT: It turns out after beating the game, if you load the save made after the end all of the regions will list the number of Skulltulas and Heart Pieces left to find in them in addition to how many you’ve found. Note however that some areas, and their totals, will be different on the map depending on which age you’re in.

One thing noticed by me, in N64 Ocarina of Time, is that Navi tells Link she can’t get near Ganondorf in the penultimate boss fight, but that doesn’t matter at all in the fight. Despite what she says she is able to target him as she can any other enemy. They rectified that here: if you try to Z-target G-dorf you get a message saying Navi can’t get near him. (Admit it, Ganondorf is kind of a funny name.)

The escape sequence with Zelda has been bulked up to make it more dramatic, but they removed the countdown timer so technically you can’t fail it.

The final boss fight had a minor Breath of the Wild-ism in that Ganon gets a big eye on his forehead for a weak point. Of course they remade the cutscene with Ganon’s reveal, and as with many things with this version, I think it’s slightly worse than the relatively-understated original, but that could just be nostalgia talking. Ganon’s appearance is so great in the N64 version, they really made the most of their limited number of polygons! I will mention that you should really come into this fight with a couple of magic refills, for if you run out of Light Arrow fuel in the last fight, and also run out of item-generating rubble for Ganon to smash, your heroic green ass will probably be stuck.

The credits sequence follows nearly exactly the plan of the N64 version, just with all the upgraded assets and polygons and stuff. It’s the same beat for beat, even with the same music, though with the standard glow-up everything else in this version has gotten. It finishes with Navi wordlessly flying away into the light as she did in N64 Ocarina of Time, which sets up Majora’s Mask if they choose to remake it too. While Ocarina of Time is more iconic, I think Majora’s Mask works a little better as a game game, and its repeated three-day structure gives it an entirely unique feel among Zelda games, so I will look forward to that, in case they decide to make it.

Even the final screen of the N64 version was included, although they use the Zelda title font for the last card.

After the ending ends, you get a shot of the “Tapestry of Time” that I think gets slowly filled in through the game, I didn’t notice it during actual gameplay though.

Anyway, so that’s the remake of Ocarina of Time put to bed. When der Ganondorfer is in the white void being sealed, they added magic shackles attached to his limbs. I think they’re trying to set up for Twilight Princess there, but truly the Ganondorf that follows this one is Wind Waker’s more comtemplative, more rueful version, who you’re reminded in that game is not a descendant or reincarnation, but the very same Ganondorf as this one. Wind Waker’s Ganon is the best in the series in nearly every way, so I say it’s good to see that he used his time in the Blank White Void to work on himself.

Notes on Ocarina of Time’s Remake

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has been embiggened by its remaking. Some old secrets moved, a handful of new secrets added. Connection made with the Nntendo Switch app. Trivia quizzes of the game. A modest increase in explorable size.

Yet it hasn’t been made much larger. Compared to its predecessors Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, it’s tiny. Both of those were games that prided themselves in sheer bigness, with size in bulk and terrain by the ton. Both games contained 900 Koroks to find, hidden around their many acres; Ocarina has only its modest 100 Gold Skulltulas, and although back in 1998 that seemed like a whole lot, and they served as the very inspiration for the Koroks, their number now seems to lack.

Yet Ocarina’s miniscule relative space is much more finely honed. Less seems included just to fill out space. It seems like its space is used more, indeed, than the Nintendo 64 original. Time has not been kind to that first game’s Hyrule Field; for all the fond memories of traipsing through its space, there really wasn’t a lot going on there. In N64 Ocarina’s Field there were only six kinds of enemies, and not even all at once.

Tektites, those one-eyed jumping enemies that go all the way back to the first NES game, are somehow actually cute here. They give a chirp of delight when they see you! You still gotta kill them though.

They were parceled between two different eras, and on top of that daylight and nighttime. To avoid spoilers for a game that’s been out for 27 years, in the younger time there’s only Peahats and their Larva, Stalchildren, and the very rarely seen Guays, and in the more adult period there’s only Poes of small and large sizes, and the big ones only show when you’re on horseback. Hyrule Field, in short, is a whole lot of space but with not much in it. In the new Ocarina this has been remedied a bit. In younger times there’s a little more opposition, but in the more mature age there’s actually some decent competition now.

But the thing about Hyrule Field is, while it’s the center of the map and what most people might think is the core of the game, Ocarina of Time’s true heart are its nine dungeons, among the best in the series’ long history. Now in the remake they’ve been reworked a bit, especially its long complained-about Water Temple. Not hugely, there’s still many of the same rooms and puzzles. They’ve been changed just enough to keep the people who replay N64 Ocarina on their toes. Ocarina of Time was the first 3D Zelda and set the stage for every subsequent mainline game, and nearly all of them pale, in some way, compared to Ocarina’s: Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker have too few, Twilight Princess has too many, in Skyward Sword there’s hardly an overworld but instead the whole game feels like it’s dungeons to its detriment, and of course Breath and Tears are overwhelmed by their gigantic overworlds. Ocarina could stand to have a larger overworld, but eh, I’m overthinking it. It’s really easy to overthink Ocarina of Time, because it’s so much fun to play.

Navi the Fairy also known as Little Miss Obvious

Some areas of the overworld have been somewhat changed as well. Some areas that were separate loads in the N64 have been merged together seamlessly now, so Lon Lon Ranch and Lake Hylia are just special regions of the field now. This has enabled an interesting thing about Lon Lon ranch particularly: it is possible to exit the Ranch through a route other than the front gate. If you do this, you can mess up a certain event later in the game, but it turns out the designers accounted for this, and there’s a new way to get back into the main portion of the ranch.

Kakariko Village has also changed. If you haven’t played N64 Ocarina for a while, you might stumble around, wondering if the buildings had always been in these places and your memory is failing. I’ll put your mind at ease, as I had to put mine: yes, the buildings are in different places, yes, there are some new ones, and yes the village has actually a couple of new buildings in it in the latter part of the game. Yet despite these changes, and some huge visual upgrades, the general shape of Ocarina of Time is the same, nearly all of the subquests and events are the same. In fact, I think probably they could have added some more events, but there are few people who played the original who would say it was much broken.

Mido here may be the character who’s been given the most improvement. He’s got what one might call Tom Sawyer energy.

I don’t think the new game is completely an improvement of the original, but it makes some different choices, not good or bad ones, just different. The example that strikes me the most is how it treats money. N64 Ocarina rains cash down on you like a glittery hailstorm, and even the biggest wallet will soon reach its full capacity. When your rupee count is a green 500, you almost don’t want to open new chests or uncover new secrets, because so many of the rewards are rupees.

Finding a 200-value Gold Rupee when your accounts won’t see a particle of it is such a nauseating feeling. The designers of Switch 2 Ocarina must have found themselves vomiting from it so much that they’ve fixed the problem three times over. All of the wallets, including the starting one, have been doubled in size; there are more things to buy and a bit more expensive; and most sources of rupees have been greatly downgraded. Basic enemies only drop singles, or fives for bigger versions. The frogs on Zora River give 50 rupees each in the original game, 250 in total; in the Switch 2 version, they give a total of just 65. Those examples are typical of the cash reduction across the board. Chests that might give 100 or 200 now give 20 or (rarely) 50. And the Great Fairies no longer work for free. They’ve read the same book on personal finance that the greats from Breath and Tears have, and they now demand increasingly many rupees before they’ll even deign show their be-vined bodies.

The Mask Shop owner is creepy as ever. If they decide to remake Majora’s Mask as well then you’ll be seeing more of this face.

Because money has been derandomized and decreased, money counts for a lot more. There’s more incentive to fight enemies and collect their leavings. In the original you basically didn’t need to chase money at all, but it’s now a bigger part of the game. It’s possible to miss how the first game threw fistfulls of gemstones at Link, but I think the change is much better from a design standpoint.

Enemies, in addition to being more in number in Hyrule Field, often have a bit of an extra complexity to them. Enemies that had one attack before may now have two. A couple of enemies have fakeouts that seem intended to trip up people relying on their muscle memory from the N64 game. Many bosses now have extra phases and require new tactics. All of this makes the S2 OoT a slightly harder game, but it is far from insurmountable. I just want you to know, it’s not you, the game has changed a bit, and in ways specifically to mess to players of the original.

They covered up the Great Fairies…

I have yet to finish the Switch 2 version, but I’ve been enjoying my time with it so far. I wish it was bigger, given that it’s a $60 game, but I still think it was worth it. I think you’ll enjoy it too.

…”butt” the moblins let it all hang out.

How Stop N Swop Was Meant To Work

More information on the legacy of Stop N Swop.

Stop N Swop was the stuff of schoolyard legend. Rare had figured out a way to transfer state between games with no memory card. The idea was, you could do something in a future game, Rare’s upon release only-planned sequel Banjo-Tooie, that could be recognized in Banjo-Kazooie. Deviously, you could see items in Banjo-Kazooie that you couldn’t collect, like an Ice Key visible behind a frozen wall of ice, that they promised you could eventually get by doing something in Banjo-Tooie that would remove the wall. They even showed video of locked-off areas in BK1 that they promised would be made accessible by doing something in BK2. Sheer madness, impossible madness!

The way it was supposed to work, the N64’s RAM kept state for a short time after the system was turned off. If you were fast enough, you could turn off the system, remove one game, put in another, and memory could persist into the latter game. That was the promise. Rare even came up with a fun trademarkable name for their clever little hack: Stop N Swop.

Stop N Swop never came to pass. In a post on MTV.com in 2008 (really, they used to have a gaming section), it was revealed that the N64 hardware was revised in such a way that reduced the time that RAM would stay active after powerdown from 10 seconds to 1 second, and they made the decision not to implement a feature that wouldn’t work on some players’ consoles.

Stop N Swop has been the center of rumors for almost 30 years now, and bits of information have leaked about it in the time since. raregamer.co.uk has a sizable recounting of the misfired feature’s whole legacy. Recently, after being laid off from Rare by Microsoft in their recent downsizing, Gregg Mayles uploaded the original design document for Stop N Swop. He did so on Twitter, a.k.a. “X,” which Set Side B does not link to on moral principle, but the images are inlined below. By the by, check out that use of Comic Sans in an important design document.

The design document also mentions Donkey Kong 64, which would have activated further features from the other games, and a projected fourth game that was never decided on. The Cutting Room Floor’s page on DK64 explains how it would have worked, and that the feature was cut in the last week before the game went to manufacturing.

Hellshade on Youtube posted a few days ago work on a series of fan recreation romhacks implementing the cut content (5 minutes). It’s n0t complete yet, and chooses N64 Ocarina of Time as the other game to complete the design. I cannot say if these hacks, which are highly unofficial content anyway, will be accurate, or will even be finished, but speculation is fun, provided one doesn’t take it seriously.

Sundry Sunday: WAHLOWEEN

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

A series of videos by RudeJack featuring a glitzed-up Wario with friends Freddie Waluigi and Captain Syrup, combined with various songs. The most recent (2½ minutes) was from last week, and uses a Neil Cicierega-made remix of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe, but there are earlier ones too.

Earlier, Wario and co. in a crossover with A Fox In Space, music is Walk the Night by Skatt Bros. (7 minutes)

Extra: Mario and Link hanging out in the city (9 minutes)

In-Progress SNES Port of Castlevania Symphony of the Night

There have been such a lot of ports of various games to newer/older hardware, so many that I don’t even bother linking them all, and the number has proliferated with the arrival of generative-AI-based ports, which lay entirely outside my sphere of interest.

There are a couple of interesting remakes of the Playstation game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which may be the most popular game in the series, and one of them, by Kaffeeware is for the Super Nintendo. (18 minutes). The PSX is a system far different, and much more powerful, than the SNES, so it’s interesting to see the concessions made for the hardware. Thankfully it disclaims any use of AI generation. It’s far from done, but shows a lot of promise. Look, look:

I have been playing the new The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake with the intent of comparing it with the original. The two games have mostly the same story, but the new version is a from-scratch remake with many design differences, including some I haven’t seen mentioned in many places. It looks like Nintendo took the opportunity to rebalance the game in many ways. Sadly I needed to get out a post today, and couldn’t finish it in time. It should be coming soon though!

Jeremy Parish Looks At Joy Van’s Metal Fighter

Jeremy Parish’s NES Works is currently grinding through infamous unlicensed NES publisher Color Dreams, and his most recent video (17 minutes)looks at Metal Fighter, which originally came from Taiwan. As such it isn’t really great, but it’s still better, more technically polished at least, than Color Dreams’ in-house developed products.

I am left to muse on why unlicensed, and even some licensed Western-made NES titles, are so badly implemented. I refuse to chalk it up merely to lol baddevs. The NES is harder to develop for than the home computer systems that many programmers started with. Many personal microcomputers had a design that mapped the video chip’s graphics into the CPU’s address space to make it easy to manipulate, but on the Famicom/NES, unless (I think) the mapper had some special magic in it, the PPU had its own memory that the CPU could only adjust during a certain time each frame.

How would programmers figure out this method of coding for the NES if they didn’t have access to any, or many, of Nintendo’s official documentation? Rare got started by reverse engineering the system themselves, but I have to expect not every developer had Rare’s technical acumen. I’m thinking especially about some of the games Mindscape made, especially their awful port of M.U.L.E., which is not only a glitchy mess but doesn’t even do a good job of implementing the original’s rules.

Joy Van most likely had to do what Rare did and figure out the details on their own, but as with most other companies who tried to do it that way weren’t nearly as good at it. I think it might be interesting, from a software archeology standpoint, to compare Rare’s early NES games to each other, and see if it’s possible to chart out their improvement in coding for the system. Perhaps Joy Van too, although I don’t know any of their work other than Metal Fighter, and even that only through Jeremy’s video.

Romhack Thursday: Laszlovania

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Been awhile since we did a romhack, and this one is pretty cool. Someone used an editor to turn one of the DS Castlevania games (probably Portrait of Ruin, I’m guessing) into an homage to the comedy vampire sitcom What We Do In The Shadows, starring Laszlo Cravensworth the vampire. You can play it in your browser, or pay five bucks for a downloadable ROM that you can transfer to a physical Nintendo DS, if you have the means, or play in a standalone emulator.

I should warn you that saves don’t seem to survive page reloads in the browser version, but if you run out of HP you can continue from your save as long as you remain on the page. The game’s really short and can be easily completed in one session.

The great thing about this hack is the writing, it reads very much like an episode of the show, down to the frequent profanity and grotesque content like peeing werewolves, so this one’s for adults only. It follows on from the end of the show, after Guillermo had given up on becoming a vampire and learned to stand up for himself a bit, and Nandor the Relentless decided he was going to try out being a superhero.

There is a bestiary with descriptions for all the enemies you’ve seen, and a few secrets to find. It even has one of the celebrity cameos the show was known for, near the end. The game does sometimes hand you a new ability only to take it away later, but the true draw here is the dialogue anyway, and the game’s so short.

It’s difficult to take screenshots while a game is in progress, so all my images are from moments when the game is paused in some way, but it looks pretty nice, at least when the werewolves aren’t peeing. Here are a few more images.

A mocking reference to AI generated images. The game itself uses no “AI” produced content.

P.S. Sorry for forgetting to make a post Tuesday, but if you live in the U.S. I’m sure you realize that something really important and distracting was happening that day.

\Laszlovania, by Edward La Barbera (itch.io, free to play in browser or $5 for playable DS ROM file)

Set Side B’s Favorite Games as of October 2026

We think a lot about games here in the neon pixel halls of Set Side B.

You probably already know that three of my personal faves are Rampart, Party House, Balatro and Kirby Air Ride City Trial so I’ll set them aside for this. What else?

For me this isn’t a complete list by any means, but there are some games that come to mind, that stick out in my memory. All screenshots from MobyGames.

Nethack, of course, because it’s Nethack, and Rogue for similar self-referential reasons. A lot of classic roguelikes would get a place on my personal list: ADOM, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Brogue and the more recent Caves of Qud. But these would also go into the obvious list except that I haven’t talked about them here so much lately (except maybe Qud).

Cadash, a terrific early 90s multiplayer platformer RPG from Taito, is a whole class on game design in itself. It’s also a game that is almost unplayable in its original form, because none of its emulations, either open or commercial, support its linked-cabinet mode. (Also: the Capcom D&D beat-em-up games.)

Not to make all of these RPGs, but there’s also Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, especially Digital Eclipse’s remake of it. Lots of interesting ideas from the classic age of CRPGs have been wrong left behind. I blame internet culture’s relentless browbeating of anything that they don’t understand. The remake of PGotMO doesn’t wholly escape that, but there’s a lot of what once addicted hundreds of thousands of Apple II users remaining there. (Also: the Ultima series.)

A true list of my favorites at any moment will naturally ebb and wane, but a few other that I am fond of right now: Capcom’s arcade games Black Tiger and Magic Sword, Hempuli’s Baba Is You, Cruise Elroy’s Annalynn, Castlevania and Castlevania III of course, most of the Shiren the Wanderer series but I prefer the earlier ones, Gradiuses II and III, Pocket Card Jockey (the 3DS one edges out the Switch remake), Herzog Zwei, Athena (really!), the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, and Advance Wars II.

Josh Bycer of Game Wisdom, who’s reviews of indie games appear here every week or so, offers these:

Astlibra: Revision: The definition of a passion project, Astlibra is an homage to the action rpgs of the YS series, made over many years, it’s a game of high action, and lots of systems and exploration. You’ll never be able to tell where this game is going to go and just how many bosses one could fit into a single game. We may never get a sequel at this point, but it’s still one of my favorite games for all the ways that you can play it.

Xpiratez: I’ve always loved the X-Com formula, but hated how paper thin and limited the beginnings always were. With XCOM from Firaxis, I’ve often thought it would be close to one of my favorite games, but XPiratez, despite being a mega mod, nails the concept of a very fleshed out, all-consuming, take on the X-Com formula. Maybe by the year 3000 I’ll be able to finish a complete run of it.

Zeroranger: The only shmup I’ve managed to get a 1 CC on, it is an amazing game with a great story, fantastic music, and does a fantastic job of being a challenging shmup without going into the levels of Touhou mastery.

The World Ends With You: My all-time favorite RPG and it’s one that doesn’t play like anything else out there. Another amazing combination of gameplay and music, if you talk to anyone who has played TWEWY, they either love the game or completely hated it. It represents for me the peak of the DS era — a game that is entirely original and could have only existed on the platform.

Sundry Sunday: Do Not Ask Nova For Help

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Kirby games are mostly light and friendly, but need antagonists. The first game had the mischievous and charismatic King Dedede, but after that it’s mostly been a long line of cosmic horrors: the Nightmare, Dark Matter, O² and others. Even the cute antagonists, like Magalor and Marx, have their scary sides.

Probably the Kirby antagonist though, of all of them, is a half cute/half terrifying machine god called Galactic Nova. Created by an ancient race, perhaps the same one whose ruins feature Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Nova’s main function is to grant wishes, but it almost always nearly destroys Pop Star as a result. It’s unknown if it’s malicious in a monkey’s paw kind of way, or if it’s just trying to help, but the result is the same: Kirby has to go and destroy it.

Galactic Nova’s attempts to help are summarized, humorously, by Team Dusk in this half-minute video, with bonus Strong Bad and Futurama references. Enjoy!

Displaced Gamers Explains Mario’s Physics

Displaced Gamers’s Behind the Code series is one of the best code explainers on Youtube, and here they describe, in 35 minutes worth of no-nonsense detail, how Mario in Super Mario Bros. moves, runs, skids and jumps.

Super Mario Bros. basically created an entire genre of video games, but it probably wouldn’t have happened without its exacting attention to how Mario moves, which is a large portion of the gameplay. A few of the details:

  • Mario’s position and velocity are stored in pages, pixels and subpixels, but acceleration is handled additionally using fractions of a subpixel.
  • When Mario is facing a direction other than he’s moving, his acceleration doubles! Speedrunners actually take advantage of this fact.
  • When Mario runs with the B button, he doesn’t slow immediately when it’s released, but waits for ten frames before he drops back to walking speed. This is why he doesn’t slow down when throwing fireballs when running, and also helps players who slide their finger to the A button to jump.

Youtuber Beating Caves of Qud as a Pacifist

I’ve been meaning to write on Caves of Qud for a long time, but it’s such a huge topic! In the meantime you may enjoy this Youtuber getting a “lesser victory” as a pacifist, never killing a creature, while playing a “Classic mode” permadeath game. (58 minutes) The video, of course, contains spoilers for Caves of Qud.

Making it much easier is that there’s a lot of ways to gain experience in CoQ without killing anything, so you aren’t stuck at level 1 the whole game. If you play a mutant character you can pick which mutations you begin with, with Force Bubble, Phasing and Precognition being a few that help you escape many forms of danger. And CoQ has a variety of items that you can use to overcome tricky situations, like mechanical wings, and a spiral borer for digging staircases.

Going for a bigger victory would be harder. The ultimate victory requires dealing with all seven of the Girsh Nephilim, which can be done without killing them but requires a special (somewhat spoilery) trick. I should save more explanation for that eventual article series on Qud….