Zelda OOT Conversion - Dunkelschwamm

    Finally, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has come to Sven Co-op! I am amazed at how close this map is to the actual Zelda game. It's definitely very janky, but it's more faithful to the original game than it has any right to be.

SCMapDB page

Author: w00tguy123

Date of final release: 2012

Maps in package: 2

Map review of Zelda OOT Conversion

(originally posted on SCMapDB) 

by dunkelschwamm | December 1, 2021 | 5473 characters

    The Zelda Ocarina of Time Conversion for Sven Coop is what it says on the tin executed better than I would have ever expected. Do I think it works? Almost! Do I think I'll be playing again? Probably not if I can help it.

    The conversion covers the section of Ocarina of Time that would have been on a shareware disc if the game ever had one: the beginning village, and the Deku Tree. As an added bonus, the Lost Woods are around if you want to go get lost in them. The mod covers up to the first boss, Gohma- or at least I've heard, as my party was unable to fell Gohma. Could we have just beaten it if we had been patient enough? Perhaps, if we were cool with restarting the whole Deku Tree map every 10 deaths.

    Yeah, the mod includes a lives system which cannot be turned off; it's a feature that now feels like a meanspirited removal of server agency with the default inclusion of Survival Mode in Sven Coop. The lives are shared between players and, due to the buggy nature of some aspects of the mod, will become a source of frustration that's hard to shake from the overall experience. Any time we had to restart a map because of lives it felt like it was the result of the map being unclear in how certain mechanics have been duct-taped together to have a barely-passing resemblance to how a mechanic worked in OoT. I'll get to THAT bit in a moment.

    First, I'd like to praise the map for many of the things it got right: the work in porting the models, sounds, animations, sprites, and locations to Sven is incredible. The creativity put into the weapons and enemies, when they really work, is magical to see in action. There's also a really fun currency system where better items and weapons can be unlocked at a shop. It's also really neat that the beginning cutscene is modified to accommodate the fact that there are many players.

    All of these really nice touches and a keen eye for recreating the original kind of make the issues more glaring, though. For every fun mechanic that survived being ported, there's a couple others that are wonky at best and buggy at worst. The skulltulas in particular have a nasty bug which can detatch them from their position, after which they home in on players, causing damage and robbing players of lives until the flying skulltula is vanquished. The deku scrubs proved really hard to hit right using the wonky weapons (including the possibly non-functional satchel charge?) while they knock down your health and lives, so every time we knew we were approaching any it was pretty stressful. The pushblock brushes used for the flaming sticks were annoying to move from point A to point B and sometimes would get stuck in a wall and fly away. The web in the Deku Tree that you have to jump on is updated to require at least two people to jump on it, which isn't really signposted during gameplay so if you forgot the description from the mod page you take a bunch of fall damage or possibly lose a life for thinking that the web faithfully ported from an old classic game will behave as said web from said classic game does. Some of the inter-area transitions are teleports, meaning you can easily telefrag teammates as you run together through certain areas, thereby depleting your lives pool. Basically any weapon that isn't a melee weapon feels like it doesn't hit right.

    And then there's Gohma. I've beaten Gohma in the original Ocarina of Time probably seven or eight times. None of that knowledge helped me battle Gohma as it continuously vomited up new enemies to fight one after the other while not taking any perceivable damage. Once we ran out of lives to this thing we called it quits.

    I feel bad that I have so many negatives to say about this project because I have a lot of respect for its accomplishments and I want it to be something to congratulate. I feel like if the lives system were ripped out many of these issues would be far easier to look past because they would be far less consequential and stressful to encounter. I feel like if we didn't have to start the whole tree over every time Gohma killed us too many times we would have kept throwing ourselves at it until we figured it out and we would have had a great time. Instead we abandoned the map near the end because we were tired, frustrated, and didn't feel like it was worth playing more.

    If you have a server where you host novelty maps, maybe throw this one in the rotation. The map gets a lot more out of the novelty of being a Zelda port than actual gameplay. If you're a fan of Zelda, definitely give it a look. Just don't feel bad if you give up on it at some point.

Pros:

• Incredible port of the first two areas of OoT.
• The shop system is really fun and well implemented.
• There's some really fun attention to detail and minor updates to accommodate coop gameplay.

Cons:

• There are many bugs which the lives system makes needlessly consequential.
• There are many frustrating quirks and wonky implementations which the lives system makes needlessly consequential.
• It's not entirely clear how to fight the boss which the lives system makes needlessly consequential.
• Some things (like the web) just work differently now without much warning, which the lives system makes needlessly consequential.

Score: 6.3 / 10