.

@Beau Skunky Ah, that’s it! Yeah. Making it even more brutal was the fact that unlike other ‘partner’ games like Sonic 2, Minnie takes damage too! Nothing like missing a jump and having her on a separate level getting chewed up. Also a lot of licensed games were oddly hard as tits, especially if they involved fast food or Disney. MC Kids, so many leaps of faith, so many frickin’ “back to the start” little red arrows.  
Oh and cutesy clones of popular games were pretty rough too, like Legend of the Ghost Lion vs Dragon Warrior/Quest. It’s easily as hard as the third, but has a cutesy animal-filled exterior making you think it’d be as simple an rpg as Mystic Quest. NOPE!

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
I don’t know, only levels in the first quest I couldn’t find on my own were levels 5 & 7 personally. I couldn’t beat the game for years, just because I couldn’t find those. (But yeah the second quest is way harder.)
 
You have a point, I played “Mickey’s Mouse Capades” for NES as a kid, (is that one you’re talking about?) and it was BRUTAL! I couldn’t even beat the second level. Alot of old kiddy NES games are very deceiving in appearance, and hard. (Yet, fun.) I actually liked alot of hard games as a kid, even ones I couldn’t beat ’till years later when I got better at games.

@Beau Skunky Never needed the map actually. I beat it borrowing it from a friend before without it. I to this day have no idea why people find the first quest so hard/confusing. It reminds me of how many ‘kids’ (both now and back then) complained about Gradius, Life Force, and Contra. pssssh they weren’t so punishing as the more cutesy platformers and shmups. Cotton and Lolo and Kickle Cubicle and that one Mickey Mouse game, now those were punishing and masochistic. The ‘kiddie games’ back then were so bloody unforgiving! Much worse than the more mature themed ones. Made me wonder what kind of kids they were actually intended for.

@Beau Skunky  
Scratch that, I meant most of the dungeon enterences didn’t have clues, but the few you did get were very vague. I never understood what “There are secrets where fairies don’t live” for many years.

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
I don’t know, even if it lacked some of those “features” the 2D games had, (they did have a digging, but only in the graveyard, and you could actually roll into trees to see if they dropped rupees, or something) I wouldn’t say the game “lacked polish.”  
They worked on the game for nearly 3 years, and I felt it had alot of content, and hidden things in it to make up for it. I admit Hyrule field was a bit barren looking back on it, (horse-riding was fun though) but some of the areas, and dungeons were very well designed.  
It just has flaws, and good things about it like every game does.
 
Even the original Zelda 1 had flaws to, I felt that burning trees with the blue candle, and having to walk off screen to reset the candle was very tedious personally. (So honestly, I don’t really miss that feature, though, I suppose it added a bit of exploration to the game, as well as bombing straight rock walls to see if there’s a cave.) You don’t get the unlimited red candle until level/dungeon #7, which was a pretty well hidden dungeon, and I couldn’t find it for years, until somebody told me how to get to it, and you didn’t have hints/clues on where to go, and such.  
If you didn’t have that map pamplet that showed you where to get the first 4 dungeons of the game, you had to guess where to go, or look ‘em up online.  
(Though, you don’t have to beat the levels/dungeons in order, it makes it easier.) So, even the previous games had flaws to.
 
Also, those “Pay me for the door repair” guys were annoying. I didn’t like being punished for finding hidden rooms.

@Beau Skunky It wasn’t really an opinion piece. Things like having too barren an open world can’t be ‘opined’ since it’s like, right there. Essentially 2d kind of forced them to think about how many screens they should have between ‘useful’ screens, or a screen with some sort of shop, secret, or dungeon, and travel screens. The first move to 3D had a bit more length between locations though since now distance has become subjective. Later games began touching this up so the only thing you find in a vast expanse wasn’t just a random skulltulla or two. Also no burning/bashing trees or digging the ground (though a couple very obvious places could be bombed)  
Not a bad game, but did lack polish compared to the construction of the 2D ones.

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
I don’t know, I still like “Ocarina,” and it was faaaar from my first game. (In fact, my first Zelda game was the first NES one.) While it took a li’l getting used to, (like the targetting system, and such) I still loved it, and didn’t think was “full of flaws,” (some like the issues with the Water Temple were fixed in the 3DS remake BTW) in all honesty, I think it has way more positive things about it, then flaws, but to each their own. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and some Zelda games afterwords improved some things to, I admit.  
I always felt that it was basically like a 3D “Link to the Past” to me, and a good transition of the series from 2D to 3D. Some game series have had a harder time adjusting to 3D.
 
Also, I still think (some) of the modern Sonic games are still good, even though I like the old games. I try not to let “nostalgia” cloud my judgement of games. (Like all those retro’ Sonic fans who hate a game for a reason like… “Sonic has green eyes.” Seriously, I still see some fans say that…)

@Rubber Johnny  
Who pissed in your cereal?

@Background Pony #D039 There’s legitimate reason for them to like it, even if it stinks.  
Call it ‘Babby’s first console+genre game’ syndrome if you like. The more overarching term is ‘rose-tinted glasses.’ The same thing is why FF7 is the most ‘beloved’ even though it was really pretty poor and had the most intolerable hero of the franchise. You see a similar occurence with those whose first console was a gamecube, whose first mario game was Sunshine. Or anyone whose first Sonic game was anything after Adventure, up until Colours. That’s probably the only reason Sonic survived long enough to shit out colours, really, each new game bled off more of the old fans, and captured more youngsters who only bought those ones from knowing of the name due to past works, which removes their ability to see how far the series ‘sank’ as their starting point was the lowest point in the franchise’s history.

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
Are you really saying that FF7 is worse than 13?

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
What does that have to do with the discussion in these comments?

@Rubber Johnny To be fair, it is an entry point game. You know how it goes, even if it’s the worst of a series (such as FF7) if it’s your first, then you love it blindly. And OoT was decent, it just had a whole bunch of really aggravating/terrible flaws that drag it down.

@race’emhard  
>implying every hipster attention-whoring “gamer gurl” doesn’t pretend to like OoT

Ocarina of Time, all of my yes.