[JediWing]

I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.

That's not to discount the criticisms or "feel" you get from the game, but it's worth noting that nothing lives up to our childhood favorites.

[eslaught]

I loved Star Wars as a kid. Then the prequels made me jaded that there could ever be anything as good as the originals. The sequels and other content did nothing to dissuade me from this. Then Andor showed up and it's like, holy cow, this is actually good.

Sometimes when the follow-on content is bad... it's because the follow-on content is bad.

[somebehemoth]

Check out Clone Wars and Bad Batch. These brought me back to star wars fandom. Don’t be put off by animation. The stories are excellent and there is lots of character development.

[eslaught]

I did watch The Clone Wars (note this is the 2008 TV series, not the 2003 one). The last season (especially the finale) was amazing, up there with Andor for best Star Wars content of all time. But watching the rest of it to get to that point was honestly a slog, and plenty of the shows are gag-worthy or at least blah. It's bad enough I can't recommend it to friends, but I've been trying to think about whether there's a minimal subset of shows I can recommend watching to give enough of the experience that you can appreciate that finale without needing to suffer through the rest of it.

Andor comes with the distinct advantage that you don't have to slog through hours of questionable content to get to the good stuff.

[jghn]

There are lists out there on which clone wars eps are skippable vs not if you just want to be up to date with all of the key storylines and hit the good eps.

Rebels is harder because they had a habit of sneaking key storyline bits into the meh episodes.

[jghn]

Rebels as well, which IMO was the best of all 3.

Clone Wars & Rebels both suffer at first from being a bit too kid-oriented, but both wind up getting pretty serious over time.

[kirso]

I really tried to make it work, but going through the first season was unbearable dread... imagining that there are like 5 more to get to good stuff is IMO not worth it.

[toadi]

Weird because I am split on this. I still game a lot but never got those feelings again that immersed me in the world. Sid Meiers Pirates in my C64 for example. the first CIV or Xcom. I still rack up significant game time but the immersion is less. This I attribute to me not being a kid anymore.

When I was a kid I gobbled up all movies, good, bad, ... Whatever I watched it all. Last decade I haven't watched that much movies anymore. I am in the middle if it is me not being a kid anymore or it is quality.

The difference is that I still put significant time in gaming although it doesn't make me immerse into it like I did as a Kid. Movies I just quit on most of them and watch a couple of good ones.

Maybe it is unfair. A good movie you watch once but even if in a year only 1 good game comes out you can still rack up a big amount of time ;)

[w0m]

I was able to get my kids obsessed with Star Wars before their first Disney trip - watched all of Clone wars, every main movie. Their favorite? Episode 2.

[thatfrenchguy]

Breath of the Wild is objectively a masterpiece though.

[akhosravian]

These things are not incompatible in any way:

X is a masterpiece Some person doesn’t enjoy X

[lttlrck]

I think that's why they used "objectively"

[pfannkuchen]

It gets the big things really really right but it is missing human character in a lot of ways compared to Ocarina and MM. Not sure if it was infeasible to do both or if they were on principle trying to let the nature elements do 100% of the work.

[deskamess]

Ok... that was my path and since I was not interested I did not know of Andor. Will have to take a look at it.

[kabdib]

Andor is the first SW content I have re-watched since Jedi.

[spends a few minutes on a mental inventory]

Well, okay: I watched all the SW eps with my son. (His words after seeing Ep1 were "Daddy, that wasn't a very good movie.")

Still, I rest my case. Andor is the first content that I would actually miss if it went away.

[shorsher]

It really is brilliant. The screenwriter is Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Bourne Trilogy).

[em500]

Moreover, today's kids, including your own if you have them, like different things than you did. Most kids growing up with Breath of the Wild are not going to be impressed by Ocarina of Time. Most likely, you have pretty different preferences for book/music/movie preferences than your parents.

[mbreese]

It’s funny… talking about the Tears of the Kingdom yesterday with my son, he kept bringing up Ocarina of Time as an example of a perfectly rated game. He’s never played it and yet, it’s stuck in his head. I played it when it came out, but I still had more of a fondness for the original Zelda which somewhat betrays my age. I think Ocarina felt a little too guided for me (or maybe it was the limits of the platform).

My son never finished BOTW, but I did. But I have a feeling he’s going to try to play Ocarina of Time before the summer is through. (And yes, I’ve already put in some time in TOTK).

[jader201]

I don’t know. If we’re strictly speaking of nostalgia, I can still feel a very strong sense of nostalgia from things I’ve experienced as an adult, even experiences from just a few years ago — or even the previous year!

This can apply to a trip we went on, or a TV series we watched, or music I listened to, or a video game I played (e.g. I really experience this when playing Factorio again after it’s been a while).

So maybe YMMV, but I can still have things that (at least almost) live up to “feels” I had from childhood.

[archagon]

I don’t think that’s true. I played Ocarina as an adult and loved it, but BotW left me feeling similarly cold. It’s just a different style of game.

Meanwhile, Elden Ring drew me in like no other game in recent memory.

[skeaker]

I've experienced the opposite, where I played OoT as an adult but thought it was only okay but got completely absorbed into BotW. OoT is too railroaded for my taste, especially the dungeons that often have one linear path. Towards the end of the game when you have to do several temples I thought of quitting. BotW on the other hand gives you plenty to do all at once and doesn't care how you do it. I enjoy devising my own approaches to things rather than finding the singular linear solutions to OoT's dungeons.

[rcpt]

I played OOT for the first time at the start of COVID after no gaming for 20 years.

It's the best game. As a kid I liked Marathon and Mario but never played Zelda for some reason. OOT is just a perfect game.

[rightbyte]

As a kid Zelda might be too hard. You need to be able to read. And as me, read a foreign language, English. I could not play it properly until I was like 12-13yo.

How would you compare it to MM? I think MM is better.

[rcpt]

MM is better aesthetics but I enjoyed the storyline and adventure of OOT more.

[purpleflame1257]

I would disagree. As a kid I played OOT to death but never owned a copy of Majora's mask. I have just started playing it and I think it may even be better than OOT (though it is not really even a "Zelda" game.)

[rightbyte]

I think if you play MM before OOT you would think MM is way better. In a way MM is genius because it feels so alive with all these characters reliving the same three days over and over. The time reset makes all those hard scripted events believable.

[slothtrop]

I agree. It's a formative stage where everything is novel - even a new game that does everything right can't capture that in adulthood. You also have way more patience as a kid with nothing but time. I didn't mind trudging through jrpgs then, but I hate it now.

I don't replay old games like this (the ones that have you solve and explore). It's effectively a security blanket, with no thrill - the opposite of the first experience. I find it bittersweet and it dulls feelings I associate with those games.

You can never go back, is the thing.

[Tainnor]

> I think "as a kid" is the operative phrase here. Nothing will ever live up to that nostalgia.

Of course, you're entirely correct but other entries in the series, even Skyward Sword with all its flaws, has managed to capture some of that spirit. BOTW to me is just an entirely different game.

[snarkypixel]

Ocarina of Time does a fantastic job going from the bright world of young Link to the more serious and darker world of adult Link. This adds a ton of depth to the game. And let's not forget the clever game mechanic of swapping between young and adult Link to solve puzzles.

[wing-_-nuts]

Nostalgia is definitely the reason I love civilization II so much (I'd argue it's #2 behind civ IV in the series).

It's a damned shame civ II is so hard to get properly running (dosbox, win3.1, etc, sound drivers, etc)

[kr99x]

There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors. Game design has gone through a variety of eras and fashions and fads, and games "back then" (for whatever period you happen to be nostalgic for) were just built different. That doesn't necessarily mean better or worse, and maybe nostalgia is the reason people prefer games from the time period when their tastes were developing, but it's not just the games themselves. It's the way games operated.

I guarantee you that if Nintendo released "A Zelda in the mold of OoT but with a new set of dungeons and items and such" people who love OoT would go nuts for it. Look at what happened with Sonic Mania. For some reason, though, publishers/developers are very wary of doing this. Nintendo refuses to make a new Zelda that just reapplies the winning formula. Sega refuses to make Sonic Mania 2 - honestly, I was very pleasantly surprised they made the first one! I blame the late 2000s mantra of "innovation" and its presence/absence that seemed to be all the rage in critic circles.

[filleduchaos]

> There are indeed modern releases that live up to nostalgia for games of yore and they are... games that are incredibly similar to their predecessors.

That just seems tautological to me. Of course things that are deliberately trying to tug on your nostalgia will "live up" to it.

[Fricken]

I thought I was too dried up and curmudgeonly to get immersed in a video game but BOTW dispelled that myth. Prior to BOTW Ocarina of Time was my greatest gaming experience.

[jrgoff]

Agreed. My niece loved Breath of the Wild and has been eagerly anticipating Tears of the Kingdom since it was announced.