If A Link to the Past was a refinement of the first Zelda, then Ocarina of Time was refinement of LttP. It was also the game that transitioned the franchise into the realm of 3D polygons and the one game everyone seems to remember when "Zelda" is uttered. It's beautiful and worthy of being called a masterpiece, although this is also where story takes precedence over adventuring and so linearity begins to become more prominent.

The game controls very well. I don't know what game actually came up with the "Z-Targeting" technique, but this is the one that popularized, and for good reason. The camera is rarely ever an issue and Link moves and acts as you'd expect him to. There are some limitations: you can't move around while aiming, although if you use Z-Targeting, you can still strafe around. You can't control Epona while also using your bow, so you might often find yourself being galloped towards a wall, while the Poe you're hunting taunts you and your dumb beast (but then again, I can't imagine anyone controlling a horse and aiming an arrow at the same time).

The sound in this game is superb. Many creatures in the world make different sounds. NPCs make funny little grunts or moans. Weapons sound realistic enough. And the soundtrack! The title promises that a musical instrument would be important to the game, and it makes good on that promise. Not only are the music pieces great and moody, but there's even an item in-game that let's you play music. People have actually used it to play different songs, such as the Kakariko Theme. I wouldn't be surprised if someone played the Imperial March with it.

The graphics were, for its time, amazing. I remember as a kid, back in 1998, getting out of Kokiri Forest and having my eyes just pop out at how expansive Hyrule Field is. It was amazing. Nowadays, the graphics for this game are less impressive and the world actually feels very dead at times. There are barely any enemies in Hyrule Field and when there are, it's at only the beginning of the game. It felt like there could have been more here.

While LttP had an expansive story, this game made it more prominent. Minor plot twists abound although the story can still be summarized as "Save the princess, save the world." There is a much larger supporting cast than in LttP and they all receive a lot more characterization than in LttP.

I recommend this game to anyone that likes adventure games. It's very fun to play and nice to look at. Play it with sound turned up high and you'll have a treat for your ears as well.

This patch to the Simplified Chinese version detects if the game is played on an iQue or console and selects proper save and controller support for the device. If played on an iQue it will save to the device as usual. If played on a console, hardware saves and Rumble Pak support is enabled.

It also applies two bugfixes. The correct MP cost for light arrows is displayed in the menu, and if played with an expansion pak the "out of memory" bugs that plague the iQue version no longer occur.

Patches are provided for both the decrypted ROM and once-encrypted app.


On iQue:
It's designed as a (mostly) drop-in replacement for 00200f70.app provided you either can resign the ticket or use hackit.sys to load it. Upload the modified tickets, the .app, and run as usual. (If the ticket is unsigned, run via hackit.) A video of this may, with any luck, be found here:
https://youtu.be/whQKAUVsCCE
Alternately, doubly-encrypt the standalone ROM and overload an existing encrypted title.

Important: to utilize the memory fix, iQue users need to change the RDRAM size in their ticket to 00600000. OoT only uses 6MB at most (the original planned XPak size), but it initializes (almost) all of memory detected at boot. If left at 4MB the memory patch won't be in effect, and set to 8MB it may overwrite your save. You can also set the new SHA1 in the ticket to 045B50E1E10C224E78AA77A038B990125E8CD2B1.


On console:
For the sake of flashcarts that look at GUID codes to differentiate these patches from retail titles, a GUID and timestamp were added. The device type is set to "B" for "BB Player" (not "Q"), and region to "C" for China. Internal names are encoded using codepage 936 (normally CP 932). Bootstraps (IPL3) are swapped to match their retail counterparts; iQue does not, in fact, run this code. The GUID will, for better or worse, match unQue titles.

----
Note: the target for this patch is iQue & console. Emulator use is *not* recommended. It does not mask away iQue registers, and some emulators throw errors or crash on their access. Use the "unQue Zelda Chiamshou Shiguang Zhi Di" patch with those instead.

*(Decrypted) Simplified Chinese Patch: "decrypted.xdelta"
*(Decrypted) Simplified Chinese Common Names
2101104
00200F70.z64
Zelda Chiamshou Shiguang Zhi Di (Simplified).z64
*(Decrypted) Simplified Chinese Original File Checksums
*SHA-1
1015D0F3AF34B89149BFD773580BBC66466AF54E
*SHA-512
6D4473730799D631E457F8BF289CABC4979560EDCFD83E549133865600D6696E6C4236272FA925AA8A40A46D5C3A7166319AC9296B005442122120402DFD2D5A

*(Encrypted) Simplified Chinese Patch: "app.xdelta"
*(Encrypted) Simplified Chinese Common Name
00200f70.app
*(Encrypted) Simplified Chinese Original File Checksums
*SHA-1
47BAD44EB197B619FA7EB534F763267CF4437B08
*SHA-512
D792A1D60DB79D2F8C100168DF54081435CDD2A9319F8EFB5894C30C5B4B83451B2E3A6282E49FF722EC2117071CCA8ACC82AF55D2271B9876123BE1126F79BF