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Ocarina of Time’s Metascore of 99 is among the highest ever recorded for a game released in 1998, a mark that’s rarely been matched since. On 5ch’s hardware/industry (geha) board, a thread kicked off with the question: “Isn’t a 99 overrated by today’s standards?” Some argued the score was inflated by the small number of reviews counted back then, while others countered that you can’t judge it fairly without having experienced just how groundbreaking it felt at the time. The discussion ranged widely, comparing the game to contemporaries like Final Fantasy VII, Sonic Adventure, and King’s Field II, with opinions splitting along the line of “judge it by 1998 standards” versus “judge it by today’s.”
What people said
That's a stretch lol
At least say King's Field III…
Whether or not it was "fun," the three-dimensional map design was genuinely astonishing.
It really felt like there was a whole world packed inside the game.
>Even playing it back then, King's Field II was the more fun 3D action RPG.
Well, "fun" is subjective, but King's Field is actually a great reference point for comparing 3D action RPG quality. Before the N64 came out, most 3D action RPGs were just polygon remakes of games that already existed in the sprite era, and King's Field is a textbook example — basically a first-person dungeon RPG, a genre that's been around forever, just rendered in polygons.
Back then, games from major publishers basically got high scores just for being from a major publisher.
If you start disqualifying old games for having too few reviews, Super Mario Galaxy 2 ends up as the highest Metascore of all time.
No game before or since has had that kind of impact.
By today's standards it's more like a 70.
Exactly this.
What about Super Mario 64?
Or maybe Japanese fans are the ones underrating it?
Recently I finished it by watching YouTube videos.
I thought Ganondorf was the final boss, but it's actually Ganon.
But there's no doubt it was amazing for its time.
1998 also gave us Resident Evil 2, Gran Turismo, the original Minna no Golf (Everybody's Golf), Mobile Suit Gundam: Federation vs. Zeon (Renji), Sakura Wars 2…
For that era, the 3D field design was pretty impressive.
It's kind of similar to how Breath of the Wild dropped just as open-world games were starting to feel stale.
If we're talking about moving freely through 3D space, there's Mario 64 from '96, and Jumping Flash on PS1 came out three years before Ocarina of Time too, though its story was pretty by-the-numbers.
Ocarina of Time is the kind of game where if you plot it on a radar chart across every category, every single axis comes out high.
If your only reference point was Mario 64 and then Ocarina of Time suddenly dropped, I bet it would've been an incredible shock — kind of jealous of people who got to experience it that way.
Huh?
That's a trash game with a broken lock-on system.
The frame rate was way too low.
The camera made you motion sick, it was barely playable.
The Z-targeting system and everything else were overtuned.
The difficulty was pretty high too, so most people never finished it and gave up.
Only a handful of people actually got the experience the reputation promises.
Probably more people can judge it fairly starting from the GameCube version onward.
Nobody back then thought the N64 version of Ocarina of Time had a low frame rate, and other 3D games caused way worse camera sickness, if anything.
Re-score everything by today's standards.
You're not exempt either, Chrono Trigger.
If anything Chrono Trigger's rating goes up.
A movie-like story, hard rock music blasting, characters talking non-stop — Sega was way ahead of the curve.
There were a bunch of landmark 3D masterpieces back then, and they all pushed each other forward by borrowing each other's best ideas.
Ocarina of Time is a great masterpiece, but the fair assessment is that its influence on the modern era wasn't an achievement or evolution it pulled off single-handedly.
It's a trash game where you just run down a linear field like an idiot.
"It had voice acting and rock music, so it was ahead of its time!"
Is that a joke?
I can say this now that enough time has passed.
Both of them got popular back then mostly on novelty, I'd say.
Famitsu kept hyping up Ocarina of Time for a long, long time.
It even had a day/night cycle and you could ride trains. (Sonic Adventure 2 switched to a stage-select format though.)
I played both, and Shenmue too for that matter, in real time — neither came close to Ocarina of Time.
The field design in particular was on a completely different level.
That's because the review count was really small.
Not small at all — 22 reviews was actually a lot for the time.
Well, if the review count goes up, more outlets giving it a 9 drag the average down too.
That's exactly why people say this score is more than the game deserves and will never happen again.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Ocarina of Time’s Metascore of 99 is widely known as one of the highest review aggregates ever recorded, dating back to 1998, and only a handful of titles have reached that level since. At the time, however, there were far fewer game review outlets than there are today, and the review counts behind these scores were typically only in the dozens. The structural point raised in the thread — that fewer reviews make it easier for the average score to spike — came up again later when Super Mario Galaxy 2 set the all-time record, and it’s a point that keeps resurfacing whenever people discuss Metascores for retro games. What split the thread wasn’t the number itself, but the underlying premise: should the game be judged in the context of the era’s technology and the impact it had at the time, or re-scored using the same yardstick as modern games? It’s easy to miss that neither side was actually disputing the score as a fact.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Ocarina of Time’s Metascore is 99 ← isn’t this way too overrated?.”
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