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The story
After the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time scored a stellar 96 on Metacritic, opinions have split on 5ch’s “Hardware & Industry” (Geha) board. It started with a post reading, “This is too much — 86 would’ve made sense.” Defenders argued, “It’s a remake built on nostalgia, so that’s part of the package,” while critics countered with accusations like “a score bought with brand power and money” and “the FF series pulls the same trick.” The thread then expanded into comparisons of the original 1998 Nintendo 64 version’s roughly 7.6 million worldwide sales against contemporaries like Gran Turismo and Super Mario 64, reigniting old console-war debates about popularity back in the day.
What people said
Eighty-six would've made sense.
There aren't that many — that's exactly why it's scoring this high.
There's nothing else quite like this game anyway.
Guess that's fair…
So that's why the FF7 Remake games score so high too, huh?
GT, Pokémon, and Tekken 3 got more buzz. Sales-wise it was probably about on par with Metal Gear Solid.
MGS did about 800k.
Ocarina of Time easily cleared a million against that.
Pulling those numbers on the N64 was no small feat.
Nintendo 64 version (released 1998): roughly 7.6 million worldwide (about 1.14 million in Japan)
MGS sold 7 million worldwide, good for 10th place among all PS1 titles
And this was on the PS1, the runaway dominant console of the time — its own best-seller was GT at 10.85 million
Super Mario 64 did 11.91 million, Mario Kart 64 did 9.87 million
PlayStation's big hitters back then were Crash Bandicoot, FF, and Tomb Raider
Though you'd never guess it looking at them now
FF in particular is obviously rigged.
Yeah, I think the FF scores are sketchy too.
FF is sketchy, sure, but Ocarina of Time is at a level where anything less than a perfect 100 would be weird.
Agreed.
Even being generous, mid-80s is the ceiling here.
There's no way to describe this score except as one bought with brand power and money.
Can't speak to the money part, but this sure looks like a score handed out of excessive deference to the brand and its fans.
But you haven't even played it in the first place.
Calling people cavemen now? Wolverine (a centuries-old mutant in Marvel comics) really has it rough.
Are the people voting on the Metascore cavemen too?
Maybe just reject the Metascore itself at that point.
It released with the movie looming on the horizon too.
If the movie doesn't flop, this could keep selling for a long time.
Ocarina of Time holds an important spot in the series timeline, so there was probably a real need to remake it with the movie rollout in mind.
Now if you're more into the Wind Waker/Breath of the Wild lineage, maybe.
I like both.
Honestly, I like all of them.
Famitsu's just as bad.
At the end of the day it's all favoritism.
Some outlets don't even bother with a radar chart — it's just whatever the writer personally likes. They'll literally write stuff like 'full disclosure, I have a personal attachment to this game so this isn't an objective score, but I'm giving it 100.'
That's not okay, lol.
And the fact that it's still a blast to play today is no small thing.
W-well, it's not THAT big a deal.
Even though the N64 version's been sitting right there playable this whole time, lol.
Back then everyone was going 'whoa, amazing!' over FF, GT, and Resident Evil instead.
There were even manga about their development stories running in Weekly Shōnen Magazine.
Takayuki Hirasawa, 'Game Creator Chronicles' (Kodansha, Weekly Shōnen Magazine KC)
Published December 1998, ISBN 978-4063126358
The Men Who Created Virtua Fighter (Yu Suzuki)
The Man Who Created Derby Stallion (Hiroyuki Sonobe)
The Men Who Created Resident Evil (Shinji Mikami)
Published April 2000, ISBN 978-4063128369
The Men Who Created Gran Turismo (Kazunori Yamauchi)
The Men Who Created Super Mario Bros. (Shigeru Miyamoto)
The Men Who Created PlayStation (Ken Kutaragi)
That's a textbook case of 'a frog in a well knows nothing of the great ocean' (a Japanese idiom for a narrow, sheltered worldview).
Both Resident Evil and FF7 were just pseudo-3D games faking character movement over pre-rendered 2D backgrounds.
There's a night-and-day quality gap between those and Ocarina of Time from the same era.
It's hilarious that people are getting cocky over a game that only became a 'proper' 3D remake twenty years late.
Whoa, hold on, I was just talking about what games were popular back then. I don't know anything about whether it was 'proper' 3D or not.
Everyone was into Resident Evil, FF, or GT, right? None of my friends even owned an N64.
Nobody cares about anecdotes of how clueless you and your friend group were.
No, back then PlayStation was overwhelmingly dominant in Japan.
That was just a cheap trick on kids that happened to work.
And look at the result: today's gap in software development muscle between Nintendo and everyone else.
I think it genuinely has that level of quality.
Hard to believe this was a '90s game.
Even assuming new hires were involved in this training, being new doesn't mean they lack skill.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Metacritic’s 96 is a “Metascore” aggregated mainly from Western media reviews, calculated differently and drawn from a different pool of outlets than Japan’s Famitsu Cross Review. The “favoritism” and “brand bonus” theories raised in the thread are a recurring complaint every time a major series gets a remake — similar suspicions surfaced around the FF7 Remake as well. It’s also true that some reviewers disclose personal attachment to a game right in their review before scoring it, and that practice is part of why skepticism about objectivity runs so deep. Meanwhile, the figures raised later in the thread — the original 1998 Nintendo 64 version’s roughly 7.6 million worldwide sales, along with the contemporaneous sales of Gran Turismo and Mario 64 — are reference points about hardware market share at the time, a separate axis entirely from how well this remake is reviewed. Readers should be careful not to conflate “did it sell well” with “is it rated highly,” since the thread blurs the two together.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry / Geha) thread “I played the Ocarina of Time remake, but come on, a 96 Metascore has to be favoritism…“
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