Our Lord Ditto died for your sins so that His prophet, this regular ordinary human child, could rebuild a society for Our Blessed Trainers to return to.
Started finally properly playing Ocarina of Time via the Ship of Harkinian PC port (and in Japanese, for immersion practice)! Over the years, I think I've watched at least half a dozen streamers play through the first couple of dungeons or so, but this will be my first time experiencing more of the game, and I'm right on the cusp of that new material having finished Dodongo's Cavern and picked up my two Great Fairy Fountain upgrades. Thankfully, my knowledge of the Adult Link portion of the game is very limited, so I'll be experiencing a lot of that completely blind.
At any rate, even though a good chunk of what I've played is stuff I've seen before, I'm really enjoying myself. I love the sense of wonder and exploration that you get skulking around the alleys of Hyrule Castle Town or wending your way through the Lost Woods. I can't remember where it was, but I read/watched something recently talking about how fixed camera angles are a legitimate artistic tool and not just a relic of a resource-constrained past, and the Temple of Time exterior is a perfect illustration. You just wouldn't get that same sense of awe and foreboding with a standard 3rd person camera. It's really making me want to go tackle the original three Resident Evil games, since I've played all the mainline games from RE4 onward including the REmakes (and excluding RE9, so far) but haven't had the guts to tackle the fixed camera titles. Honestly, even more than the fixed camera, I think it's the limited saving that has me quaking in my boots, since I tend to be a save-every-thirty-seconds kind of scaredycat.
As far as my Ship of Harkinian set up goes, I have only a very minimal set of Quality of Life tweaks applied:
and then I have the resolution and FPS cranked up + LOD and draw distance disabled, but it's otherwise a vanilla experience—no texture packs or major modifications.
I'm trying to use guides as little as possible, so I'm taking lots of notes so I know where to backtrack and which items I've collected where. I'd love to have a very spoiler-reduced checklist kind of thing that would just tell me, say, how many collectibles are in a given location, and allow me to progressively drill down in something like the below structure to minimize future spoilers and give me a chance to attempt find things on my own if I know they're in a certain area without risking missing something completely because I tripped some progression flag:
If anyone knows of something that already exists along these lines, definitely let me know! And if not, who knows...maybe if this playthrough turns me into an OoT superfan, I'll end up making it myself.
Anyway, Ship of Harkinian is an incredibly cool project that's emblematic of the wonderful things that people can accomplish working together without a hint of a profit motive. As the quote on their homepage proudly states, "Proof that the unofficial option is sometimes the best option"—Nintendo could never. I only listed a few tweaks, but there are literally hundreds of little flags you can toggle, and extensive support for randomized playthroughs and mods. Probably just about anything about the original game you can think of that you'd want to change, there's a way to do so.