Introduction

Ocarina of Time: Master Quest is a curious case in Nintendo's history. It was originally produced as a pseudo-sequel to Ocarina of Time back in 1998, before Aonuma decided he would rather make Majora's Mask and the project was canned until being revived as a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker and later an added selling point for Ocarina 3D. While a beta rom of the game from 1999 does exist, Master Quest is not and has not ever been its own game; even in its completed state, it is functionally a dungeon romhack, with the base game (ie, everything that isn't a dungeon) being completely identical to the original release. This makes it a fascinating point of comparison to some of the actual romhacks we've played, both in its scope of changes and general quality, which is exactly what we're going to explore.

See, Master Quest is weird. It's not bad (although there are definitely a few puzzles that come close to straddling that line), and given that its changes are limited solely to actors, even kind of impressive at times. But it absolutely radiates "my first romhack" energy, where even when it does have an interesting idea, it never seems to go anywhere or do anything cool with it. This is most obvious in MQ Jabu (that being the thing that basically everyone knows about MQ, even if they don't know anything else about it), but pretty much every dungeon has something you can point to and be like "Oh, that's it, that was their one idea for this dungeon." When the dungeons are the only thing that are different about MQ...well, you can see why it has only ever been a tagalong for the actual game that people know and love.

Since the dungeons are the only thing that are interesting in the slightest, that's what we're focusing on. Each one will get a full-length video with minimal editing so we can all really soak up that Master Quest Experience™, while all the rest of the game will be posted alongside it as a short supercut of the stuff we did in between the dungeons. I have never played MQ period, and Chaos Argate (and FPzero, when he's around) is the closest thing we have to an expert, having played it a decade ago when Ocarina 3D came out. As such, consider this an open spoiler thread for Ocarina of Time because that's what we're going to do in the videos. In addition to our "experts", you can expect to see the usual gaggle of idiots that I do projects with (most notably Faerie Fortune, nine-gear crow, and poorlywrittennovel), as we make our way across Hyrule's stupider cousin.

And yes, if it wasn't immediately obvious, we're playing on the "Ship of Harkinian" PC port. This means we get native widescreen, cosmetic options, time saving gameplay stuff (text skips, climbing/pushing faster, etc) and all sorts of other goodies that we will be turning on more and more of as we get further in the game and less patient with its bullshit. So look forward to that!

Table of Contents
Part 1: The Deku Tree
Part 1B: The Tragedy of Impa's Legs
Part 2: Dodongo's Cavern
Part 2B: The Return of Beancoin
Part 3: Inside Jabu Jabu's Belly
Part 3B: Let's Play the Song of Time
Part 4: Forest Temple
Part 4B: Kneecaps Broken Successfully
Part 5: Fire Temple
Part 5B: Ice Cavern
Part 6: Water Temple
Part 6B: 6000% Speed
Part 7: Bottom of the Well
Part 8: Shadow Temple
Part 9: Gerudo Training Grounds
Part 10: Spirit Temple
Part 11: Ganon's Castle