Recently I began my journey with the Zelda Ocarina of Time Randomizer, a tool that allows you to create a patched ROM of Ocarina of Time where all of your major items are in different locations. During my first run with the randomizer I spread all my items through the various pots and crates in the game. I discovered that the part of the randomizer that really intrigued me was the opportunity to improve my game knowledge – learning where all the pots and crates were located in order to find my items was a fun experience, and all the times I got stuck I ended up learning something about a location in the game I didn’t know very well. I expressed that for my second run I wanted to try randomizing different things, and in addition to that I wanted to try the Triforce Hunt mode. My opportunity came during one of my livestreams; I finished the Zelda romhack Escape from the Facility earlier than I anticipated and had quite a bit of stream time left. So I quickly whipped up a randomizer seed and dove in.
There were quite a few things I changed from my first seed. Instead of adding pots and crates into the random item pools, I added cows and business scrubs. If you’re not aware, playing Epona’s Song for a cow in Ocarina of Time causes them to fill one of your empty bottles with milk. By adding them to the randomizer pool, these cows instead can give you items. For example, during my run I got my bomb bag from a cow at Lon Lon Ranch as well as one of the progressive strength upgrades from another cow. Business scrubs are located at a number of locations within the game – primarily optional rooms in dungeons or in secret grottos. Defeating these deku scrubs will cause them to offer to sell you an item. There are different settings within the randomizer to make the items sold by these scrubs more or less expensive. For my first attempt, I decided to keep things affordable and make all business scrub items cost 10 rupees.
There were a couple of other features I experimented with as well. I wanted to try a new hint format as well as add new hints to the pool. Specifically, you can set it so that Dampe’s journal tells you the location of one of the game’s two hookshots, and you can set the cursed skultulas to tell you what items they will grant you for bringing them the gold skultulas. Getting these types of hints was very useful and quickly allowed me to establish how many skultulas I cared about and enabled me to get a hookshot somewhat quickly. My experiment with the hint format was less fruitful. I tried a format called “important hints” that basically tells you how many major items are at various locations in the game. So instead of telling me one specific item and where it was, I got a general overview of how much important stuff was located where. I didn’t end up liking this setup as much as I had hoped to – while it did eliminate hints that felt completely useless, it also eliminated hints that were highly useful, bringing everything to an unsatisfying middle.
Oh look, it’s the front door of the Forest Temple! Wait…
In addition to all these minor differences, there were two major settings I experimented with during this run. The first was the dungeon entrance randomizer. This makes it so that the doors leading inside of the game’s dungeons and dungeon-like locations (e.g. Ice Cavern, Bottom of the Well, etc.) actually lead to a different dungeon entirely. In my run, for example, the Deku Tree’s mouth led to Dodongo’s Cavern while the entrance to Dodongo’s Cavern led inside of Jabu Jabu’s Belly. This created an interesting challenge where I needed to figure out how to actually find the dungeons that I had the tools to solve, and I learned a lot about what was and wasn’t possible. For example, on stream I kept talking about how I wouldn’t be able to do Water Temple because it was located in Bottom of the Well, which I thought was only accessible as a child. But adult Link can in fact get there! I also learned that adult Link can finish the Deku Tree and Dodongo’s Cavern child dungeons as long as he has the right tools, which might open up some options for me in future runs.
The other major setting I tried out this time around was the Triforce Hunt. This mode injects a bunch of Triforce pieces into the item pool. Not like the capital P Triforce Pieces, but little shards of Triforce by the dozens. The settings I used required me to locate 20 pieces out of the 30 in the item pool. My understanding from the description of the Triforce Hunt mode was that finding the required number of pieces unlocked the final boss battle, but somehow someway I got things mixed up because what actually happened was that as soon as I found 20 Triforces pieces, Ganondorf got sealed and the game was over. It was kind of an anticlimactic conclusion for the game to just suddenly finish right after I completed the Gerudo Archery game, but I had broader issues with the Triforce Hunt mode beyond that.
Oh wait, sorry, wrong game…
One of the settings I enabled was “chest size matches contents,” which makes a treasure chest big if the item inside of it is a major item. Triforce pieces count as major items for this purpose, so sometimes I would open up a big chest and it would be something like a bow and arrow, but often I would open a big chest and find a Triforce piece. Now Triforce pieces are necessary for progression, yes, but in terms of excitement generated they don’t hit quite like finding the silver gauntlets or Din’s Fire or something along those lines. It reminded me of an article I once read about the distinction between power moons in Mario Odyssey versus power stars in other 3D Mario games. I wish I remembered the name of the blogger to credit, but their website is gone so I can no longer look them up. This is a paraphrase of their description:
Finding a power star in Mario 64 or Mario Galaxy is like finding a crisp $5 bill – not life changing of course but quite satisfying. It’s a bright spot in your day and it’s exciting when it happens. Finding a power moon in Mario Odyssey is like finding a nickel. There are so many of them and it takes so many to matter that finding any one individual moon doesn’t feel special or amount to much of anything.
For me, this is exactly what finding a Triforce piece felt like in the Triforce hunt. I would open a big, gold-rimmed treasure chest hoping for something like the Longshot or the Boomerang and instead I would get a Triforce piece; it felt like expecting a $5 bill and finding a nickel instead. While the Triforce pieces are arguably the most important form of progression in the Triforce hunt, individual ones don’t unlock anything. I can’t get into the Water Temple with Triforce pieces, nor can I teleport to the Desert Colossus or blow open a grotto or play a song for a cow or any of the things that I need to do in order to accomplish more checks. Major items in the randomizer are exciting in part because they open new possibilities – the Triforce pieces don’t accomplish that, which for me makes them significantly less interesting to discover.
This cutscene jumpscared me when it showed up all of a sudden after collecting my final Triforce piece
I had a lot of fun during the run despite my issues with the Triforce Hunt mode itself. The dungeon entrance randomizer was particularly fun. There was a moment on stream where I walked into Ice Cavern and discovered that it was actually the Gerudo Training Ground and I was so genuinely surprised because I had forgotten that those locations were included in entrance rando. It was great! That sense of fun and discovery is what makes the randomizer as a whole appealing to me. The cow randomizer was fun but I was a touch disappointed to figure out how few of them were in the game – the majority of the cows are at Lon Lon Ranch, with only a small number located in some other locations around the game. Scrubs add a lot of check locations that I’ll have to learn to master, but I think as long as I keep them affordable that it will be fun to learn those locations over the course of a few runs. I’m already getting a better mastery of the grottos and I’m looking forward to being able to check them all without a guide.
I think for my next run I want to keep on the entrance randomizer, cows, and scrubs, then add back in pots and crates as a way to kind of test all of the knowledge I’ve built up to this point. I may also expand the number of shopsanity items – I’ve slowly increased the number of randomized shop items each time and I’m liking that steady progression. I’m also interested in potentially including songs in the item pull instead of having them tied to song locations, or in making the warp songs warp to a different location than where they normally lead. Finally, I might also add one more thing to the item pool; possibly beehives since those are largely tied to grottos, or maybe some other element that won’t add an unmanageable number of checks to the pool. At some point I want to try out adding skultulas to the pool but that’s such a huge number of checks I’d prefer to do it as a standalone challenge.
Regardless of what I do next, I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Ocarina of Time Randomizer. Learning more about this game I’ve been playing for the majority of my life has been a lot of fun, and it’s exciting to find a new sense of discovery in something that’s so familiar to me. I’m not necessarily planning to stream the very next randomizer run I do but I will probably stream the game more in the future, so there’s a lot to look forward to with the experience.
P.S. I tried the skulltula randomizer after writing this article and it’s everything I don’t like about the Triforce Hunt multiplied by 1000. Also, the song randomizer makes the songs teleport you to completely random locations instead of just switching the vanilla locations to different songs, so I didn’t particularly care for that either. The more you know!