Video Game / Ocarina of Time: Randomizer

Stuck in cyan.

Inspired by the popularity of A Link to the Past: Randomizer, the Ocarina of Time: Randomizer generates a randomized version of the N64 classic Ocarina of Time. It can be found here.

As with any Zelda randomizer, items and chest contents can be shuffled around to produce different routing. This includes rewards for completing sidequests (like collecting Golden Skultulla tokens). Among other things, Link will discover that the many cows in the game may hold items.

Like in Ocarina, your objective is to collect the six Medallions (now guarded by randomly selected dungeon bosses), open the bridge to Ganon's castle, and stab that son of a bitch in the head. Naturally, the average run is much longer than Link to the Past, and Ocarina has many potentially useless logic choices, e.g. having a Gossip Stone inform Link that Sheik will teach him a…rupee. The randomizer sticking a rupee in the shop for way more than it's worth. The Deku Trader charging Link 15 rupees and then giving him 1 rupee with the dialog "CURSE YOU...!" This is essentially the same feature which spawns rupees when you cut grass! (If only rupees mattered in this game.)

As long as Link talks to every Gossip Stone he sees, they'll often give him information about where to search: If a location is the "way of the hero", it means at least one important item is there, along with the Medallions and any song the Ocarina teaches. If it's a "foolish choice", no plot-relevant items are there, though there may still be optional ones like Heart Containers or the Biggoron's Sword.

Several different settings exist that allow a randomized Ocarina "seed" to be vastly different from a vanilla playthrough:

• Entrance Randomization: every doorway leads to a new location, meaning that doors won't always take you where you think they will. Something as simple as exiting Link's House might take him directly to Goron City, or the Fairy grotto in Zora Fountain might lead to Ganon's Castle. The possibilities are limitless.
  • Delinked Entrance Randomization: The above, but even more confusing, as entering a door and then leaving doesn't guarantee you'll be in the same place. Using the previous example, exiting Link's house might take him to Goron City, but going back in the door the player just came out of might lead to the Shadow Temple.
• Keysanity: takes every small key and boss key from every dungeon and shuffles them into the item pool. Link won't be able to complete some dungeons until every small key between the entrance and the boss room has been acquired, including the boss key. Keysanity can be really helpful if Link finds 4 or more dungeon keys, since it helps guide him on where to go, but it can also suck if the seed gives him 1 key and then expects him to "dip" into three three different dungeons to fish for the others.
• Shopsanity: increases each vendor's inventory. Link can find something like Gerudo Mirror Shield being sold in the Kokiri shop at the beginning of the game.
• Scrubsanity: adds the many Deku Scrub vendors into the mix. Settings that range from affordable prices (10 rupees each) to Random (anywhere from 0 to 99 per vendor).
• Cowsanity: shuffles the nine (or ten, if the Jabu-Jabu Master Quest dungeon is enabled) cows into the game as item locations. Link can play Epona's Song for them and they will give him Lon-Lon Milk into an empty bottle as a reward in Vanilla, but if they are shuffled in, they give him items like shopkeepers or Deku scrubs.
• Tokensanity: shuffles the reward for Gold Skultulla tokens. For killing each Gold Skultulla, Link will receive a random item from the pool as well. As you might expect, the locations of the tokens are shuffled, as well.
• Text Shuffle: shuffles all the dialogue that NPCs say and most, if not all item pickups. There are a few exceptions, like hints, Shopsanity items and which dungeon each map, compass and key you pick up. Other than that, you never know what they're gonna say. You could have Guru-Guru introduce himself as Darunia, Zelda calling you disgusting for literally no reason or Navi cursing you, Zelda and the sages. The possibilities are endless!

The randomizer is often used to organize speedrunning tournaments where players are given the same game seed and then face off against each other in races. The races are entirely fair as far as RNG is concerned, but since neither player knows in advance where all required progression items are located (or even which items are required), a large part of the race comes down to figuring out the most efficient route through the game based on what items the runners encounter along the way. As a result, routing and execution are both incredibly important in such tournaments, and winning requires both substantial amounts of skill and a certain amount of luck.^note Although there's a skill of "reading" a seed to figure out the likeliest path through the game, at some point, the seed will defy the odds and place an item required for progression in an unlikely location that's time-consuming and challenging players for reach - for instance, a (non-entrance randomizer) seed may place the first possible Ocarina upgrade behind Barinade in Jabu-Jabu's Belly. Under normal circumstances, the Ocarina and Zelda's Lullaby are required to reach Zora Fountain, where Jabu-Jabu is located. However, if the Silver Scale has been acquired, a player can enter Zora's Domain through the entrance in Lake Hylia. There aren't many items in Barinade, and the player will never know for sure what item Barinade is holding until they defeat it, but given that it's likely that beating Jabu-Jabu's Belly will result in a medallion (assuming no dungeons are finished, it's either a 62.5% chance or a 75% chance), players would chance a visit all the same.

Having a location/item tracker is virtually requisite for completing the randomizer efficiently, unless you have an eidetic memory — and even then, the randomizer may helpfully point out new progressions that otherwise may not have occurred to you. EmoTracker is currently the most popular one for Windows that has packages for this and most other popular randomizers (it defaults to installing the Link to the Past package, but Ocarina of Time is its second-most downloaded set of packages). A list of other trackers can be found here.

As the randomizer is based on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, most tropes that apply to that game will naturally apply to the randomizer as well. To avoid redundancy, only tropes that differ in some way between the randomizer and the original game should be added here.

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This game provides examples of:

• Alien Geometries
  • The entrance randomizer can result in a particularly large dungeon existing inside an entrance to a tiny building. The entire Shadow Temple fitting neatly inside of Link's House in Kokiri Forest is one such example.
  • A seperate randomizer that combines Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask has the player swap between games using the Happy Mask Shop and Clock Tower in each respective game, so both fairly small buildings now include an entire country, alongside any entrance randomizer settings set for the seed, which can include other cross-game entrances, so the barn in Romani Ranch could contain the entirity of Hyrule Field.
• Already Undone for You: In Open Mode, the gatekeeper Kokiri lets you right through at the beginning. Depending on the settings, this can mean that the Door of Time is already open too.
• Anticlimax: Having access to Nayru's Love turns several bosses into total jokes, provided you can beat them.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • As ironic as it may seem, the randomizer actually does away with some of the RNG reliant features of the original game to save players from wasting time repeating the same mindless tasks over and over again due to bad luck. Dampe's digging game yields its item the first time you dig anything up. This does not, however, extend to the random flames he spits out during his races.
  • If shuffling dungeon key items into the bunch, pressing the A-bind on the menu brings up a small screen that shows which items have been acquired for which dungeons, so you don't have to rely on a tracker or visit the dungeons in question to see.
  • Since the randomizer is intended to be used to play through the game multiple times, it gets rid of most of the unskippable cutscenes and dialogue boxes from the original game to speed things up. King Zora, for instance, is basically teleported out of the way of the door to Zora Fountain, and a setting can be enabled that turns all chest opening into the short version.
  • The randomizer includes several options to shorten lengthy minigames or sidequests, including:
    • Allowing the player to earn both rewards from Dampe's Grave and/or Gerudo Archery if they do well enough on the first playthrough.
    • Opening the Kakariko Gate and allowing all masks to be rented at the Happy Mask Shop immediately.
    • Reducing the number of cuccos needed to be turned in to the cucco lady in Kakariko, or big poes turned in to the big poe merchant in order to get their respective rewards.
    • Bypassing the "sneak past the guards" sequence in Hyrule Castle and the tower escape after beating Ganondorf.
    • Allowing you to immediately leave Kokiri Forest as child Link (typically requires beating the Deku Tree first) and opening the Door of Time in both past and future (the former requires the Song of Time, while the latter requires you to obtain the Forest Medallion).
  • Your current Ocarina and both the Iron and Hover Boots get assignments on the d-pad that is unused in vanilla. This makes it a lot quicker to bring these items out when needed, as you don't need to open the menu.
  • Hints can be toggled to cut down significantly on excess searching. The cursed House of Skulltula family can be set to tell what they will give out after collecting a certain number of tokens, letting the player know if it is worth hunting down anywhere up to fifty of them. Ganondorf can also be set to tell the player the general location where the Light Arrows are found, if that is the final item they need.
  • Keysanity has the option to make the keys have unique designs based on the dungeon they correspond to. If the player knows that a dungeon isn't worth going to, then this gives them a good way to know which keys to ignore, and conversly, if they know a dungeon is necessary, they'll know which keys are worth the time to grab.
  • Keysanity has the option to add key rings, which replace a dungeon's set of small keys with a single item containing the whole set. This can reduce the time in collecting the sets, especially for the larger ones like the Fire Temple, and may also give a suggestion as to where the logic might expect them to go.
• Ascended Glitch: As with most randomizers, the use of well-known glitches and exploits is expected in order to complete a seed generated under Glitch Logic. The randomizer also allows you to turn specific tricks and techniques on to be considered in custom logic settings, allowing you to tailor the experience to what glitches you know/are comfortable using.
• Ass Shove: ...sort of. If the nine (or ten) cows are added into the mix for items, they give the items for playing Epona's song. Meaning they came from within the udders.
• Backtracking: Called "double dipping" by the community. Depending on the seed, you may be required to return several times to the same dungeon or area in order to fully complete it, in the case that an item required to progress further in the dungeon is locked in a location that itself can only be accessed using an item found earlier in the dungeon. This is especially likely in Keysanity mode.
  • Even in seeds where such double-dipping isn't technically necessary, there's still a good chance that a player will nonetheless do a lot of backtracking, simply because they didn't know which items they needed to bring the first time they entered the dungeon. So they end up having to leave to go find said items in different locations before coming back to finish the dungeon.
  • Depending upon the extremity of the options selected, entrance shuffle may necessitate a good bit of this, just because the path to certain areas of the world may end up being particularly convoluted until the player obtains all the necessary progression items to reach them normally. Making notes on where the entrances are is virtually mandatory for the more complicated entrance shuffle settings.
• Blatant Item Placement: Frequently happens by random chance as the randomizer has no concern for in-universe logic in how it places its items. The randomizer will gleefully place a single green rupee behind Twinrova, or have a random Deku Scrub sell you a powerful and destructive magic spell for all of 6 rupees.
  • The Plandomizer lets you invoke this trope intentionally, if you're so inclined. Usually this is done for races.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: If the corresponding Misc. Hint option is enabled, Ganondorf will tell you where the Light Arrows are, which are absolutely required to defeat him.
• Boring, but Practical: Finding bombchus or Deku sticks in chests certainly isn't as exciting as getting your hands on a flashy weapon or progression item, but especially in the early game these "junk" items can actually be incredibly useful since you'll have several item locations locked behind bombable rocks/walls and the Deku sticks take the place of your sword (and do even more damage as a child), and you'll probably pass by many of them before you've had time to stack up on enemy drops or pot contents. This can apply to Heart Pieces and Heart Containers as well, since having a bit of extra health can go a long way in case you need to dip into some of the more difficult Adult dungeons early.
• Carrying the Weakness: It's perfectly possible that a boss will drop a weapon that it's particularly weak to after being defeated, provided the player had access to some other weapon to damage the boss with before. If said weapon is the only way to damage the boss, on the other hand, the logic wouldn't allow them to be carrying it since that would make them unbeatable.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Averted when utilizing the Light Arrows against bosses that can be hit by them: With the exception of Ganon they all go down in just one or two hits. And unlike the original game, the randomizer may very well give you the Light Arrows early enough in the game to be used against most or all of these bosses. The only trouble is whether or not you have the magic meter...
• Convenient Questing: May be played straight depending on the seed, but probably won't be, as item locations are spread out all over the world and there's no guarantee that an item needed to access an area will be found anywhere near the area in question.
• Couch Gag: Ganondorf will have a random line right before giving the Light Arrow hint, such as talking about taking over Lon Lon Ranch or somehow not realizing that Sheik is Zelda despite this being after he captured Zelda right as she took off the Sheik disguise.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Provided you have the object in question (and ammo if necessary) to defeat a particular boss, when you've got Nayru's love, you cannot be damaged, so you cannot lose. Can get ridiculous when you have weapons you shouldn't have. For instance, using Light Arrows and the Biggoron Sword against Phantom Ganon.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Averted in many cases; dying at bosses who are far away from their dungeon's entrance is almost always a massive setback. However, played straight in certain other cases:
  • It's sometimes advantageous during races to take intentional deaths if you don't have Farore's Wind, because it places you at the room where you entered a dungeon, which can be faster than backtracking or warping out of some dungeons, especially if you don't have the warp to the entrance in question yet.
  • Intentionally causing a void-out (by jumping back under the exit door as it's closing) is often expected in Dampe's grave, as the only normal way out requires using the Song of Time, when the player might not have either the song or an Ocarina yet.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Being proficient with Deku Sticks (which isn't too hard to do) is like having Biggoron Sword as a child. It has comparable reach and jump attacks make short work of most child bosses, but the only downside is that they break with each hit and you don't carry many of them. Before acquiring the Kokiri Sword as a child, they are excellent sword replacements, but until you get a capacity upgrade, you will likely not be able to make it completely through a dungeon without some other way of damaging enemies.
  • Although the Hammer is a rather awkward weapon, it actually deals as much damage as the Biggoron Sword (i.e., level three). If you don't get a sword early on in the game, getting the Hammer is often just as good or better, although it's much shorter range. The Hammer also takes awhile between attacks, though, and its hitbox is strange, so players who haven't used it as a weapon before may take a while to get used to it. Learning to use it effectively can be a massive help in the randomizer.
• Disc-One Nuke: There's nothing stopping the randomizer from placing Biggoron Sword or powerful late game magic spells right at the start of the game, allowing the player to plow through the weak early game enemies with ease. However, having a spell doesn't mean you have the magic to use it. But when you do, and you have Nayru's Love, bosses become trivial.
• Follow the Plotted Line: While the ultimate goal of defeating Ganon still makes sense (assuming you're not playing Triforce Hunt), the path you have to take to get there is almost guaranteed to be very weird. Why would Mido have Din's Fire in a random chest in his house? Why is the Song of Time hidden underwater in Lake Hylia? Why did this merchant just agree to sell me a huge rupee (200) for the price of 25? Who knows, but if you gotta do all those things then you better go do it!
• Guide Dang It!: The randomizer can seriously test even the most devoted Ocarina of Time fan's knowledge of the game, sometimes in ways the vanilla game never does. For instance, did you know that you DON'T need the spiritual stones OR the Ocarina of Time to open the Door of Time as a child? Despite what the cutscene implies, the only thing required is the Song of Time. Similarly, did you know that you don't need all medallions to enter Ganon's Castle under normal settings? The rainbow bridge will spawn with just the shadow and spirit medallions, as well as the Light Arrows (admittedly, the most common settings change this to have the rainbow bridge spawn with all medallions and no light arrows). There are a couple of dozen similar bits of "knowledge" - including obscure ways to access specific checks (or, in an entrance randomizer, exits/entrances to an area) - that the game will consider in logic and a player may need to know to finish a randomizer seed.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Adult Link MUST use the Master Sword, but nothing is stopping Child Link from accomplishing everything without equipping (or even finding) the Kokiri Sword, provided he has enough Deku sticks.
• Infallible Babble: Gossip Stones always tell you where to go, either which medallion is hidden in which dungeon, or which areas contain progression items, or even which items are gated behind bosses.
• Instant-Win Condition: In Triforce Hunt, your goal is to find a certain number of Triforce pieces randomly scattered across the game world. Once you find the required number you are instantly teleported to the final boss.
• Level Editor: Of sorts. The official randomizer website features the Plandomizer, which lets the user design their own handcrafted version of the game using the same variables as the randomizer itself.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: A possible outcome in Triforce Hunt mode, if you manage to find all the Triforce pieces you need without fighting any of the bosses.
• Not Completely Useless: The Blue Fire Arrows randomizer option allows the Ice Arrows, which had a similar status in the Vanilla game, to also melt red ice in the Ice Caverns...in the event you somehow get the Bow, Magic, and the Ice Arrows before any of the multiple bottles.
• Now, Where Was I Going Again?: Can easily happen when you have over 100 unique item locations to check and dozens of unique items to find, many of which help you gain access to more locations. Keeping track of which locations you have and haven't checked and which items give you access to which new locations is very important to ensuring a good run. This is taken up to eleven in modes such as Keysanity and the Entrance Randomizer. Fortunately, the third-party item trackers are a godsend to help combat this, including some which keep track of what locations you have access to with your current inventory. Some of these trackers, such as EmoTracker, even allow you to save your input so you won't lose track of your progress if your computer loses power for some reason.
  • This is particularly likely to happen if you haven't played a seed for more than a day or two. If more than a week goes by, you might as well just start over from scratch, unless you took really detailed notes.
• Reward from Nowhere: All places where Sheik appears do not have him/her actually appear, and instead, Link just receives the item from mid-air. Items received during any cutscene are learned this way.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • Aside from the fact that the randomizer inherently breaks the sequence of the original game, it's actually possible to sequence break the randomizer itself by circumventing the built-in logic it operates by. This is usually accomplished by exploiting glitches to get to areas you normally aren't able to reach without a specific progression item. When you acquire an item in this way before the logic expects you to the item is said to be "not in logic", which can be used to predict the locations of other items (for instance, you can get an item from a person sitting on a roof in Kakariko Village which normally requires you to have the hookshot by side-hopping at a specific angle as Child Link from the top of the Kakariko Watchtower). This being said, the randomizer allows you to account for these glitches, and to allow for this kind of sequence breaking to be considered in-logic. The game also makes sure to question whether you want Bombchus to be in-logic for bombs or not.
  • The game can require you to pseudo-sequence break, particularly in entrance randomizer, by accessing locations via unorthodox pathing. For instance, the game may expect you to access the Fire Temple from upper Death Mountain Crater by jumping down onto the platforms immersed in the lava, then longshotting over onto the wooden bridge to the temple entrance. Similarly, if dungeon entrances are shuffled, the game's expected pathway to Desert Colossus can be going partway through Spirit Temple, then exiting out the door behind either of the Iron Knuckle Minibosses and jumping off the Colossus hands. Arguably the rarest and most unorthodox of these can require the player to set Farore's Wind inside the central column of the Water Temple, then raise the water to its highest level before using Farore's Wind to return into the column; doing so provides a way to access the skulltulla in that room without the longshot, which may be required for progression in skullsanity runs.
• Skippable Boss: Out of the two types of Boss Prizes, Medallions and Spiritual Stones, only the Medallions are guaranteed required to finish the game under normal rules. As such it's often the case that one or more of the three Spiritual Stone bosses are skippable. The Stones may be required if Zelda tosses a required item into the Hyrule Castle Moat, or if the Deku Theatre Mask of Truth prize is needed. However, even if the Stones themselves aren't required there's always the possibility that one or more of the Stone bosses will drop a required item along with their Stone, thus making them non-skippable anyway.
• Sidetrack Bonus: Occasionally you will end up in a situation where you either already have all items needed to beat the game^note aka "Go mode" or at least know where all items you need are located^note aka "Know mode", in which case checking any other remaining item location is unnecessary. But even then, sometimes it can be worth it to go slightly out of your way for the off chance of finding an extra item that, strictly speaking, isn't required, but would nonetheless be very helpful. This most commonly happens in search of Nayru's Love, which greatly increases your survivability in certain boss fights and especially the fight against Ganon, but can also be done to find the Biggoron Sword upgrade, 2x Magic Meter, or Defense Upgrade.
• Silliness Switch: Can be invoked through the use of various optional settings. The randomizer has a wide variety of custom character shades to choose from, some sillier than others. Background music and sound effects can be shuffled as well. The option to change the game's color palette often leads to ridiculous color combinations. Then there's the implications of the entrance randomizer, which throws the laws of three-dimensional space out the window resulting in such ridiculous scenarios as the door to a small house leading into Ganon's Castle, or two entrances to the same building leading to vastly different locations, and so on.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: May be played straight or averted depending on the seed: Sometimes you'll be tasked with defeating the bosses in roughly ascending order of threat level while receiving gradually stronger equipment as you go; other times you'll be stacked with the strongest gear and plentiful hearts before you fight even the first boss; other times you'll be forced to take on the toughest bosses at the start of the game and then work your way down the difficulty curve. Though it should be mentioned that the randomizer is naturally weighted toward playing this somewhat straight for the simple reason that the tougher bosses generally require more items to reach and thus are less likely to become available before the easy ones - unless boss shuffle is enabled, in which case all bets are off.
• Starter Equipment: Is usually the same as in the original game (which is to say, literally nothing but the clothes on your back), but you can enable the option to start off with the Deku Shield (if it isn't being sold in a shop someplace), Sticks, and Nuts. The Plandomizer gives you the option of starting Link off with any equipment of your choosing.
• The Three Trials: Usually subverted. Although there are always three Spiritual Stones to collect that enables you to acquire the item Zelda tosses into the Castle Town Moat (the titular Ocarina of Time in vanilla), that item usually isn't required to beat the game. In the event that it is, however, this trope is played somewhat straight. Very rarely will you need 3 Stones to either enter Ganon's Castle and/or defeat Ganon himself.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • Generally averted thanks to the built-in logic, but particularly in earlier versions of the randomizer you would occasionally encounter a seed where some unforeseen combination of circumstances rendered the game unwinnable, at least without the help of glitches. The developers are always hard at work to improve the logic with each new version to account for these circumstances but there's always the possibility that something slips through the cracks.
    • Mostly, though, key logic is coded to assume players will use their keys in the worst possible order. As an example, the central chest in Gerudo Training Grounds is behind seven locked doors, but since there are also two locked doors on the other side of the maze, logic will require nine keys to be available to reach the central chest.
  • The No Logic option, on the other hand, does what you would expect: The randomizer will place items entirely randomly with no regard for whether the game can actually be completed or not. If you try to play the seed as normal without relying on glitches and exploits it very likely won't be, but since the game is so absolutely riddled with Good Bad Bugs it's actually possible for an experienced player to get around almost any obstacle the seed throws at you, even if you'll spend an awful lot of time clipping through walls and the like.
    • There's a possibility of a Catch-22 situation in No Logic, such as the Shadow Temple Boss rewarding the Shadow Boss Key, or Volvagia rewarding the Megaton Hammer, where there's no way to even glitch around it.
• Wallet of Holding: Exaggerated compared to the original game: The randomizer lets you carry up to 999 rupees at once, instead of merely 500, but you have to find the Tycoon's Wallet to do it. This is a particularly useful change, especially for completionists, because you never know how much certain items in the stores will cost if you're playing Shopsanity (though it's always less than 500).
• You Fool!: Ice Traps obtained via an event will have the game helpfully inform you that "You are a FOOL!"