There are a lot of Moments, but the one we always point to when we wanna elucidate simply is the Couple's Mask quest, particularly the ending.

There's a lot about the game we ruminate on... it's just an immensely weighty and meaningful journey, particularly for the intended demographic.

Oh, very interesting. Esp considering how the masks came to be. The song of healing scenes still speak to us.

Honestly, after living through the original console wars and seeing the poles shift on realism vs stylization (to the point "stylization is better" is becoming a truism in danger of pendulum backlash), we're less worried about that setting in culturally. Doom is doing better than ever, for example.

We do NOT miss the damned arrow controls and have immense respect for the us that got good at sniping Takkuri from so far away it was out of culling range out of pure spite and resentment for getting got and losing our money

Hell yeaaaaaah. We'd hear more of that inspiration if you ever cared to share sometime.

We can't perfectly replicate our experience because we'd have to set up a mall kiosk to play it on for 3 months, then build a small rental store to rent the cart to ourselves repeatedly before owning it.

That reason is also why we contemplate nostalgia; our view is just as localized. Would be curious if someone who didn't grow up with the games can perceive that sense that the game is more expansive in the original fidelity.

There's a real ship of theseus deal there, for sure. For one, you can't remaster something without also applying the trappings of an artist to the job, if only because your ear has preferences and a context it grew up in. So there is a zeitgeist being applied, in so many small ways.

Effects like the ghost images used all over MM hit way harder, too. Contemplating doing an original MM run while tripping sometime, hm. Would be appropriate, too, game is important to us.

We'd even add the framerate to that list. It adds charm to claymation, it adds something here. The whole reason we're contemplating this is how surprised we were that Bottom of the Well's Deadhand recaptured something other than tedium when we watched it play out with full crust.

People grasp this pretty intuitively when it comes to "crispiness" of the texture filtering in Doom sourceports, but they usually leave it at "muddy" rather than examine the downstream effects on something like Zelda which is trying to impress a whole coherent world on you.

We don't even rank OoT all that highly these days, but the N64 titles had an unnerving vibe that MM perfectly exploited to become (probably) our favorite Zelda. It's easy to chalk that up purely to art direction/writing, but the original low-fi context is inseparable from the notion of stylization.