It looks like after joining Super Smash Bros. in 2001, Ocarina of Time’s Young Link hasn’t played his whole hand of moves to all the other competitors just yet! This modder has a penchant for rendering the powerful, iconic moves of Smash in Ocarina of Time’s engine to see what kind of outlandish interactions can be created. What happens when Link brings the abilities of Fox McCloud, Samus Aran and Captain Falcon to his home world? Let’s find out!
Modder notCHase is relatively new on the YouTube scene, with at least ten videos in four months as of this writing. But the exercise of their curiosity has led to a suite of hilarious modifications based on various Zelda games and other sources of inspiration. Their two most popular videos, modding the Falcon Punch and Tears of the Kingdom’s Ultrahand into Ocarina of Time, have around 150k views, as these were the mods covered by outlets such as Nintendo Life.
The Falcon Punch tool is about as comical and busted as you would expect. Any of Hyrule’s NPCs (or inanimate objects) giving you a hard time? Give them a fiery fist in return! Fox McCloud’s iconic reflector from Super Smash Bros. Melee, known as the Shine, is also featured in one of notCHase’s showcases. Holding it out auto-reflects all projectiles, and it even has a close-up hit box that allows you to approximate the advanced Melee technique “waveshining” to completely overwhelm the enemy. Samus’s arm cannon with chargeable shots is also here, but the modder uses it to… exterminate Kaepora Gaebora and force the game to play the ending immediately? Let’s just move past that.
Beyond the inclusion of other characters from Link’s crossover travels, notCHase also designed a very interesting mod that gives Link his own Smash-specific movement abilities, the double jump and aerial Spin Attack. As shown in the video (which doubles as a showcase for a translation of Revali’s Gale), the platforming potential of these extra jumps is scintillating, with many of the commenters wishing this could be its own full ROM hack or platforming-centric Zelda game, like a Hyrulean Super Mario Odyssey. The prospect is tantalizing, to be sure. This creator has also dabbled in other silly modding ideas within the confines of Ocarina of Time, such as using Ultrahand to set a homemade wagon rolling all across Hyrule in order to dump Mido into the fires of Death Mountain (yikes), and implementing Bullet Time to turn Link into an aerial combat master. The potential of modding is just astonishing these days.
