Here's a comparative of the Oot Hyrule Castle versus the Super Smash Bros. 64 stage. They actually look more or less the same with a few small changes.
Here’s a shot looking straight down through the ground. That ball down there is actually the sun shining up through a black plane while it drifts back to the horizon. I never thought about it until I saw this. I guess I just assumed that he sun appeared/loaded at the horizon and floated across the sky, disappearing at the other horizon where it was gone until it loaded again. But apparently it’s always there, continually rotating around the skybox in the same sense that the real sun appears to work.
There’s typically not much to see in the dungeons because you’re inside rooms with solid walls and a ceiling, so you can’t fly over the tops of the walls and look beyond. But the Forest Temple has some open air cloisters so I tried those areas out.
I found a duplicate elevator of the one on the first chamber of the temple, just floating there behind the walls. No clue about this. Could be beta. Could be a glitch but again, I’ve never seen glitches like this in this game. Stuff doesn’t seem to move around and appear in weird places. It just doesn’t appear at all if anything.
There’s also this water texture that is only visible as the water surface in this well. Yet there’s a ton of extra extending beyond the wall and into oblivion. I can also stand, walk and climb on invisible surfaces all throughout this area. I even found an area that injures Link when he walks on it. It makes little flames appear on his feet which is what happens when he walks on lava. For being outside the playable realm, there’s sure a lot of constructs here. Was this supposed to be a playable area or was it just a dumping ground for unused code?
One thing I thought was interesting was all of the instances where some object has to be recreated in several different areas as to appear further away or closer. This might constitute creating a flat bitmap image for something that’s really far away. For closer things, they seem to make simplified mockups. When I fly up to investigate, I often find hilariously large size discrepancies between the backdrop mockup version and the actual version.
Here’s the windmill. True size on top. Mockup on bottom (as viewed from the graveyard.)
The Lon Lon Ranch silo. This one’s REALLY bad. Like the Stonehenge prop from This is Spinal Tap bad.
Looks like they got Death Mountain about right though. (That speck in the air just above the peak is Link.)
Here’s a nice pullback shot to show the entirety if Bongo Bongo. Seeing this actually makes him more creepy to me.
The interesting thing about this boss fight is that you don’t enter the main room and immediately get locked in. You enter through a hole in the floor of a smaller chamber high above. So at any point during the fight with the levitation cheat on, you can just fly back up through the hole and leave.
I found a gossip stone tucked behind the roots of the Deku Tree which means it’s not accessible by conventional means at any point, young or old. Could be beta. Whatever it is, it’s sloppy because it’s not hidden that well but neither is it simple to get to. There’s another gossip stone on the tree’s right which I’d think would make this one pointless but I don’t know.
I can’t even begin to describe what I did in order to get in this completely empty shop in frozen Zora’s Domain but let’s just say it was an accident that happened while trying to do something else. I wish I could make a gif of this because it’s bizarre. Link is falling sideways into the background. If I hold down the levitate button, he rises headfirst toward the camera. At some point when he gets close enough, he does a 180 and begins going back into the background. So basically he “falls” and “rises” along this invisible U-shaped track on its side.
The levitation cheat also works in dialogue and cutscenes which makes them more fun. It even works in flashbacks. What the hell? This is interesting because it shows that throughout the whole game, no matter what’s happening on screen, you are always seeing in game models. The Link you see almost get trampled by Zelda fleeing the castle is the very same Link model that you control. Today, (and even back then on the Playstation since it had video capabilities,) your cutscenes are basically like watching a movie that was created in a vacuum. There is no direct in game content in them typically. Everything is recreated and staged with better looking models and graphics. This is probably more of a testament to the limitations of the N64 than anything. Not to say that it detracts or looks bad…
If you fly over the wall in the graveyard as young Link, you can see the pit that leads to Dampe’s tomb (black strip on the left of the map) even though there’s no headstone there and the ground above it looks normal. If you fly in the hole from under the ground, you go to the tomb and you can race Dampe’s ghost for the hookshot like normal… just as young Link. So yeah, you can go in a tomb that
hasn’t been built yet and race the ghost of a guy that’s not dead.
