The Legend Of Zelda: 10 Best Intro Dungeons

Inside The Deku Tree, Ocarina Of Time's first dungeon, did for three dimensional Zelda what The Eagle did for the top-down games in the series.

Spearheading 3D gaming, the Nintendo 64 required the games giant to rethink its major franchises in order to craft games which would better suit the new platform. An open ended environment meant that Mario could do much more than just run and jump from point A to point B, while the introduction of the extra dimension gave The Legend Of Zelda series a whole host of problems not experienced by its platformer cousin.

Mario's principle attack - jumping and stomping on enemies - was facilitated by Mario's shadow helping to convey depth, but Nintendo needed to go further to adequately translate Zelda's combat mechanics for a 3D environment. Z-targeting -- which gamers take for granted now -- was revolutionary at the time, allowing Link to lock on to certain enemies and traverse around them with ease.

Inside The Great Deku Tree plays in many ways like the dungeon equivalent of Z-targeting, reinventing a familiar element of the franchise in a way suitable for gaming in the third dimension. Retaining iconic components of dungeons introduced in the series' very first game (keys, locked doors, items, boss battles), Ocarina's opening dungeon places particular emphasis on verticality, tasking players to think about the dungeon space in a new way.

Dungeons in the 3D Zelda games often require players to keep track of more information than is necessary in their top-down counterparts, and Inside The Great Deku Tree serves as a perfect introduction to the complex multi-faceted dungeon designs which have appeared in the franchise's main games ever since.