Emanuar first teased the mod more than a year ago and has released other smaller projects in the meantime. The small team behind The Missing Link is led by Kaze Emanuar, who's well-known for his amazing Mario 64 mods. Nothing revolutionary, but encouraging that the developers were able to do something new with very old bits of Zelda design. A Deku scrub kept ducking my blasts and reappearing in other bushes around a small room, so I had to cover those bushes with blocks to pin him in place before attacking. Even in the first few minutes I ran into a puzzle I don't remember ever seeing in a Nintendo Zelda. It's focused on ambiance and building small puzzles around its new weapon, Link's soul-charged sword, and those soul (laser) beams it can shoot out. That's a short Zelda game, but still a hell of an undertaking for modders reverse-engineering a game. I've only played the first bit of The Missing Link, but comments from other players indicate it'll take 3-5 hours to complete. This is Spooky Zelda, with some unsettling takes on classic Zelda music, too. Or some poor kid walking into the Skultulla house in Ocarina of Time, getting freaked out, and having a nightmare that resembles this more spartan, eerier version of Zelda's woods. I can imagine a 12-year-old future goth dreaming up a darker Zelda and coming up with this. It keeps the focus tight by taking you deep into mysterious parts of the Lost Woods rather than Ocarina of Time's sweeping overworld, and it immediately sets its own vibe. Despite explaining something that really needed no explaining, The Missing Link is a very cool idea for a romhack. I guess Link will heed literally any call to adventure.
It was always an odd plot beat to start on, because out of the tens of millions of people who played Ocarina of Time, literally zero liked Navi. That story is meant to bridge the gap between Ocarina of Time and its sequel, Majora's Mask, explaining what happened between the two games and why Link is searching for his missing fairy friend, Navi, at the start of Majora's Mask. The textures and menus and so on will be familiar, but the game has its own story and locations completely separate from Ocarina of Time.
Unlike some romhacks that remix parts of a game but leave the bulk of it intact, this one is a completely new adventure built out of the bones of Ocarina of Time. The Missing Link, released in late July, is a romhack for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, first released on the Nintendo 64 in 1998.