🎮 Ocarina of Time

"Write about time."

I think back to an anecdote when the word wait comes to my mind, which usually happens during a videogame session. The story goes like this: In June 2019, I decided to borrow a friend, a small, blue-colored Nintendo 3DS. 

    The game already inside the console was nothing less than The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As a formerly devoted gamer and occasional one right now, I knew I had no time to play it; nonetheless, I told my friend than in less than a month, I could finish it—I had played when I was 8, so I thought I could pass it immediately.

    Quick disclosure before continuing: If you have not heard about the game, well, you should not be reading this. Please, go outside, find a tech store, buy a console, and play it. I know today's topic is about waiting, but...come on, at least google it!

    Continue. When you are in the middle of the story, you run into a stressful-costly challenge, a secondary character bothers you to accomplish. The main problem here is that there are no instructions to follow, nor even when to begin. The final price is a vitality heart. Very few are found throughout the game, and if you are about to fight a boss, every stuff counted.

After asking every avatar in the village next to the graveyard—yes, the trial takes place in a cemetery. You discover than a kid plays over the tombs at certain hours of the night and charges you a fee for using the shovel. Besides, this event happens some days a week, not every day.

    The funny thing about waiting is that you should pause your in-game activities to spends hours until dawn—a matter of 20 minutes or so in real life. Finally, the day I had decided to stand outside of the zone and wait, the ghost did not work. I almost forgot to mention, the kid was dead. 

    My main struggle, however, was finding the day the guy wanted to challenge me. I had been two days in a row connected, and nothing happened. When I encountered him, I talked to him and grabbed the shovel—I had to pay for every excavation—and started. Five minutes later, I ran out of coins and missed just one tomb, the one with the heart. I went immediately out of the graveyard, tried to find some rupees, and came back. The game started over.

    Without emotion to do it again, I decided to try it one last time the following day. So, I did wait, entered the zone, saw him floating, and paid for the shovel.

    "Hey you, stop, I saw you were standing outside my playground for a lot of time. What are you looking for?" The ghost said before I could make a hole. "Oh, I see, I thought you wanted to play, not to find the heart. Here you have it, I do not need it anymore."

    Amazed by how the experience was created and how life sometimes is similar, I felt that patience and wait were synonyms. The concept of having an Ocarina of Time is merely imaginative. If you think about it correctly.