Media in Review: Ocarina of Time - Master Quest
I'd like to have a stronger opinion of the game than "well that sure exists" but uh... I'm not sure I can. Most of its dungeons ideas are thoroughly whatever and at best recreate all the problems of the original (looking at you Shadow Temple) and at worst just strip out half the dungeon's puzzles, rendering huge chunks of it completely pointless or optional (Fire, Water, Ice Cavern).
Every so often something genuinely clever slips through, and it's a reminder of how much better this could have been had it not been gutted when they decided to make Majora's Mask instead. Most of the child dungeons are actually pretty good, and Spirit has some genuinely interesting ideas, even if you would never see them unless you went out of your way to go see all the optional rooms. The game as a whole is just completely hamstrung by the idea being that they could only change actors and not any geometry, although that understandably starts trending toward "remake" territory rather than "romhack".
But that's the point, right? Why does this exist if not to do something interesting with the dungeons? I understand that this was never going to get the resources it needed to be a full release, nor would I expect it to given the circumstances that it originally came about in. But Nintendo went back to that well not once, but twice - once for the Wind Waker pre-order bonus, and again as part of Ocarina 3D. They've had opportunities to do something with MQ and every time they've turned away. I get that they don't want to essentially design 8 new dungeons for a throw-in bonus mode, but just about anything would have been better than what we've actually been given here.
In the grand scheme of things, MQ is fine. It's interesting to play once, and you can mix them in randos in place of regular dungeons which is a decent way to experience it, but MQ as a whole is just thoroughly whatever and isn't really worth your time.