I'm guessing you had to be there for this one. ALttP is a bit of a kitchen sink game to me, where they had a lot of ideas, but didn't really care to explore most all that well. It could probably stand to cut a few dungeons, as most of them felt pretty samey. I assume it was because most were visually similar, lacked a gimmick, barely use the item you find inside, and most had simplistic sword-mashing boss fights at the end. The lack of named NPCs hurt it too for me, making me less invested in that world. I do respect it for what it was, but I prefer the direction changes that the series took with Link's Awakening. ALBW would also pretty much address most of my issues with this one.
Ocarina had pretty good dungeon theming, forces the use of the dungeon items a lot both in puzzles and the boss fights, and has plenty of memorable NPCs. The gimmick of a 3D Zelda wasn't really there for me, since I had already played other 3D Zeldas before it, but I still think it is among the better entries. I was especially surprised how well it used verticality in its design. To this day, most of our 3D games still put everything important on the floor or at eye-level, so it was weird to go back and see them be this ambitious on that front. Its successor does similar things, so I assume it's because we hadn't agreed yet on certain standards as a medium. I do think OoT peaks relatively early, and there's probably a lot I'd change about it, but I still think it's really impressive, with plenty of gimmicks I haven't seen replicated in anything else. Of these two, it easily has my support.
