Ocarina of Time In the 3D Version, Why Are There Two Empty Item Slots?

[Michael Heide]

Bad design, Nintendo and Grezzo! 2 empty slots could be easily filled with Goron & Zora Tunics, but these items are still present on the Gear screen.

What would be gained by assigning the red and blue tunics to item buttons? You don't take them on and off nearly as much as the iron or even the hover boots. Even worse, if a button is used for one of those two tunics, then you can't use it for anything else, unnecessarily limiting the player.

 

[BombchuPwns!]

this stuff is so confusing i still have 2 empty slots

 

[Blendercat]

Explain how I have 2, and I'm missing two bottles. All of my buttons are filled.

 

[cannavaro]

In the N64 game you had 24 items, but in the 3DS game the 3 magical arrows are included along with the Bow, and the Ocarina is not in the item section. That's 24 - 4 = 20. In the 3DS game there are 20 slots in your inventory, and 4 on the side (24 slots). And now the hover boots and the iron boots are items, so you have 20 + 2 = 22 items total, leaving 2 empty slots.

Don't ignore his perfectly fine answer for why it is like this.

 

[EternalNocturne]

Wait, never mind what I said earlier.

Read the above post.

I also found an article explaining this:

http://touriantourist.blogspot.com/2011/05/two-unknown-items-in-ocarina-of-time-3d.html

"You'll notice how the items don't have any particular order, that's the result from this system. There are twenty free spots inside the menu and four buttons. That's space for 24 items, which is they exact same number as in Ocarina of Time on the N64. But... the Ocarina is not an item inside the item menu anymore, it will be always assigned to the lower left touch button. One free space. And it seems, that the Magic Arrows work like in The Wind Waker. Which means that they are not individual items, but you'll probably just switch between the arrows by pressing R while using the bow. If you look closely, you can see colored points around the bow icon, just like in The Wind Waker. So, three more free spaces. Those free spaces are used up by the Hover Boots and the Iron Boots, which are now normal items just like the Iron Boots in The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Well done. However, there's still room for two more items. You can cleary see that on the screenshot, there are two empty spots and this savegame got all the other items."

(Here's a picture): http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Xy4tJpT2mjY/TdApU3WgJyI/AAAAAAAACLM/h9ofw6JRVvk/s1600/oot3d_menu02.jpg

 

[Justeazy]

I refuse to accept that as fact because 1: that is merely their interpretation, not the word of Nintendo (and by that I mean the company who re-developed the game for 3DS and got Nintendo's approval, not Nintendo themselves), and 2: Many Zelda fans are meticulous of our inventories, and the two extra spaces make us feel better.

This can easily be seen when playing games like Resident Evil and we spend a good few hours over the course of the game organizing our briefcases. However, in this sense, since the new inventory screen has no direct sorting, instead of having to make a dozen switches back and forth to change out one item while we also want and keep all of our not-currently-equipped items sorted the way we want, we have two spots perceived as "extra" by some that are there, in fact, so that we can always have a logical place to "put" our item X so that we have a free hand to then equip our item Y (since Jabun knows we're not magically inclined to make them teleport to each other's places instantaneously).