What is your favourite LOZ game? My fave is twilight princess as it was the first zelda game I played. Being it on the Wii.
What about you?
OoT for me. ALttP and Link’s Awakening were already my favorite games at the time, but OoT came out at that perfect time in my life when consoles were being made for kids my age and 3D was this mysterious, exciting new thing. To this day, I usually end up replaying it about once a year, and I suspect I’ll continue doing that until I pass on.
Link to the Past. Partially the nostalgia hit, but even going back and playing it today just feels good IMO.
If you haven’t tried them, the randomizer for LTTP is well polished and makes the game really fun for another play through!
In case anyone doesn’t know, the mobile port is incredible when you don’t have time to play a full run.
Maybe I’m getting to be an old head but it’s OoT for sure
Link’s Awakening. I played the shit out of that on GameBoy. If you knew the screen skip glitch you could break that game wide open.
Most importantly, finish the game while having Marin as a companion until the end. I’m playing the game every year cycling through the three versions and every time I get to the original version, I skip the walrus.
If you’re emulating, there’s a romhack that restores the screen warp glitch to DX.
Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The characters were more real in that game than any other Zelda. So much emotion and good music.
That’s probably the Zelda game I had the most negative reaction to. Oh, you’re going to undo all of my progress because I didn’t know how much more there was to do in this quest line before the world reset? No, I’m not going to do all of that again.
But that’s the fun of it! The game really manages to put you in a hurry if you really want to do everything you can in one cycle. Plus, my emotional atachment to the NPCs made me feel so relieved every time I went back in time and saw people living their little lives, clueless about the horrors to come
It would be one thing if I knew how much I had to do ahead of time, but until I’ve seen most of it before, I have no idea. There was some upgrade I could get only after finishing the entire goron temple, race, and some such, and I was on the final step of it when I ran out of time. I can’t do just the last step of it; I had to repeat at least the race, maybe the temple, in order to get to that spot again. I decided instead, “Nah, I’m good,” and put the game down. I respect that they tried to do a lot with a little on the development side, but it introduced tedium for me, the player, to be within those constraints.
The Wind Waker for me. At the time, the open world and sea felt so massive, and the colorful cell-shaded graphics made me feel like I was immersed in a cartoon. I played other Zelda games before, but it was the first one to hold my attention all the way to the end. To me, it’s one of those games I wish I could experience again for the first time.
Windwaker would’ve been an easy #1 for me if it weren’t so stretched out. The ocean really didn’t need to be that big, I remember many times where I was just holding forward on the boat and browsing my phone for 5 minutes.
What got me was the Triforce hunt. Nearly no guidance/signposting, constant trips back to tingle, then back to a warp point, then sail around, rinse repeat. Ugh.
They did make it less tedious in the Wii U remaster, but still, eughhghgh
Zelda is one of those things I somehow missed growing up. The only one that I ever sunk any significant time into was Phantom Hourglass. It was pretty good. I’ve tried some of the other ones but I get the sense that they are hard to enjoy if you don’t have nostalgia goggles on.
You mean the old ones or all of the series? Skyward Sword, Breath and Tears are all very polished games.
I tried BOTW. The story felt very uninteresting. Like nothing that was happening felt justified. And the gameplay just felt like Just Cause but without all the cool stuff to interact with.
BotW ruined the series. Open world, despite the promise of freedom, is a crippling set of shackles on world design. No upgrade can meaningfully interact with the world because every area has to be a potential first area. There’s no mystery of “what’s past this obstacle?” because everything has to be passable as soon as you see it. Worst of all, your reward for thoroughly exploring and completing all the optional quests? Butchering the final boss, which at full power is a highlight of the game, into the worst anticlimax of the series by removing multiple entire phases and drastically nerfing the HP of the phases that remain. The only intact phase literally can’t hit you if you just run in circles around it.
All of this wouldn’t be too bad if it was a one off, but Aonuma confirmed it’s the template for the series going forward. We’ll never see another proper Zelda game.
Breath of the Wild removed pretty much everything that made the series great. It leaves behind a meh game with some of the lore Nintendo knows will sell units.
Oof. Yeah, if you’ve only played Phantom “go back to the same temple for the tenth time” Hourglass and Breath Of The Wild with it’s almost non-existent story, I can absolutely understand the disappointment.
Phantom Hourglass was pretty disliked even by fans at the time. The touchscreen control focus and the damn ocean temple re-runs were quite contreversial.
Breath of the Wild was the series’s first attempt at open world, non-linear gameplay and is incredibly different from other games in the series. Very light on story and characters. Unfortunately they’ve confirmed open world is the planned standard going forward.
The real “core” 3D games are Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. For 2D, A Link To The Past and Link’s Awakening.
Twilight Princess is probably the most accessible for someone not super familiar with the franchise, and the least burdened by old school design decisions. It’s what I would consider the pinnacle of classic 3D Zelda. Took all the good stuff from the two N64 games (what most people seem to think are the best) and polished the hell out of it.
Until Breath of the Wild it was Ocarina of Time (I’m so original, I know /s), then BotW, and now Tears of the Kingdom improved on BotW in just about every conceivable way. I’m not much of a big completion type of gamer, despite really enjoying BotW I didn’t go for every shrine, but I definitely made the time and effort to do that in TotK. The only aspect of it I didn’t care for was that I didn’t really like going into the Depths and largely stayed above ground as much as I could (and screw Gloom Hands). Makes me excited to see where the series will go next.
My top three:
-
A Link to the Past. Basically gave the Legend of Zelda its identity, so many staple mechanics, so much lore, comes from this game. First appearance of the Master Sword, the idea of Ganondorf as a king of thieves/sorcerer before becoming a pig monster, Kakariko village. The creation myth with the three golden goddesses came from here. In fact, there’s a passage in the manual that basically reads like the design document for the next 30 years in the series, look it up. Gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, and it’s amazing how it has lasted with the randomizer community.
-
Ocarina of Time. A sequel which referred to previous entries and expanded on the lore without shitting on it. Imagine that! It’s amazing how right they got it as basically the first attempt of a game like this in 3D, even if controller technology had some evolving to do.
-
Breath of the Wild. While it does get a bit samey since there’s only so many enemies to encounter, and exploring the world will result in finding shrines or koroks, the openness with which it approaches puzzles aka “just get to the goal, we don’t care how.” I find very refreshing compared to the previous “you’re in a room with a lock and a key. Bet you can’t find the only existing solution to this puzzle” dynamic the games increasingly had.
My bottom three:
-
Skyward Sword. The artwork is charming, the soundtrack has a few gems in it but is mostly short repetitive and annoying loops, a lot of the gameplay elements are just blatantly recycled from Twilight Princess. The mysterious floating girl who flies back a distance when Link approaches to lead him somewhere would have been more effective if the Zora Queen’s shade hadn’t done it a few years earlier, and I fully expected Fi to explain the collect the light fruit games by saying “Yes Master, ‘this shit again’.” Combine that with the frankly terrible motion controls crammed in as much as possible and the “Master, I have detected a 97.3333% chance that the man you just talked to said that he lives here in town” nature of it all…fuck this game.
-
Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.
-
Tears of the Kingdom. Never before has a game been this much mile wide and inch deep. The story barely exists, there is more content in the Hudson & Rhondson’s daughter storyline than in the main story quest. There are two different crafting mechanics added to the game, plus the one from Breath of the Wild, but none are really explored because there’s no room, there’s no time. In addition to the original map, there’s the entire sky and the entire underground, both full of basically nothing. They could have gotten two games out of the concepts found in this one and explored the individual mechanics a lot more, but no. This game is a mile wide and an inch deep.
-
Old guy who has played every Zelda game there is. Breath of the Wild wins.
TOTK overtook BOTW as my favorite because there is just so much to do. It’s one of the things I loved about BOTW, and they somehow managed to cram even more into TOTK.
Before BOTW, Ocarina of Time was my favorite Zelda game.
It’s a super close second
BotW and TotK for sure. Mainly for the exploration of Hyrule in two different forms. Visually appealing as well.
LttP would be 3rd. Story and gameplay was great.
Probably unpopular, but I loved WW as well. Soundtrack is wonderful to listen to.
Gotta be Breath of the Wild, for me. Taken together with Tears of the Kingdom, the series’ storytelling and immersion has never been better, I think, and as a game, Breath of the Wild was the tighter, more-satisfying experience, overall.
Wind Waker is a veeerrrrrrry close second. I think it’s the most-polished entry in the whole series, in both categories. I’m really not sure what I would change, if given the chance.
My first was the OG Legend of Zelda on the NES, and it will always occupy a special place in my heart. I hated The Adventure ot Link because it was so different from the first one, and because I could never get past the first dark cave. I spent hours scouring the towns for a candle, and it never occurred to me that I could just go through it in the dark.
OOT was amazing getting to ride Epona and move around in 3 dimensions. The puzzles, the stories, the polygons, I think that was my favorite Zelda experience overall.
Twilight Princess was fun, and I loved Skyward Sword more than most people seemed to. To me, the Wii mechanics and the flying were worth the frustrations. But I understand why it was divisive.
Breath of the Wild had that OOT feeling of discovery to it. It was fun to play, and novel enough to keep me exploring. I haven’t played Tears of the Kingdom yet, but my son loves it so I’m looking forward to it.
I regret that I never played A Link to the Past, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, or any of the handheld games.
Breath of The Wild for me. The open world and exploration just blew me away. I wanted to just spend as much time as possible exploring that version of Hyrule.
Second is Majora’s Mask. It was so different than all the Zelda games before it and really dark. I loved the time element and really getting to know all the different npc characters.
I’ve played them all over the years. My favorite for a long time was Wind Waker, because of the feeling of freedom it gave me, so it’ll surprise no one that Breath of the Wild beats it.
Breath of the Wild is my new fave. I gotta say that the story of Tears of the Kingdom really did it for me (just absolutely sobbing at points) but since it feels like it wouldn’t have had that impact if it wasn’t for Breath of the Wild, I give it to Breath of the Wild.
(Special shout out to Link Between Worlds. Really feel like that game was fun as hell.)
Edit: Gotta be real. I don’t remember which one I played first? I think it was Link to the Past.
