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?
Link to the Past. Partially the nostalgia hit, but even going back and playing it today just feels good IMO.
Same here. A Link to the Past feels like it defined Zelda games for me. OoT too.
Replayed it last year and it was as good as I remembered. Windwaker is my personal favourite but LTTP is so close it might as well be a tie.
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.
I am very bad at the randomizers, but that doesn’t stop me from playing them anyway. :)
LttP is the origin of the iconic gameplay style. My preference is Links Awakening which refined it a bit and introduced some fun characters. I was happy with the version on the Switch.
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.
This was the last Zelda game I played, but I couldn’t really get the hang of it since I really went into it expecting OoT 2: Eclectic Boogaloo, and OoT was really the best thing I’d seen up until then regardless of franchise. Then I saw all the cool stuff being done in later games with all the amazing tech that was being developed but I just couldn’t get around to have the time or patience necessary to sit and play anymore.
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.
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
I actually really enjoyed the size of the ocean it made me feel like I was really on a journey
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
This was the first zelda I really felt like nailed the open world feel. I had a blast playing this one with my partner.
I think my first was Majora’s Mask (I joined the N64 age late) and I’m the same. I wasn’t even committed to buying “new Zelda” until I saw they were upping the difficulty and having players be more self-reliant, and I loved it. I still can’t categorize the exact mode of fun people associate to “dungeons” compared to wide-open exploration.
Majora’s Mask is the best Zelda game. However, Wind Waker is my favorite Zelda game. The setting, art style, and musical score all combined perfectly to make a game that was both really fun and relaxing. No Zelda game since has ever matched the feeling of sailing to the Great Sea soundtrack.
I really liked Spirit Tracks.
Train gameplay was actually enjoyable for me (especially the way it got used in one of the end game fights was so cool). It was also nice that Zelda was an actual part of the game and helped solve puzzles instead of some princess locked away in a castle.
I played Phantom Hourglass much later and Spirit Tracks honestly just felt much more polished and fun.
I preferred the ship of Phantom Hourglass more to the train but I agree that Spirit Tracks felt much more polished and fun.
Except that last flute challenge which can fuck off
I really think that everyone really had trouble with the DS microphone rather than the flute challenge itself. It came pretty easily to me but I doubt I’m a particularly expert mic blower, so I can only think my mic was a fully functioning one and people like you got a much harder challenge.
Oh jeez I completely forgot about the pan flute. I’m pretty sure my DS mic was broken so those were all torture :,(
Twilight Princess. I loved the characters and the vibe, the MUSIC was something else too. On par with OOT. The snowy mountain theme was chilling.
It was not revolutionary like OOT, experimental like MM, or transformative as WW, but I feel like it was the most polished, quintessential Zelda game we got.
Now that BOTW and its squeakwal are just cash cows though, it’s sad to think we’ll never get a good old fashioned Zelda game again.
Honestly, I think Wind Waker is and I didn’t like it when it came out. The art style has grown on me over the years, the combat is satisfying without being to complicated, and the exploration is fun and unique for a Zelda game.
Wind Waker was an amazing game
Nostalgia-wise it’d be Phantom Hourglass, it’s super underrated, super fun game! But otherwise it’d be the Switch duology, they’re incredible games
Phantom Hourglass was a lot of fun, it really took advantage of what the DS can do.
My wife hated having to return to the temple repeatedly, but I enjoyed revisiting the same area and seeing the shortcuts I can take with my new items.
Also, freely drawing notes on the map was awesome.
Ocarina of Time, for sure
Game Boy Zelda is best Zelda.
I love Links Awakening due to nostalgia, but Oracle of Ages is still the longest game I’ve played (since I’ve yet to beat it). Seasons is fine but not my cup of tea, and minish cap is a bit too shaort
Never finished Ages either ! my 11yo self was too thick to get through some of the puzzles. I should try it again
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.
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 top three:
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.
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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.
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