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.
Maybe I’m getting to be an old head but it’s OoT for sure
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
Link to the Past is how I discovered Zelda.
Never got to play it through as a kid, but then we got OOT when N64 came out. There’s never gonna be a game I’ll have better memories from.
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.
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, clueles 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.
Oracle of ages and seasons were me childhood.
Link to the Past. Partially the nostalgia hit, but even going back and playing it today just feels good IMO.
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. :)
Same here. A Link to the Past feels like it defined Zelda games for me. OoT too.
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.
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.
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.
There was nothing quite like when your parents finally let you get another game so you brought home majoras mask and read the booklet thoroughly on the dive home, then after getting control of link again after what felt like centuries to an impatient child and seeing him do flips and shit up the tree stumps
Twilight Princess is the perfect LOZ game
Ouff, this is difficult.
To me it’s a very close call between:
- Majora’s Mask (atmosphere, inventiveness with the loop, boss battles)
- Link’s Awakening (first self-owned game, lots of memories, also that nerve-wrecking final battle with forms after forms after forms)
- Tears of the Kingdom (the way they hid the third world until release, the grand atmosphere, the whole thing around the Master Sword)
Majora’s Mask probably wins. But it’s a really close call.
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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My favourite is Link’s awakening, but there are a lot of great games in the franchise.
