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?
Oracle of Seasons
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 favourite is Link’s awakening, but there are a lot of great games in the franchise.
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.
It’s cool to hear someone say their favorite is TP. I always felt like it was OOT on steroids. Which in my opinion is a good thing. I wish TP had gotten more than an HD port of the original. Would love to see that get a facelift for the Switch with higher polygon count and his res textures.
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.
You must have played the remake of SS. The original has its merits, but polished it ain’t.
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.
If you want to try a more “modern” Zelda game that isn’t open world, twilight princess is a huge game.
There’s also Skyward Sword but it’s way too linear for my liking. The sword swinging stuff can be pretty cool though
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.
Actually I did enjoy what little of Windwaker that I played. But I played it on an emulator and had to wipe the machine it was on so I never got past the beginning.
Probably a Link to the Past. Although I’ve only played the games in the series up to Link’s Awakening so that might change although the game would have to be pretty damn good
Wait so no ocarina?
Its next on my list!
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.
I’ve sunk more time into TotK than any of the others. I have nostalgia for OoT, TWW and TP, but their gameplay don’t hold up to BotW or TotK if you take off the nostalgia glasses.
Might replay BotW at some point.
Phantom Hourglass was my first but Spirit Tracks is my favorite. I actually really like the stylus DS controls (and it’s not even that bad using a mouse on an emulator either) but the main thing I like is the music and story. Music and story I would say are both better in Spirit Tracks than any other game in the series. It also is one of the few games in the series that you can really call a legend of Zelda. She’s there the whole time and the main story focuses on her character arc.
Just overall an amazing experience with some really dramatic moments, if I had to summarize what I like about it more than the other games in the series I’d say it’s the most “cinematic & dramatic”I love them all. But Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time will always live in my heart. As well as the original, I beat that one yearly.
Seasons and Ages. They were my childhood.
Honestly, I think the original. I know its inferior to most of the other games in most ways, but I’ve found a lot of the modern Zelda games feel pretty shallow and formulaec. Not to say they’re bad, but none of them really feel like they stand out to me either - they’re just good games. The original on the other hand, feels very different from a lot of the games since then. The world is kept a lot more foreign and hostile both in terms of aggressive enemies and in terms of tutorialization. Its makes the exploration so much more rewarding, and when you do find a new item, that much more special.
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.
