Rank your favorite Zelda games!

[PAOerfulone]

1. Skyward Sword (Best dungeons in the series; Greatest game to ever make use of motion controls; Best Link & Zelda incarnations of the series; Ghirahim is an amazing villain and my personal favorite in the series; Skyloft is a pleasure to explore and beautiful to see. - But there are flaws. The biggest among them is the PADDING!)

2. Twilight Princess (2nd best dungeons in the series. Almost neck-and-neck with Skyward Sword's dungeons, but Lakebed Temple and City in the Sky are what bring them down for me, those places SUCKED; Love the Tolkien-esque, Lord of the Rings aesthetic, I think that style fits Zelda perfectly; Midna is the best companion in the entire franchise and it's not even close. Truly an epic and grand adventure that checks off all the check marks in the series. Definitely a Zelda fan's Zelda game.)

3. Breath of the Wild - (An absolutely, mind-blowing experience that completely shattered the bar on what the series can be and what it's capable of while still being true to what makes Zelda, Zelda.)

4. Majora's Mask - (The biggest oddball in the series, next to Zelda II; This is one of the games in the series that takes a more required taste to get into; The 3-Day Cycle can be understandably alienating, it was for me at first. But once I gave it time, got used to the game's mechanics, and started learning how to use the 3-Day Cycle to my advantage, I had an absolute blast traveling through Termina, which is still the best game world in a 3D Zelda game to date, in my opinion. Termina and the people you meet in it are a total joy, the side quests are the best in the series, and while there are only 4 dungeons, they are some of the most challenging, demanding, (and frustrating) the series has to offer. (Great Bay Temple, go fuck yourself!) While not my favorite on my list, out of the classic-styled 3D Zelda games, in my view, Majora's Mask is the best.)

5. A Link Between Worlds - (Or A Link to the Past 2.0 in a lot of ways; My favorite 2D Zelda game, this took A Link to the Past and made it smoother, crispier, and more refined while doing just enough to stick out on its own with the wall-paint mechanic and the item rental shop system with Ravio.)

6. Ocarina of Time - (The Zelda game everyone knew and viewed as the crown jewel of the franchise before Breath of the Wild came and took it; One of the pioneers of 3D gaming and a game that set a lot of standards in 1998 and one of the very few games from the PS1/N64 era that aged very well and is almost just as good today as it was back then. That is VERY hard to do and Ocarina of Time manages to do just that.)

7. Wind Waker - (Quite the divisive title when it first came out; Coming off of Ocarina of Time and the GameCube Tech Demo for Zelda, and that brief glimpse of Shiek in Melee's intro, fans were very eager and chomping at the bit to see what the first Zelda game for GameCube would look like... And then we got Wind Waker; Pretty damn hilarious to think about, but man was their backlash against the game and its art style when first revealed and it was enough to have people completely skip out on it; Damn shame too because Wind Waker was a very solid and great Zelda game; Triforce Hunt notwithstanding. And for all the shit the art style and cartoony direction received back then, that art style has actually aged very well. Look at Twilight Princess and Wind Waker on the GameCube and hold them up to today's standards and it's very different. Twilight Princess's graphics have not aged all that well. Meanwhile, Wind Waker still looks great.)

8. A Link to the Past - (An SNES classic that has also aged fairly well.)

9. Oracle of Seasons - (My personal favorite of the Oracle Games. Would love to see a 3rd Oracle game or remakes of these games in the future.)

10. Minish Cap - (Very solid game for the Game Boy Advance. I remember enjoyed the shrinking dynamic and the dungeons... And that's about it.)

11. Oracle of Ages - (While I preferred Seasons, this was still a solid 2D Zelda game.)

12. Link's Awakening - (I should specify that this is the original version of the game that I rank here. If I added the Remake for the Switch, it would be right between A Link to the Past and Oracle of Seasons. At its core was a great 2D game that was severely limited by being on the Game Boy.)

13. Legend of Zelda - (The one that started it all... And it has not aged well. What was amazing back in 1986 is now very archaic and dated. I won't be too hard on it because it WAS the first game in the series and it was very different from a lot of the games being made back then. It was revolutionary for its time. While it's well past the point where it can be considered a good game, it should be respected for what it did for gaming.)

14. Zelda II: Adventure of Link - (The biggest black sheep in the series and the hardest game in the franchise. Much like Zelda 1, this has not aged well and is very archaic and dated, but probably moreso than Zelda 1. If there are two games in the series that REALLY need and deserve a remake, it's the NES originals.)

I've never played the Four Swords games, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, or Triforce Heroes, so I can't rank those.

Last edited by PAOerfulone - on 10 October 2019