What has happened to Zelda this generation?

[S.Peelman]

Seems like a thread where I should say something useful.

I'll start with, given all the criticism here, by saying I personally liked Spirit Tracks a lot. It's a good game with good ideas and good dungeons and locations. Before the HD remaster of The Wind Waker, I thought the former was actually better than the latter. I'd put them both right in the middle of the ranking of best games. A Link Between Worlds is equally good, I'd even put it a spot higher up, but it did have some things I didn't care for.

Besides the renting system, I agree with OP that it's overworld was disappointing. I however, only really had a problem with Lorule. It makes sense for the Hyrule part of the overworld to be exactly the same as the one in ALttP, because the game is a direct sequel. One of the few in the series, and this one is also supposed to take place in the same location. That's okay by me. The Dark World in ALttP however, was supposed to be the Sacred Realm, which is something different than Lorule supposedly, so yes, I agree that should have been different. It's a problem with the game itself though, and doesn't make it less of an original entry for me.

To the topic at hand though, in general I'm fine with how this gen goes Zelda-wise. The games they've remade/remastered were 13, 11 and 15 years old. That's old enough to give them some extra attention for a generation and they've really done a wonderful job at them all, making them feel fresh yet retaining the magic that made them great in the first place. One original on handheld and one on home console is okay, that's happened before in the SNES/GameBoy era, and the GameCube/GB Advance era is questionable enough with should-be-spin-off-Four Swords and Twilight Princess which is more often than not associated with Wii instead.

There was also the ALttP remaster and NES Zelda ports on GBA, and the OoT, MM and NES Zelda ports to GameCube on the Collector's disc. The GameBoy Color the generation before that also had one remaster of the two handheld games (Link's Awakening DX, with the original game being the Oracle duo).

If anything, I'd say we were just spoiled last gen, probably due to the giant success of both Wii and DS, that we got four truly original Zelda games in one gen, as well as spin-offs for both systems. This gen, we're just going back to business as usual.