Skyward Sword I didn’t give a fair swing. Largely because of Twilight Princess.
Celda was a real kick in the nuts, and I actually liked the art style, it’s that the overly large and convoluted dungeons were boring and repetitive. The game overall felt really slow. I almost quit early on because of this BS stealth dungeon which pretty much forced you to play the game even more slowly: the biggest obstacle is impatience.
Twilight Princess... It was drab, the whole thing was a mash of dark green, grey, and brown. While the art style has been compared to Ocarina of Time and Majorca’s Mask, this isn’t at all the case - those games were much more colourful, and the design was snappier - dungeons were still a slog on N64, but not nearly as bad as TP, they even made you do an obstacle course to get to the dungeons in TP.
Anyway, by the time I got to Skyward Sword I had little enthusiasm for the franchise. It did have positives, but the controls bothered me.
Breath of the Wild not only saved the franchise, but it revolutionized it and brought it to commercial heights not even dreamed of before. Breath of the Wild is the Zelda game I wanted to play 25 years ago, and certainly what has been needed since Ocarina of Time. Rather than the even sloggier clones of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
