I've actually heard mixed things about Zelda CD-I. Seems some people actually enjoyed it and thought it was a good challenge.

I've never played it myself. I've seen the horrible cutscenes, but ignore. those cutscenes and I hear the game isn't bad.

The youtube poops for the cd-i games are great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZL6YHLwn9M&list=RDtZL6YHLwn9M

I have the CDi Zelda games, and the first two do not suck at all. In fact they were praised at the time of their release.

The side scrollers were decent, but the CDi controller held it back and the animated cutscenes were horribly hilarious.

Zelda's Adventure was a victim of bad game design, but I would hardly call it unplayable. It is the worst of the 3 however (and the most rare).

I feel like the first two games would have been fine with a better control scheme, which Nintendo could have seen to. The cutscenes would have likely been replaced with text, similar to Adventure of Link. They did greenlight the games afterall, Nintendo had the power to make them change things.

Zelda's Adventure would have never existed. It would have been an entirely different game, a much better one, had Ninty gotten their hands on it. I think at this point, Nintendo just did not care when they greenlit the game. CDi was already on its way out anyway and many people forget this one exists.

Funny thing is when they met for a progress report, Miyamoto actually liked the first two games (which were made side by side and released the same day as one another).  Considering that they were competition though, I doubt Nintendo was willing to spend any extra resources to make the games better, so long as they did not cross a certain line with the characters.

You have to remember the first two Zelda games were well recieved at the time.  High review scores and all.  They are not crappy games (the first two), the CDi was a crappy console with a janky controller.

Nintendo had nothing to do with developing the games, all they did was make sure Phillups did not release anything that would tarnish the image of the IP at the time.  Like if Link screwed Zelda in the game, they would not have greenlit the game.  Other than that, Nintendo did not interfere.

Nintendo had more of a hand in these games than people realize, they could have prevented them from being released if they wanted to.  Given the sticky court situation and making amends for a sour business deal, it probably was not worth it to push things too far and so they allowed for creative freedom so long as certain lines were not crossed.