Oh OK, I see. In my mind, adventure games are those that are focused on puzzle-solving, exploration, dialogue, and story — with little to no action. So titles like Day of the Tentacle, The Book of Unwritten Tales, Deliver Us the Moon, Return to Grace, etc. And action-adventure games take those elements from adventure and pair them with real-time combat and physical challenges — the hallmarks of the action genre.

So, Zelda is sort of the archetypal action-adventure franchise for me.

Darksiders

Lemme give you my answer like this. *sticks the Master Sword right through Ganon's chest*

It's gotta be Zelda.

The series comprises so many great games, some of which I'd count among the greatest ever made, and the overall level of quality it has maintained over nearly four decades is staggering.

The others include some excellent games too, but Zelda is on another level.

I remember back in days both reviewers and players used to label what is now known as action-adventure games as arcade adventures, being mix of skill-based gameplay of games in arcades, which were action oriented, whether it's fighting, shooting or platforming, and computer adventure games that are based on exploration and puzzle solving.

So, yes, Zelda was arcade adventure...though it did dabble with light RPG elements (apart from Zelda II that actually is action-RPG), so it's probably closer to modern crop of those games, action-pseudo-RPGs or action-RPG-lites, we really don't have name for action-adventure/action-RPG hybrids yet, like newer Assassin's Creed games, Horizon Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima, than fully fledged action-RPGs.

Zelda, Metroid, Tomb Raider, GTA are all classified as action-adventures, but do they feel and play differently, so it is natural that there are subgenres.

Witcher is in the poll because, for reasons only known to them, Eurogamer put it in the poll, and this whole thread is to see how VGC votes in that poll.

Notice that Zelda is in second place in EG poll, so, if you disregard Witcher, out of actual action-adventures, Zelda takes the lead, but then again, I have no idea how those 25% percent for Witcher would be spread across other games. My guess is that if there was GTA as an option (which is really bizarre omission, when RDR is there, and GTA is far more popular), spread would be quite different.

Zelda is very special, but Witcher and God of War are very close

God of war series. Becasue it was my first major introduction to this genre