As a lifelong fan of the franchise, I felt it pertinent to the fandom to have a space dedicated solely to talking of, about and around it. With the latest game, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom all set to come out this Friday, and having finally caved and pre-ordered both it and the Collector’s edition guide, I believe this space would prove most useful to those wanting to discuss both it, and other titles/ topics therein.
I look forward to picking up my copy from Best Buy and having the game prove me wrong as while I didn’t outright hate The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I consider myself more of a dungeon-esque Zelda fan and the very open-world nature of the game never took. The weapon degradation didn’t seem to stick with me as well.
As always, I hope you have a great day and I look forward to this topic blossoming.
I’m a lifelong Zelda fan also! I count myself lucky that I fall on the other side of the spectrum and I didn’t mind Breath of the Wild’s lack of emphasis on dungeons, and loved its open world. That said, I really do hope Tears of the Kingdom expands on dungeons. After seeing how Elden Ring worked massive dungeons into its open world so seamlessly, it’s going to be difficult to swallow a new adventure game that doesn’t offer a variety of cool dungeons to discover and explore.
Speaking generally about Zelda, I think my top three favorites are Majora’s Mask, Breath of the Wild and Link’s Awakening. But with only a few exceptions (I don’t like Zelda II at all unfortunately) I think they are all enjoyable games.
I would have to agree with your sentiment on the dungeons. I didn’t play Elden Ring but I heard they were quite good. I want more variety other than the puzzle dungeons we were given, which were neat but I found actually getting to them to be the better part of them personally.
When it comes to my favorites, I would have to say in no specific order: Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker, A Link to the Past, A Link Between Worlds, and Majora’s Mask. The only one I really didn’t care for was Skyward Sword. It was a mixture of its motion controls, poor usage of stamina, and the visuals. I’ve seen that there are quite a number of dungeons in it that were decent, but when mixed with recurring, annoying bosses, and the tutorial sword that was Fi, I would rather not go through it again.
Yeah the lack of variety in BOTW’s shrines really stood out to me in my most recent playthrough. Once I maxed out my Stamina meter, I pretty much stopped doing them altogether, since I was just playing for the main quest at the time.
I agree about Skyward Sword. I didn’t totally dislike the motion controlled sword combat, actually, but I really disliked how everything relied on motion controls. Flying felt like a mess because of it, and I think that alone sapped the Sky of fun. The dungeons are definitely the best thing about the game, there’s some really creative ones in there. I don’t find the first half of the game to be so bad, but in the latter portions where you have to trudge through reused environments and bosses, it gets old quite fast. I played it most recently when the remaster came out a few years ago, and getting to the end of the game is an experience I can only describe as “hate-playing”.
A while back, one of my ideas was to try to beat every Zelda game
I’m currently working on Skyward Sword and have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it thusfar. Just finished Dungeon 3 and dusted a lady’s house; that was nice
I didn’t care for Breath of the Wild [never finished] but considered giving it another try when I’m older
BotW always felt like a very intricate tech demo more than anything. The foundation for many good ideas were there but it ultimately felt like it didn’t manage to really take them anywhere. There’s so much potential in the game’s design so I’m really hoping TotK manages to be the game they likely wanted to create in the first place. I still love BotW though and it’s actually one of the two 3D Zeldas I actually enjoyed and finished, the other being Twilight Princess. Try as I might, I can never get past the first few hours of 3D Zeldas and simply opted to watch other people who enjoy them play through them instead. Huge fan of pretty much every 2D Zelda though.
That is how I felt about Breath of the Wild too. I don’t hate it, and don’t even dislike it, but what it did surprised me and wasn’t what I expected or wanted out of the next title. I played Twilight Princess at least 4 times, on both the Wii and GameCube and after that, I craved more and felt a bit of disappointment with Skyward Sword and with BOTW, felt it again but not in the same regard.
I liked being able to just meander around and really take it all in. The apocalyptic environment and storyline really lended itself well to creating a Zelda/ Fallout atmosphere, which is a weird crossover but one I saw while playing.
I felt like the dungeons were afterthoughts instead of focuses, the weapon degradation system was not implemented properly or balanced at all, and world was too empty after a while of playing. I hope that Tears of the Kingdom can take my criticisms or at least some of them and run with them. It doesn’t hurt that this game is not a port as well and solely developed for the system which should help it avoid any performance issues that could crop up and have with other games in this generation.
What’s funny to me is that I always felt like the original Legend of Zelda was a little apocalyptic too. Hyrule had no real sense of civilization other than people hiding from monsters inside caves. BOTW really recaptured that for me, It was a little nostalgic to see such a lonely version of Hyrule. Emptiness isn’t necessarily a bad thing to me, it’s just a creative decision that some games pull off well and others don’t. I enjoyed BOTW for the sandbox experience of moving from objective to objective more than anything. It’s such a serene and peaceful game to me.
Seems like Tears of the Kingdom might really make BOTW feel obsolete, though. Looks like they took the skeleton of BOTW and fleshed it out with a ridiculous amount of things to do. Hope that ends up being the case and that it’s not just a tease!
I felt the same way. I also liked how you just appeared with no sense of where to go, or what to do other than visit a cave if you wanted to.
I felt a bit nostalgic while playing BOTW as well for those reasons, but after a while, it grew to more boredom. I have grown quite fond of the Liminal Space trend when it appeared years back and that has made me appreciate the world they created a bit more, but I still wish they would’ve done more with it. I felt a lot of teases here and there but some of it being unfinished and never explained. Take the Forgotten Temple and how beautiful and well-crafted it is, only to be a holding place for armor that you may or may not be able to collect depending on how many of the shrines your completed. That whole area amongst others felt unfinished. I’m hoping that Nintendo can take what worked in BOTW and really strive to do more with it if that makes sense.
All of those things contribute to why I love the game. I love the shrine approach and am happy there aren’t a set number of large dungeons that force you through specific progression. I love breakable weapons and love the way they are balanced contributing to a very fluid combat style that feels flexible and empowering. And I love that there are wide open spaces that I can explore that mimic the fact that our own world is far more open empty space than it is inhabited because humans congregate in condensed locations around resources. Thus I love that there’s nothing but stretches of land with the odd traveller, or herd of horses, or one menacing Lynel every once in a while.
While I agree to an extent, it still feels like some of these things could still have been fleshed out far more while still keeping that atmosphere and sense of freedom intact. I also enjoyed the shrine puzzles alot to the extent where it started becoming disappointing when encountering my umpteenth combat shrine that wasn’t any different from the previous combat one instead of a puzzle one. It would have helped if they had included enemy variety or combat challenges similar to that of the Sword Trials, but it was always just a small guardian. I really hope they put more emphasis on puzzle shrines as the new powers beg to be experimented with in creative ways. The weapon durability system seems to also make much more sense in TotK now as it looks like you’ll be making your own weapons.
On a different note, I recently watched a small favorite streamer of mine play Twilight Princess blind and man that game is just wonderful. It honestly baffles me how so many people back then tried to gaslight (and still do) people into thinking this game was the “worst Zelda”. It has such a great art direction and great cast of characters you encounter and interact with. The final fight with Ganondorf, together with the incredible soundtrack, still gives me goosebumps and is easily the most memorable fight in the series for me. Even if Twilight Princess is on the weaker side of the series as people like to claim, and even though I personally couldn’t get into most of the 3D games, I feel each game does such a great job of standing out from each other and excel at what they want to do that trying to argue which is better or worse is a moot point.
Twilight Princess’s only faults to me is that it’s on the easy side and some of the items are extremely situational. But it really is one of my favorites in the series for sure. I still think it has the best ending of any Zelda game, and Midna is in my list (If not my #1) of favorite characters in the series. I really want to get around to replaying it, because it’s been ages since my last playthrough.
They did vary in difficulty, however and with that the strength, attacks and weapons of the guardians changed.
I don’t really think anything can be the worst, because everyone has different tastes. But I do think Twilight Princess is one of my least favourite. Although I like some of the art direction, I don’t enjoy the aesthetic overall. I dislike the turn to increased realism and much prefer Wind Waker or BotW. I like Wolf Link and Midna, but I just find the game feels like an attempt by Nintendo to deliver the opposite of Winder Waker because of mixed to poor initial reception of that game among fans.
Agreed. They all have strengths and weaknesses and each appeal to different people differently.
I played Twilight Princess around when it came out and this is the first time hearing that there are those that consider it the worst game in the franchise. That kind of blows my mind, and not just because it’s my favorite in the series. I can definitely understand those that prefer the more whimsical visuals and so in turn don’t care for the TP aesthetic (heh). Beyond that though, I can’t pinpoint how it could possibly earn the title of “worst Zelda game.”