Zelda Series Playthrough Wrap-Up

By -

With my Zelda series lite playthrough done and my rankings locked in I just wanted to take a bit to reflect on how I feel after sampling the series in order.  Once again, here's how the rankings shook out for me personally:
  1. A Link Between Worlds (2013)
  2. A Link to the Past (1991) 
  3. The Wind Waker (2002)
  4. Oracle of Seasons (2001)
  5. Oracle of Ages (2001)
  6. Majora's Mask (2000)
  7. Ocarina of Time (1998)
  8. The Legend of Zelda (1987)
  9. Tri Force Heroes (2015)
  10. Twilight Princess (2006)
  11. Link's Awakening (1993)
  12. The Minish Cap (2004)
  13. Skyward Sword (2011)
  14. Spirit Tracks (2009)
  15. Phantom Hourglass (2007)
  16. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988)
The most surprising thing for me is how poorly the 3D Zelda games held up.  I enjoyed most of them a lot the first time I played them but going back to them in the greater context of the whole series made them feel clunky, slow, and just generally not as compelling.  Their 2D counterparts held up much better than I remembered and A Link to the Past completely blew me away with how great it still is.  It's one of the few games that I played through entirely, even though I decided to only do a lite sampling of the series.

Speaking of which, I'm happy I ended up tackling the series that way.  If I had committed to playing through and beating all these games I know I would have gotten bored and given up somewhere along the way.  A lot of them just don't hold up to my modern gaming standards, even if I loved them at the time.

Looking at my list, at this point I would only willingly replay the top five games on there.  I would still recommend a lot of the others to people if I knew their taste in gaming and knew they hadn't played some of the classics but there are also a few I will always steer people away from.

In a way this series playthrough was kind of weird for me.  My Final Fantasy series playthrough reaffirmed my love of that series and how great it is.  This Zelda playthrough has shown me how amazing a few of the games in the series are but it's also brought to light that I really don't like a lot of the games as much as I thought I did.

Before this I was considering someday, maybe, getting a Triforce tattoo.  Now I'm definitely not going to do that.

Overall, this was a fun project to tackle and I'm glad I did it.  Mostly it's just made me excited to see what they do with Breath of the Wild when it comes out next year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latest Board Gaming

By -
Image
Besides video games I also regularly play board games when I'm hanging out with people face to face.  My brother, my wife, and I end up playing a lot of 3 player board games, but sometimes we get other players involved too. I realized I haven't talked much about what I've been playing in the world of board games, so here goes: Ticket to Ride - We own 3 different base versions of Ticket to Ride, 2 expansion sets, and an extra map set.  We love this game.  This is the game that gets the most overall table time when I'm playing board games with friends.  It's super accessible but still holds fun for people who have been playing the game for a long time.  I recommend this as a great beginner board game for anyone. Masquerade - A hidden role game where roles are constantly switching hands.  You're limited in actions on your turn and can only take one action.  This means that a lot of the time you're not entirely sure what role you currently have.
Read more

S2E22 - E3 2017 - “Who doesn’t want to be a dinosaur?!”

By -
E3 Hype! E3 2017. Not comprehensive. Not VGNN.  Only talking about things we think are interesting enough to talk about.  You have video game news sites for the rest :) We’re talking about Press Conferences, if more news comes out throughout the rest of the week it won’t be here because we’re recording on Tuesday night! http://e3recap.com/ has been my friend Overall trends Esports being forced onto games that aren’t even out yet “Influencers” being put front and center BJ: torn on the current “influencer” boom. Feels like a bubble that’s totally disingenuous Shorter press conferences with less big game announcements Really hard to tell what is actually exclusive Microsoft “Console Launch Exclusive” Most of these press conferences would have been better pre-recorded as just a series of trailers instead of having a stage show, honestly. Updates on games we already knew existed.  This is what we get for so many years of announcing games way ahead
Read more

Games of the Year 2022: In Conclusion

By -
This running Games of the Year list has been an interesting experiment.  I decided to start this series right as we were shutting down the Geek to Geek podcast as a way to keep creatively broadcasting some gaming thoughts out into the world.  I learned a few things from sticking with it this year. The main thing I learned is... I just don't have as much desire to broadcast my thoughts out in public as I used to when I started this blog or when I started podcasting.  I still love to have in-depth discussions about current games and general geekery, but I feel less and less need to broadcast those thoughts widely.  Honestly, it's been over a decade of blogging and podcasting at this point.  It would be more surprising if my relationship with the media landscape hadn't  changed. Around mid-year I started trying to use Twitter as more of a microblogging platform to do very short quick-hit thoughts about games but didn't get much traction or conversation going which was wha
Read more