Untitled

A Link Between Worlds

The Minish Cap

Majora’s Mask

Breath of the Wild

A Link to the Past

Link’s Awakening

The Legend of Zelda

Spirit Tracks

Phantom Hourglass

Echoes of Wisdom

Tears of the Kingdom

Oracle of Seasons

Oracle of Ages

Wind Waker

Twilight Princess

Ocarina of Time

Four Swords Adventures

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Skyward Sword

Tri Force Heroes

Four Swords

i expected the multiplayer zeldas to be bad, was not expecting them to be terrible. the only truly awful games here. Skyward sword I put a valiant effort into liking and it's got its high points but sadly the popular opinion is correct that it's not good.

Zelda II, as mind-numbingly hard as it is, is a game that's still a lot of fun for what it is, even if you should really just play shovel knight instead. ocarina... still not a favorite but i have to respect it. four swords adventures is fine but pretty unremarkable, as a zelda game and in general.

Twilight princess and wind waker are really about the same for me. good games with great graphics that just sort of drop the ball (tp with its dull and disconnected world, ww with its atrocious treatment of tetra). overall good though, and easy to see why they're the favorites of many.

the oracle games impressed me. really well put together gbc games that are clearly straining against the hardware but make great use of their gimmicks to make great puzzles, great bosses, and a fun interconnected storyline i've never seen before. possibly the black sheeps of the franchise, you never see these get discussed and it's a shame.

Totk i gave my big speech on already. good game, cannot compare to botw. echoes of wisdom wasn't even announced when i started this but it slots in just fine. probably the game on here i most want to replay at the moment, i don't think i appreciated some of the new steps it took for the series. great 3d platformer

Phantom hourglass and spirit tracks are two games people like to bag on but i assume they just can't handle touch controls, the poor buggers. i still think they're great. i give spirit tracks the slight edge because the stuff with zelda as a character really elevates the iffy train stuff, but they're both great

the original zelda i think holds up amazingly. people call me crazy but it's true. sometimes a game just drops you in and says "alright go get em kid", and i love it for that. if more people gave retro games a real shot they'd realize how good they are. and link's awakening is the first zelda game to really care about story, along with some fantastic dungeons and a really distinct world from the rest of the franchise. someday i'll try the remake but i really don't need to when the original is so good

i really agonized over whether botw or lttp was the better before barely settling on botw. it's razor thin there for sure. both are so good at the game they are trying to be, and both totally revolutionized the genre Majora is the biggest surprise for me, did not expect to be so struck by that game. really is the kind of story that rewires your brain a bit

in spring of 2023, I saw the approaching release of tears of the kingdom and thought to myself that despite considering myself a fan of the franchise, there was so much of it I hadn't actually played, much less finished. as i've said, before I started all this, i'd only actually finished 4 of the 19 games released at the time. of course, you don't actually need to be completely complete to be a fan, but, well, I wanted to be. and so I had the idea to sit down and play through all of them, blogging my thoughts as I went. Here I am now, having played them all, plus a couple spinoffs and the cartoon. I have to find a new series to work through, clearly!

this has definitely been a fun exercise and one I recommend to anyone who wants to try it, but I definitely have some advice I'd give now that i've done it myself.

for one, don't do it chronologically lol. that was a stupid idea from the start that is my only real regret in this process. release order is by far the best option for a project like this. you get to see the way a series evolves as it goes along, what works, what doesn't, what callbacks are being made. it gives you a better feel for the games when you can look at them as they are, not part of some lore. the zelda timeline is ultimately a bunch of nonsense anyway, we all know it

second, you really have to commit to a game when you start it. it is not a good idea to try and juggle one of these with another game at the same time. you can take breaks between games on the list, but it's much easier for the playthrough if you maintain focus. if you lose it, it's so much harder to get back into the groove, and some of the earlier zeldas being what they are, if you take a long enough break you might not have any clue what you're supposed to be doing when you get back into it. the biggest gaps in my posts are when i lost focus and couldn't get back into a game for weeks at a time.

Let's start with the good. The Zonai tech and Ultrahand stuff are phenomenal. I cannot believe just how much creativity a player is able to exhibit with all these devices and ways to snap together different contraptions. I have never been a real creative type when it comes to customizing a game, but the tools in Totk are so easy to use and the possibilities so gargantuan I found it so easy to try everything at least once. It doesn't take much effort at all to make Looney Tunes contraptions of any kind and the amazing thing is they almost always work. The amount of technical wizardry going on behind the scenes to make all these devices intuitively interact with each other, I mean, the control stick alone understanding exactly how to pilot whatever you've slapped up is ridiculous. You can see the results from so many players expressing their creativity in boundless ways. I'm kinda surprised Nintendo never released a sandbox mode to just play with this as a toy forever.

Those zonai devices lead to another strong element of the game: Puzzle solving. While I have some trepidation on the concept of making your own puzzle solutions, I found that Totk really doesn't have that for the most part. the shrine puzzles in particular are very authored, and have a specific solution in mind, while giving you a little bit of leeway on the exact track to get there. Meanwhile, the dungeons themselves are pretty open, and while they do have intended solutions, you're free to use whatever tools you have on hand to cheese them any way you like. I find this to be a really good balance; the shrines were easily my favorite part of the game, but I also enjoyed the looser style of the dungeons, especially because I had a companion with me for all of them. It's a good mix, and I can see Nintendo trying this particular mix of puzzle design again in the future, or at least refining it in a different way down the line.

As for the exploratory part that Botw made central, I think Totk does a pretty good job maintaining that air of something new over the horizon. While the games share a map, the world has changed a lot over the years (ingame and out), to the point that the familiar can become unfamiliar, and part of the intrigue is seeing how a location you know and love has become different either through time or the upheaval. This is the first time Zelda games have specifically shared a map like this before, and as long as it doesn't strictly become the norm, I think this was a good shot at it. Plus, even if they're not as fleshed out as I'd like, the depths and the sky are fun additions to the overall world, and make a hell of a contrast in environments, both visually and gameplay-wise.

It's the story where the cracks first start to show. I like the idea of the story here, but the execution is all over the place. The Zelda memories are, unlike Botw, not a story meant to be experienced out of order. Unless you luck into the right order (and I sure didn't), you are going to experience a jumbled mess that hurts the intended reading. They should have made them unlock in order regardless of which one you found. Combine that with the extreme repetition that comes with the sage quests, and you get a story that borders on a farce sometimes. However, I do love the individual characters that come with all of the sages, and the shonen energy that the bosses (especially the final bosses) bring to the table earns me over in the end, not in spite of but because of the ridiculousness. Really, it's a Zelda game, I don't expect an amazing story. If this was the only issue There wouldn't really be a problem at all.

However, the big sticking point with Totk is that there's just too much. There's simply too much of everything. There's too many fuse materials. There's too many sidequests. There's too many collectables (poes, shrine lights, bubbul gems, sage lights, crystals, probably some i'm missing). There's too many chests. There's too much of everything! And the bigger problem is that it's just not really worth it the majority of the time. This isn't a classic Zelda game where you'll find a high value prize at the end of a curated quest. In Totk, you'll get a weapon (which breaks), rupees (which you could make easily), a consumable (rarely good enough to be worth it), or very rarely, some armor (actually worth it). With so many of these and so little reward most of the time, you end up just ignoring them a lot of the time. Some of them are fun just intrinsically, and some of them do offer interesting glimpses at the world... but most don't. You compare this to Botw, which was much better about giving you rewards that were worth it, and also held back on shoving them into you constantly. That emptiness in Botw was not just there for no reason! It had a purpose! And Totk failed to understand that.

That's ultimately my main issue with Totk, one I admit I don't think it ever could have truly overcome given how it was made. Botw was the bestselling Zelda game ever, it brought in so many new fans to the series. Nintendo had a blank check to make any Zelda game they wanted, absolutely anything could have come out next and would have had an audience for it. The fact that that chose to make Botw But More is such a letdown, regardless of anything else on display in Totk. I can't pretend I'm not a little fearful for the franchise's future if this was their first choice as a followup to their biggest success.

By itself, Tears of the Kingdom is a good game. A great game, even. It's a game I know I'll play again someday, I know I missed a ton in it even with 70+ hours on it. In the grand scheme of things though, I ultimately can't look at the game without a pretty heavy dose of disappointment.

and then you have the sheer spectacle of the final phase. pretty damn epic to go from the depths of the earth to the heights of the sky. dragon fighting dragon with link in the middle. it's good stuff, and a fitting ending to the entire story, even if the trip to get there was kind of a mess. went out on a very high not though