I’ve been with this series from the beginning. My parents had an NES and a handful of popular games, one of them The Legend of Zelda whose internal battery died before I could ever complete it. It’s probably easier to list the ones I haven’t finished.
- I still don’t think I’ve ever finished the first one and definitely not Zelda II but I mean to, honest
- (Only ever played Link’s Awakening DX, but I just got a copy of the grey cart version and am nearly halfway through. My impression so far is: I don’t think this game ever needed to be colorized. It was perfect as released.)
- I’ve only pecked at Oracle of Seasons, the one they say is the good Oracle game. Haven’t played the other “bad” one at all. I should probably start with Ages if it’s supposed to suck, now that I’m thinking about it.)
- This hurts to admit, but I made it all the way to the final boss of Minish Cap and then got distracted by homework and something happened to my save, so I’ve never actually finished the game. I loved it a lot at the time, but don’t remember in detail why, so I owe it a second proper playthrough—this time on real hardware and not in the PPC Mac port of VisualBoy Advance.
- I thought Phantom Hourglass was just fine, I don’t get the hate. Spirit Tracks has been on my backlog since it came out, and I’ve started halfhearted playthroughs of it on both DSi and Wii U VC.
- The Four Swords games are a complete blind spot to me and they’ve grown to a series of about what five games by now? Please don’t tell me they’re good because I want to keep ignoring them.
- I am told that the first Hyrule Warriors game is a blast and I’ve got it raring to go on my Wii U
I wish I could pretend I was always cool, but it just ain’t so: I sold my SNES and games—among them A Link to the Past—for an N64 in anticipation of Zelda 64, which I got a little too into. I knew every room in the game like the back of my hand. I got pretty sick of the game for many years, put it out of my mind. It can actually surprise me now on occasions when I return to it.
I wished I could live in Termina and cried that it couldn’t be so. (Also I secretly fantasized about there being a Gerudo mask—this is what trans people now refer to as an egg moment.)
I’ve talked before about having a shitty home life as a kid from which I would escape into video games, but also into the conservation area across the street from my family’s house. I’ve found bones and fossils in those woods, and live things too. I would wander off path into walls of orb-weaver webs, swing maple sapling switches like a sword at beds of ostrich ferns to watch their heads fall in a wave, squat down by the creek to spy what streamed by under the water’s surface or disturb the clay and watch mini pyroclastic flows form.
Miyamoto famously has talked about his childhood wanderings around his hometown of Sonobe—a town of nearly the same population as my hometown’s. I suspect you don’t need to have grown up in a green belt to get it: we’re all drawn back to nature wherever we can find it.
My experiences in game and out imprint on and enhance each other. I feed my imagination and take it with me. I thought I posted about this in that one thread on the subject but it must be festering in my drafts.
Link’s Awakening is a game that can’t convince you until it lands. You can play right up to the final dungeon and drop it there, you’ll have probably had yourself a fun time, but the only reason people feel the way they feel about that game is because of how it ends. Play either the original or DX, but I don’t think the Switch version should be anyone’s first encounter with it, straight up. Compare this early scene on GB to the same on Switch and note the timing of Link’s slash with the overworld theme’s intro. I’m horrified that Grezzo could be handed this work to be rebuilt and just completely ignore the pacing of a cutscene like that. I don’t think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill here, that’s just an obvious blindness to artistic intent.
Incidentally I’m grateful every day that I can spout off intense opinions like the above here and not fear ostracisation.
Confession time!!! I was one of the reactionary dummies who lashed out about “Celda”'s cel-shaded art direction when it was first teased (in my defence, I was young and miserable), but musta had a change of heart at some point because I preordered the thing and still have it and Master Quest both CIB up on my shelf. WW was for a very long time my professed favourite Zelda… but in the end I always return to MM.
I had high hopes for Twilight Princess from the outset, in contrast, and I’ll be the first to admit it’s maybe the clunkiest of the old school 3D Zeldas, but there’s a lot to appreciate here if you hang out in its Hyrule for a while. It’s got a moodiness that gets brushed off as edgy but which I think draws heavily from Majora. The strangeness of the characters makes motions toward realism but embraces an uncanniness instead and I think their designs are stronger for it. One of wolf Link’s abilities is to let you inside the heads of despairing villagers trapped in the twilight realm, and that’s the meat of your world-building in every new province you discover. This game’s Link, a brawny ranch hand whose body takes the twilight form of a wolf—starkly contrasting ALttP’s dark world bunny—snarls like an animal when unleashing his fully upgraded fire spin. (Now that’s how you develop a silent protagonist.) It’s hard to argue Midna isn’t the series’ best sidekick, and her competition is pretty stiff (Linebeck, Fi, Groose, I’ve heard so much praise for Spirit Tracks' Zelda).
The growth of her bond with Link is so organic and, and, fresh!! Sometimes in a series that plays it safe so much of the time it can make you feel starved for risk and new ideas, and maybe you are. Maybe you just see potential in a good thing and it’s only natural to cheer when it gets realized. The Hero of Twilight & Midna are one of my most beloved video game duos. They speak to the shipper that must reside in me (if I were to ever ship, it’d be right here). They meet at their nadirs and come to rely so heavily on each other that a real respect grows and when they part it’s devastating. This goes way beyond tagging along or asking for enemy intel or following directions: Link and Midna need each other. They’re fringe weirdos in a world of weirdos in a game that is itself a dark horse—and I’m sorry I’ve devoted two entire paragraphs now to everyone’s second least favourite Zelda but I believe in Twilight Princess. It’s dark and it’s goofy and it’s beautiful.
(I think we could have if not an entire thread then at least a lengthy discussion here in this one about the Zelda series’ side characters. Gimme yer top 5s!! The scope could be stretched past companions to the supporting cast if we wanted. We only ever see Breath of the Wild's nerd!Zelda in flashbacks for most of the game but she’s with you in spirit!!?)
I played Skyward Sword for the second time in my life last year and I gotta say it again here: the game’s good. It’s worth playing to see what we’ve left behind and what ought to return in the future.
Link Between Worlds moves so fast. That’s what it’s all about. This is how you nail the feel of an old classic.
Then there’s Breath of the Wild. I played BotW while catsitting in a Parkdale apartment at the ass-end of winter. My refurbished Wii U arrived and I spent a couple of weeks just digging into the game and not much else. I played FFXV around the same time and I did mostly have a great time with those guys but if I wanted to you know have fun then I returned to Wild (not the wild). It’s too late and I’ve spent too much time on this post, so just be assured that there’s shit about the game I hate. But coming in blind and for at least the portion of your playthrough that’s spent simply surviving, it is a great game.
I hope the next one has dungeons!!!! AND TINGLE.