In light of Twilight Princess coming out, I thought we should revisit the series that quite simply kicks incomprehensible amounts of ass.

Here is a quick timeline:
1987- Zelda 1 comes out. Everybody gasps in awe. A poorly made cartoon surfaces.

1988- Zelda 2 comes out. Everybody hates it, but it's still quite good.

1992- Link to the Past comes out. Very long game and nothing else quite like it back in '92. Loads of dungeons, two worlds, and more secrets than anything before it. Needless to say, it kicked ass.

1993- Link's Awakening. First GB adventure. Surprisingly challenging and deep for the system at the time.

1998- Ocarina of Time. Rated best game ever by many people, myself included. Had a beautiful soundtrack. The story was excellent. The dungeons were crafty. Who could remember the twisted corridors of the Forest Temple or the insanity that was the Water Temple? Recieved tons of perfect scores and heaps of praise. Game of the Year. This was the game that put Zelda on the map.

2000- Majora's Mask. Having to follow suit after OoT, this game turned out to be highly underrated. Nevertheless, it is still highly enjoyable. The time effect and the masks delivered a very intresting and fresh gameplay experience.

2001- Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons- The next chapter of GB Zelda games, these two were also surprisingly large and the link system was a nifty addition at the time.

2003- Wind Waker. Highly controversial due to the cel-shaded effects, this game was deemed too kiddy by the masses and was dissapointingly short and easy. The sailing, although pretentious, created an impressive atmosphere. Nevertheless it was still a great game, very atmospheric, and had a cool story.

2005- The Minish Cap. A facelift for the Zelda series on GB, this game was every bit as packed with secrets as its predecessors and just as fun.

2006- Twilight Princess. Who knows? It looks amazing. This will probably be fucking huge.

I just finished replaying Ocarina of Time for the fifth time. It's still the best single player game out there.

Discuss.

10/10/2006 11:13:33 PM

well excuUUUuuuse me, princess.

10/10/2006 11:16:28 PM

http://www.thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=395901

Been there, done that

10/10/2006 11:17:07 PM

yeah and you forgot the ds one

10/10/2006 11:26:15 PM

just post it in the TP thread.

10/10/2006 11:29:54 PM

If Ocarina of Time put Zelda on the map then I beat the rest of the world by about 8-9 years on the Zelda franchise.

The original for NES was awesome(played it through several times on that nice gold cartridge), and then Link to the Past was one of the best games on the SNES and I beat it a few times.

But don't forget to mention the CD-I games, those were terrible.

10/11/2006 8:20:08 AM

Quote :

"The sailing, although pretentious, created an impressive atmosphere."

I really don't think "pretentious" is the word you meant to use.

Tedious would describe it better.

10/11/2006 8:23:03 AM

This thread is silly for a numbers of reasons, most of which are outlined above.

10/11/2006 8:58:55 AM

i didnt even wanna play the wind waker shit cuz of the stupid boat

10/11/2006 9:14:11 AM

I think the sailing would've been tolerable if the map had been scaled down by about a third. The sailing was fun for a little while and definitely visually beautiful, but with nothing to look at and so much open water, even finding the "hidden" islands you were supposed to run into on different legs of the trip was tedious.

10/11/2006 9:20:10 AM

The sailing would have been fine if there were continents. That way you could spend just as much time exploring the land. Sailing would be an addition instead of the whole game. It also would have been nice if you could just control the wind with the second analog stick. Busting out the wand every minute was annoying.

10/11/2006 9:47:14 AM

Quote :

"If Ocarina of Time put Zelda on the map then I beat the rest of the world by about 8-9 years on the Zelda franchise."

everyone i knew had heard about 1 and 2, but it was kinda like...yeah they are good, but shrug. link to the past was huge for my friends and me, but it still didnt have as huge of a buzz as OoT seemed to.

10/11/2006 10:16:02 AM

i liked the idea of changing winds, but after a while it was just a hassle trying to navigate like that.

10/11/2006 10:43:19 AM

I agree with the whole sailing aspect of Wind Waker mentioned in the thread. It was such a chore to sail across the water and change the wind. Full support on the continents comment; all that goddamn water could have been replaced with land and more dungeons. The ocean theme did have a good beat to it, however. This theme was one of my samples for my Eng 101 paper on video game background music.

[Edited on October 11, 2006 at 10:53 AM. Reason : theme x2]

10/11/2006 10:52:19 AM

Quote :

" Ocarina of Time put Zelda on the map "

thank to the diehard fans pushin for it. i can recall an inital video of swordfighting w' a silver character that people were jizzing over, about 2 years before release/



^^ adventrue games require travel. sailing wasnt so bad. AFG flights in WoW wouldnt work on a console. you need to possibility of rare mobs. the model worked. the idea of a boat did not.

Quote :

"1988- Zelda 2 comes out. Everybody hates it, but it's still quite good."

just as good as zelda 1 imo

[Edited on October 11, 2006 at 11:07 AM. Reason : 5]

10/11/2006 11:03:01 AM

I didn't like the 2nd one as much, but that was probably because of the change of visuals and gameplay style.

10/11/2006 2:04:23 PM

I dont think zelda 2 gets enough praise

I thoroughly enjoyed it

10/11/2006 7:44:11 PM

I'm really surprised at the LACK of information that has come out about Twilight Princess. I thought by now the story would have leaked, more screenshots revealing more info, etc...

They are keeping it under tight wraps.

10/11/2006 8:06:31 PM

which may be becuase of what happened w/ OOT

either that or TP ain gonna be that great. but nintendo has been saying its the best yet. so, they rarely say stuff like that.

10/11/2006 9:09:41 PM

Quote :

"1998- Ocarina of Time.....This was the game that put Zelda on the map."

*sigh*

youngn's

10/11/2006 9:38:04 PM

hahaha

you know what game put zelda on the map?

ZELDA

10/11/2006 9:39:53 PM

thank you ^, ^^

10/11/2006 10:36:38 PM

lets play making money game

10/11/2006 10:59:56 PM

zelda 2 is actually my favorite in the series.

10/12/2006 12:28:54 AM

Quote :

"I'm really surprised at the LACK of information that has come out about Twilight Princess. I thought by now the story would have leaked, more screenshots revealing more info, etc..."

I'll shoot from the hip...

Initially there will be 3 dungeons. Completing these three dungeons will allow you to access a similar but different world. With a name like Twilight Princess I'm guessing that the difference will be some sort of werewolf or vampire transformation. Then you will have to complete a further 8 dungeons using a combination of the old and new skill sets. The 8 whatevers will then allow access to the final dungeon. There you will listen to the triforce speech and eventually beat the final boss, think he is dead, and beat him again when he comes back to life.

10/12/2006 7:56:13 AM

^lol

WARNING: LARGE AMOUNTS OF TEXT

I never played the first Zelda, although I do remember watching my brothers play it when I was a lot younger. My introduction into the franchise was OoT, which was fan-fucking-tastic. I have played that game over and over again multiple times, it just never seems to get old. The only heavily agreed-upon complaint I've heard about this game revolves around Navi (HEY! LOOK! LISTEN!), but I didn't mind her too much, and most of the time you didn't have to listen to what she says. It's that stupid owl with all that text that you can't scroll through very quickly that pissed me off more than anything.

After that I got Majora's Mask, and it was a good game overall but it was this very odd mixture of different yet same; the use of the same character models from its predecessor made it feel very OoT-esque, and made me nostalgic. It was also a lot darker and sadder in some respects, which I thought was a nice touch and helped it move away a little bit from the "kiddy" image that Nintendo games are usually known for. But it took a while for this game to grow on me. I just wasn't properly accustomed to the new time travel/save system and the various masks. Looking back on it the whole "3 days to save the world" premise and how you started all over again when you saved did make for some interesting time travel puzzles and side quests, but it was difficult for me to enter into that sort of mindset. I also got lost and confused in this game, I absolutely couldn't figure out how to do anything (except the dungeons). I used a walkthrough nearly the entire way, and now I regret it. It's like I cheated myself.

Then I got an SNES emulator and got the LttP rom. It was an amazing game, although the story elements from both OoT and MM had phased me to the point that I wasn't really surprised by this game. The quest starts off to get the Master Sword, then before you know it you're switching between realities to get to the final boss? Been there, done that. But since this game came before its N64 successors, I know when to give credit where it's due. The only thing I'll say about this game is that it is really hard, to the point where I was getting pwned even when I used save states. And there were a shit ton of secrets, to the point where I used a walkthrough to find them all.

After this was Wind Waker. Like everybody else on the face of the earth, the cel-shading made me very skeptical at first, but when I saw actual gameplay footage I came around. Now the cel-shading has grown on me, and has very much become a natural part of the game. I also liked how they tied it into OoT and how they treated the story, although the ending was very tragic in many ways. My only real problems with this game (as anyone who has played this game will unanimously attest) are that a) the sailing was way more tedious than it needed to be, and b) the game was too easy overall. The combat system might have been revolutionary when OoT was made, but it's still laughably easy. They could have at least upgraded the enemy AI by now. But there were also other problems with this game that are related to these first two problems. One such problem was that there were too many side quests. This wouldn't have been such a problem if only it didn't require so much sailing; you could play straight through the game linearly without making any pit-stops, and easily still have two thirds of the game world left over to explore. But even if this was the case, the side quests didn't really feel like side quests. They felt more like filler, as if the programmers either didn't know how else to cram the extra items in or were too lazy to make more dungeons. Which is another problem; not enough dungeons. MM only had four, but because there was so much stuff and so many places you had to visit before you could get to them this was acceptable. There was plenty of stuff to do, plenty of storyline to explore on your own. With WW, you were at the end of the game before you even knew it. Another problem was that WW held your hand almost the entire time, and it was just one big "go here and get this thing, then go to this place next" spiel. OoT and MM only did this a tiny bit, and the hints were vague enough that you knew the general direction that you needed to go but not necessarily what to do.

And finally, I have played the Minish Cap. Think of it as a hand-held LttP with a graphical face lift, but minus the difficulty and plus the hand-holding in Wind Waker. 'Nuff said.

10/12/2006 9:41:11 AM

^I agree 100% on those WW comments. Sailing for the shards was a pain. I almost felt like they did this so they could get some sort of 40+ hours of gameplay!1!!!1 press when it would have been a 10 hour game if not for the sail here to get thing 1 that tells you to sail across the map to get thing 2 which is a map to thing 3 that is in the corner you just came from... oh, and repeat that 9 times while you're at it. Sure, you could jump to areas on the map with that one song, but that always put you about 3 squares off your target.

10/12/2006 10:10:21 AM

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the looking for the shards.

It was fine that they hid them at the bottom of the ocean and that you had to track down the treasure charts in order to find them, that part was okay. But finding them and then having to pay 340 ruppees EACH to have them decoded? That's just plain bullshit. It artificially increases the gameplay length, forcing the player to fight pointless battles in order to scrounge up enough cash. Plus, this whole charade forces us to put up with one of the worst moves in all of Zelda-dom; Tingle.

10/12/2006 11:12:40 AM

Yeah, I really hated the artificially-enhanced length of Wind Waker. The dungeons were well-done, I liked the graphic style...but all the sailing and map bullshit turned me off.

LttP is still my favorite in the series. I've played through it multiple times (and I'm sure I will again). Incredibly fun. OoT is hot, too, but doesn't have the same nostalgia value to me--I hadn't even played it until they released the Gamecube port.

Link's Awakening, as said in the original post, is surprisingly deep. I was pretty shocked when I first got it.

10/12/2006 1:32:59 PM

^I agree, LttP is my favorite as well.
Top 3:
1.) LttP
2.) OoT
3.) Zelda 1
(given I haven't played WW)

10/12/2006 1:34:42 PM

Quote :

"Then I got an SNES emulator and got the LttP rom."

i pity the fool that didnt get to play it on the console ..... its not the same

10/12/2006 1:38:48 PM

I played Zelda 1, beat it. I was fascinated with its box design at the time... I'm thankful my parents bought it. Like many, I was disinterested in the Zelda II gamble that Nintendo made; I passed.

LTTP blew my mind. That's all there is. Exploring that fucking mountain shook my young mind.

I bought a Gamecube a few years ago... I had missed out on the N64 realm. I have played Windwaker but not to completion. There's just something missing.

Left left down left. I mean, we all know this...

10/12/2006 1:47:48 PM

Quote :

"I played Zelda 1, beat it. I was fascinated with its box design at the time"

Ahahaha, so was I. I think that's why I bought it. That gold box really stood out...and then it turned out to be an awesome game.

I've never really understood the hate for Zelda 2. Frankly I wish more companies would be willing to branch out and try new gameplay styles, like Nintendo did with Adventure of Link. I may prefer the top-down Zeldas, but I don't hold it against them for trying something new with the franchise. It was a pretty fun game anyway (although it was incredibly hard at spots).

10/12/2006 2:09:21 PM

Why do people disagree with OoT being the game that put Zelda on the map? Sure, the first 3 Zelda's were big, they weren't advertised to be must-have titles until Ocarina's debut in '98. In addition to the press coverage (a new Zelda after a 5 year abscence was a huge deal), the game was unanimously given perfect scores by almost every publication that mattered. Everybody, even people who never played Zelda before, wanted to play this game. All of this being said, OoT WAS the game that made the series mainstream.

10/14/2006 3:58:00 PM

becuase that simply isnt true.

anyone who owned a snes or nes had a zelda title. they were as flagship as mario.

10/14/2006 7:06:32 PM

yeah i agree.. i remember when LttP for SNES came out... that game was AWESOME>.. i was as hyped about that as i was when OoT came out for 64

and i loved the NES versions as well

10/14/2006 7:59:08 PM

^,^^ I agree. Just don't see OoT being the defining moment for the serious.

10/14/2006 8:10:11 PM

Quote :

"OoT WAS the game that made the series mainstream."

No it wasn't. Next to Mario and Sonic, the Zelda series was the most well-known franchise in video games. OoT was the Zelda game that arrived with the most hype and fanfare, but that's partially due to the N64's slow release schedule and it's humongous advances for 3-D gaming, not to mention the growing popularity of games in general.

10/14/2006 8:27:32 PM

Okay, I can see what your saying with it being the most overhyped game. But I still believe that OoT brought more players to the series that any other game before it. As for the series defining moment, OoT is really fucking good, but I think the defining moment was the 1st game.

10/14/2006 8:57:14 PM

Quote :

"OoT and MM only did this a tiny bit, and the hints were vague enough that you knew the general direction that you needed to go but not necessarily what to do."

It took me forever to find out how to access the Water Temple, and I was lost as fuck once I gained access. All the temples were awesome, but Water stands out as my favorite.

And I agree MM was pretty dark and depressing.

10/14/2006 9:01:27 PM

the temple in MM that turned upside down and had the huge worm boss was the shit

10/15/2006 1:58:01 AM

Quote :

"OoT WAS the game that made the series mainstream."

I'm sorry that a lot of you may not be old enough to remember the release of The Legend of Zelda, but this game defined the series & system for YEARS.

Nintendo may have come with Super Mario Brothers, but the real gamers had The Legend of Zelda in their collection, period.

[Edited on October 15, 2006 at 2:08 AM. Reason : ]

10/15/2006 2:08:02 AM

I actually wrench when I see the polygons sticking out of link in oot.

10/15/2006 2:34:58 AM

gametrailers.com is doing a zelda retrospective of all the games in anticipation of TTP. Here's the first video that should school you young'uns on the first two Zelda games for the NES.

http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=14063&type=mov&pl=game

10/15/2006 8:55:17 AM

damn this thread...

it makes me want to break out LttP or WW and play them again before TP comes out...
but i don't have the TIME!

10/15/2006 9:25:42 AM

Quote :

"Why do people disagree with OoT being the game that put Zelda on the map? Sure, the first 3 Zelda's were big, they weren't advertised to be must-have titles until Ocarina's debut in '98"

obviously, you didn't own a NES/SNES back when those games were released. EVERYONE had the original Zelda, and everyone w/a SNES got geeked when LttP came out.
It's just funny that you say that, because the Zelda games were larger than life back in the day.

for the record: I enjoy Link's Adventure.

10/15/2006 12:18:47 PM

i like them all the same

except for majora's mask... couldn't ever get into that one. and i didn't play the gameboy ones too often either. i'd say windwaker was my least favorite so far, but it was still an incredible game.

10/15/2006 1:40:54 PM

a lot of people didn't like MM. I really enjoyed it, for one. And I really enjoyed Zelda II. I won't be the first to admit that it was ridiculously challenging, however.

10/15/2006 1:53:42 PM

What is everybody's favorite boss fight?

Mine is either the dragon in the last temple of LttP, the giant worm boss in MM, or the lion boss in MM that you had to race to kill it.

10/15/2006 1:58:32 PM

OoT had the most beutiful boss fights

10/15/2006 4:29:31 PM