What Zelda games are your favorite/least favorite?

[MANDRAG GANON]

A link to the Past in terms of 2D - It was everything I loved from the original zelda increased 10 fold and more.

Majora's Mask In terms of 3D - It was everything I loved about ocarina of time only fleshed out a lot more. I sometimes feel like OOT was the test and MM was the real game.

Also up there is Zelda 2 for me, I always am surprised when people complain about the difficulty of this game, the only annoyance to me is that it sends you back to the beginning each time you die but I mean... I've been beating this game since I was 5. I find it way easier than most Megaman games. Difficulty should not be a complaint, this is why most modern day games are for pussies. It should be if the ends justify the means. Most NES era games grew from arcade games and so brought over alot of the difficulty. I see no reason to play a game unless it is challenging me in some way.

Mostly I love the style of the world in this game though. I would love to see a new Zelda that took place in the world that Zelda 1 and 2 were situated in. I miss the weird meld of Roman and medieval architecture.

[Nicholas Steel]

MM > OoT, OoT is a good game, but it is completely linear (unless you use glitch's and bugs to sequence break)

[Darth Marsden]

Ocarina of Time is still my fav. I never really got into the 2D titles, they were before my time. And, sadly, my house was a Genesis one. The N64 was my first Nintendo console, and OoT was my first Zelda title. You never really top your first Zelda game, do you?

To me, the worst in the series are the original two NES titles (which are hideously dated no matter what the die-hards say and, for me, almost unplayable as a result) and Majora's Mask, which would have been fine is not for the 3 day thing. You have an open world you want us to explore? Fine - just don't restrict us with some arbitrary time limit! Everything else was great, but when you're constantly under pressure to keep going, it takes an awful lot of the fun out of things.

[firebug]

LoZ and aLTtP are my favorite 'standard' Zelda games. LoZ holds a special place in my heart because it was literally the first video game I ever played, and still the only one with a built-in Master Quest.

My all-time favorite was AoL. I know most people hated it, but I thought the combination top-view RPG/side scrolling was ingenious, and the story totally original. I absolutely loved it. And to those who say it's too hard, learn some tactics. It has nothing to do with insane button-mashing. You have to time your attacks and jumps perfectly, just like any challenging Zelda game.
Majora's Mask comes in a close second to AoL, simply for the originality and dark atmosphere. It was totally Zelda, but didn't have to hold onto the old formula to make an excellent game.

The WindWaker sucked. Too much sailing. Minish Cap pissed me off, it was way too easy and the storyline was written for a four year old.

Majora's Mask, which would have been fine is not for the 3 day thing. You have an open world you want us to explore? Fine - just don't restrict us with some arbitrary time limit! Everything else was great, but when you're constantly under pressure to keep going, it takes an awful lot of the fun out of things.

The whole point of the game was that you couldn't possibly complete everything within 3 days (just too many damn things going on at once). There was no arbitrary time limit. Hence the time travel.

[Modus Ponens]

In Majora's Mask, if you start out a new three-day cycle by playing the Inverted Song of Time, and then having some small sense of a plan for where you want to go and what you want to do, you have plenty of time to explore, or complete a dungeon, or talk to people and play games, or whatever, but you just can't do it all at once. This, to me, gives it more of a mission-based feel, where you have to say to yourself, "okay, I just want to go see what's going on in Snowhead right now, and then if I have time, I'll check out that curious spot at the swamp." Majora's Mask remains my favorite 3-D Zelda, with Wind Waker very close behind. And I certainly don't think that Twilight Princess sucked, like a lot of people claim; I just don't like it as much as some of the other titles in the series. In fact, I still like it more than Ocarina.

[Pineconn]

Seriously, though, I can't think of a time in Majora's Mask where I ran out of time to do something. You can manipulate time easily enough - slow it down, speed it up (to the next 12 hour interval), or restart it. Perhaps the most annoying part was having to recollect bombs and arrows every time you restarted time.

[Modus Ponens]

Perhaps the most annoying part was having to recollect bombs and arrows every time you restarted time.

That's what money's for. After all, you collect a shit-ton of it, and this game actually gives you a reason to spend the damn stuff. One of the problems with Ocarina, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess is that you're constantly finding way more money than you ever need, since there's nothing you really need to buy. The greatest disappointments are when that chest I worked my ass off to find (or the reward for finding every single fucking skulltula) ends up being just some fucking money. Money I usually can't carry anyway. So at least in Majora's Mask you have a good reason to buy shit, and even if you don't feel like spending your hard-earned money on supplies every time you start out again, well, there's at least 300 rupees hidden around Clock Town that you can grab real quick before you make your store run.

(Plus, Majora's Mask has a mask you can wear that lets you make your face explode! <3 <3 <3)

[Shazza Dani]

(Plus, Majora's Mask has a mask you can wear that lets you make your face explode! <3 <3 <3)

Love it. <3

And don't forget to hold up your shield and you'll take no damage.

[Beldaran]

To me, the worst in the series are the original two NES titles (which are hideously dated no matter what the die-hards say and, for me, almost unplayable as a result)

BLASPHEMY

[Revfan9]

The first Zelda game was amazing for its time, but you have to remember: You were 10 when you first played it, and it was probably your first experience of anything like it. For the younger gamers who probably played LoZ at around the same time (most often shortly after) as they played say, TP or OoT, they'd have an entirely different experience.

Because it was released in an age where the hardware simply wasn't capable of anything complicated, it's not entirely fair to judge it by the same standards as we judge modern games, but it happens anyway because that's just how we work as human beings: We base your expectations on prior events. When compared to modern titles, however, LoZ is VERY rough around the edges. Allow me to elaborate:

It's way, way too easy to get lost on the overworld. There's little to no variation in the appearance of things, so everything looks the same. You can't really navigate effectively until you basically have the entire map memorized. The "Map" is really just a solid gray square, so unless you can draw a grid of pixels in your head (Also a skill learned by many long, tedious hours) it doesn't really help, and even then it doesn't help much since it leaves you no information of where you've been or where you're going unless you have the map memorized.

You die too easily. I know video games are supposed to be "Challenging", but the problem is that you're left with absolutely nothing to do but explore, and when you die, you start right on the same place on the map! So for your first few hours of playing (Unless you have prior experience in dealing with these sort of games) you won't be doing much more than running around in those few screens surrounding the overworld, dying over and over. You finally get somewhere you haven't been before, only to be slaughtered by enemies moments later. You can't really make any progress until after you've already beaten the game several times and memorized where everything is or use a guide to "Cheat" your way through.

Again, back in those days this was pretty much all you could do, but that's not the point. Unless you were 7 getting your first Nintendo for Christmas, just staring at the screen in wonder, when you play LoZ you just sit there, wishing your console/PC would blow up and kill you just to end the misery. The game doesn't start being fun until after many, many cruel, boring hours of experience.