The best Zelda games: Eurogamer editors’ Option

You have already had your state on the absolute best Zelda games because we observe the series’ 30th anniversary – and you also did a mighty fine job too, even though I’m fairly convinced A Link to the Past goes at the head of any record – so now it is our turn. We asked the Eurogamer editorial team to vote for their favorite Zelda games (though Wes abstained because he doesn’t understand exactly what a Nintendo is) and below you’ll find the complete top ten, along with some of our own musings. Can we get the games in their real order? Likely not…

10. A Link Between Worlds

How brightly contradictory that one of the very best original games on Nintendo’s 3DS would be a 2D adventure sport, which among the most adventurous Zelda entrances are the one that so closely aped one of its predecessors.

It really helps, of course, the template was raised from one of the best games in the show also, by extension, one of the finest matches of all time. There is an endearing breeziness into A Link to the Past, a fleet-footedness that sees the 16-bit adventure pass as pleasurably and memorably as a great late summer day.read about it zelda spirit tracks rom from Our Articles A Link Between Worlds takes that and also positively sprints together with it, running free into the familiar expanse of Hyrule with a new-found freedom.

In giving you the ability to let any one of Link’s well-established tools in the off, A Link Between Worlds broke free of this linear progress which had shackled previous Zelda games; that has been a Hyrule that was no more defined by an invisible route, but one which provided a sense of discovery and free will that was beginning to feel absent in prior entries. The feeling of experience so precious to the series, muffled in the past several years by the ritual of repetition, was well and truly restored. MR

9. Spirit Tracks

An unfortunate side-effect of the simple fact that more than one generation of players has grown up with Zelda and refused to go has become an insistence – through the show’ adolescence, at any rate – it develop them. That led to some interesting areas as well as some silly tussles within the series’ leadership, as we’ll see later in this list, but sometimes it threatened to leave Zelda’s unique constituency – you know, children – behind.

Thankfully, the portable games have always been there to look after younger players, and Spirit Tracks for its DS (currently accessible on Wii U Virtual Console) is now Zelda in its most chirpy and adorable. Though beautifully designed, it is not an especially distinguished game, being a comparatively laborious and laborious followup to Phantom Hourglass that copies its own structure and flowing stylus controller. But it has such zest! Connect uses just a tiny train to go around and its own puffing and tooting, together with an inspired folk music soundtrack, set a lively pace for your adventure. Then there’s the childish, tactile delight of driving the train: placing the throttle, pulling on the whistle and scribbling destinations on your own map.

Most importantly is that, for once, Zelda is in addition to the ride. Link has to rescue her entire body, but her soul is using him as a companion, occasionally able to own enemy soldiers and perform the brutal heavy. The two even enjoy an innocent youth love, and you would be hard pushed to think of another game which has captured the teasing, blushing intensity of a preteen crush also. Inclusive and sweet, Spirit Tracks recalls that kids have feelings too, and also may reveal grownups a thing or two about love. OW

8. Phantom Hourglass

In my head, at least, there has long been a raging debate going on regarding whether Link, Hero of Hyrule, is really any good using a boomerang. He’s been wielding the loyal, banana-shaped piece of timber since his very first experience, however in my experience it’s simply been a pain in the arse to work with.

The exception that proves the rule, nevertheless, is Phantom Hourglass, where you draw on the path on your boomerang from the hand. Poking the stylus at the touch display (which, at an equally beautiful move, is the way you control your sword), you draw a precise flight map for the boomerang and then it just… goes. No more faffing about, no more clanging into columns, only simple, simple, improbably responsive boomerang trip. It was when I first used the boomerang at Phantom Hourglass I realised that this game might just be something particular; I immediately fell in love with the rest.

Never mind that watching some gameplay back to refresh my memory gave me powerful flashbacks into the hours spent huddling over the screen and grasping my DS like I needed to throttle it. JC

7. Skyward Sword

Skyward Sword is maddeningly close to being great. It bins the recognizable Zelda overworld and collection of distinct dungeons by hurling three huge areas in the player which are constantly reworked. It’s a beautiful game – one I’m still expecting will be remade in HD – whose watercolour visuals make a shimmering, dream-like haze over its azure skies and brush-daubed foliage. After the grimy, Lord of this Rings-inspired Twilight Princess, it is the Zelda series re-finding its toes. I can defend many of recognizable criticisms levelled at Skyward Sword, like its overly-knowing nods to the rest of the series or its marginally forced origin story that unnecessarily retcons familiar elements of the franchise. I can also get behind the bigger overall amount of area to research when the game continually revitalises each of its three regions so ardently.

I could not, unfortunately, ever get in addition to the game’s Motion Plus controllers, which required one to waggle your own Wii Remote to be able to do battle. It turned out the boss fights against the brilliantly bizarre Ghirahim into infuriating struggles using technologies. Into baskets that made me anger stop for the rest of the evening. Sometimes the movement controls worked – the flying Beetle item pretty much consistently found its mark – but when Nintendo was forcing players to leave behind the reliability of a control scheme, its replacement had to work 100 per cent of the time. TP

6. Twilight Princess

I was pretty bad in Zelda games. I really could stumble my way through the Great Deku Tree and the Fire Temple alright but, by the time Connect dove headlong to the fantastic Jabu Jabu’s belly, my desire to have fun with Ocarina of Time easily began outstripping the fun I was really having.

When Twilight Princess rolled around, I had been at university and also something in me – most likely a deep love of procrastination – was prepared to try again. This time, it worked. I recall day-long moves on the sofa, huddling underneath a blanket in my chilly flat and just poking my hands out to flap about using the Wii distant during battle. Subsequently there was the magnificent dawn if my then-girlfriend (now fiancée) awakened me with a gentle shake, then asking’can I watch you play with Zelda?’

Twilight Lady is, frankly, attractive. There is a fantastic, brooding feeling; yet the gameplay is enormously diverse; it has got a beautiful art design, one that I wish they’d kept for just one more game. It has also got some of the top dungeons in the show – I know this because since then I’ve been able to return and mop the current titles I missed – Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker – and love myself doing this. That’s why I’ll always adore Twilight Princess – it is the game that made me click using Zelda. JC

5.

However, some of its best moments have come when it stepped outside its own framework, left Hyrule and then Zelda herself and asked what Link might do next. The self-referential Link’s Awakening was just one, and that N64 sequel to Ocarina of Time a different. It required an even more revolutionary tack: bizarre, dark, and experimental.

Though there’s lots of comedy and experience, Majora’s Mask is suffused with despair, regret, and an off-kilter eeriness. Some of this stems out of its true awkward timed structure: the moon is falling around the Earth, that the clock is ticking and you can’t stop it, just reposition and start again, somewhat stronger and more threatening each moment. Some of it stems in the antagonist, the Skull Kid, who’s no villain but an innocent with a gloomy story who has contributed into the corrupting impact of their titular mask. Some of this comes from Link himself: a child again but with the grown man of Ocarina still somewhere inside himhe rides rootlessly into the land of Termina like he has got no better place to be, far from the hero of legend.

Mostly, it comes from the townsfolk of Termina, whose lifestyles Link observes moving towards the end of earth as well as their appointed paths, over and over again. Despite an unforgettable, surreal conclusion, Majora’s Mask’s key narrative is not among the series’ most powerful. But these bothering Groundhog Day subplots concerning the strain of normal life – reduction, love, family, job, and death, constantly death – find the show’ writing at its absolute finest. It’s a depression, compassionate fairytale of this everyday that, using its own ticking clock, needs to remind you that you can’t take it with you. OW

4.

If you have had kids, you will know that there’s unbelievably unexpected and touching moment if you are doing laundry – stay with me here – and those very small T-shirts and pants first begin to turn up on your washing. Someone else has come to live with you! Someone implausibly small.

This is among The Wind-Waker’s greatest tricks, I think. Link had been young before, but today, with all the gloriously toon-shaded shift in art direction, he really looks youthful: a Schulz toddler, enormous head and small legs, venturing out among Moblins and pirates and those mad birds that roost around the clifftops. Link is tiny and vulnerable, and so the adventure surrounding him sounds all the more stirring.

The other fantastic trick has a good deal to do with those pirates. This has become the normal Zelda question because Link to the Past, but with the Wind-Waker, there did not appear to be one: no alternate dimension, no switching between time-frames. Insteadyou had a crazy and briney sea, reaching out from all directions, an endless blue, flecked with abstracted breakers. The sea has been contentious: a lot of racing back and forth over a enormous map, so much time spent in crossing. But look at what it brings along with it! It brings pirates and sunken treasures and ghost ships. It brings underwater grottoes and a castle awaiting you in a bubble of air down on the seabed.

Best of all, it attracts that unending sense of renewal and discovery, one challenge down and another anticipating, as you hop from your ship and race up the sand towards another thing, your legs glancing through the surf, and your eyes already fixed on the horizon. CD

3.

Link’s Awakening is near-enough that a perfect Zelda game – it’s a huge and secret-laden overworld, sparkling dungeon design and memorable characters. It’s also a fever dream-set side-story with villages of speaking creatures, side-scrolling places starring Mario enemies and also a giant fish that sings the mambo. It was my first Zelda adventure, my entry point to the show and the game where I judge each other Zelda title. I absolutely love it. Not only was it my first Zelda, its greyscale planet was among the very first adventure games I played. I can still visualise much of it now – that the cracked floor in that cave from the Lost Woods, the stirring music because you input the Tal Tal Mountains, the shopkeeper electrocuting into an instant death in case you dared return into his shop after slipping.

There’s no Zelda, no Ganon. No Guru Sword. And while it still feels just like a Zelda, even after enjoying so many of the other people, its own quirks and personalities set it aside. Link’s Awakening packs an astounding amount onto its little Game Boy capsule (or even Game Boy Color, in case you played with its DX re-release). It’s a vital experience for any Zelda fan. TP

2. The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past

Bottles are OP in Zelda. Those humble glass containers may turn the tide of a battle if they contain a potion or – even better – a fairy. When I was Ganon, I’d postpone the wicked plotting and the dimension rifting, and I’d just set a solid fortnight into travelling Hyrule from top to bottom and smashing any glass bottles I came across. After that, my terrible vengeance are even more terrible – and there would be a sporting chance I may have the ability to pull off it too.

All of that means that, as Link, a bottle may be true reward. Real treasure. I believe you will find four glass bottles in Link to the Past, each one which makes you that little more powerful and that bit bolder, purchasing you assurance in dungeoneering and strike points at the midst of a bruising boss encounter. I can not recall where you get three of those bottles. But I can recall where you receive the fourth.

It is Lake Hylia, and when you’re like me, it is late in the game, with the major ticket items accumulated, that wonderful, genre-defining second near the top of the hill – in which one excursion becomes two – taken care of, along with handfuls of streamlined, ingenious, infuriating and educational dungeons raided. Late game Link to the Past is all about looking out every last inch of this map, so working out the way the two similar-but-different variations of Hyrule fit together.

And there’s a difference. A gap in Lake Hylia. An gap hidden by means of a bridge. And underneath it, a man blowing smoke rings by a campfire. He feels like the greatest key in all Hyrule, along with the prize for discovering him would be a glass boat, perfect for keeping a potion – or a fairy.

Connect to the Past feels like an impossibly smart match, pitched its map to two dimensions and requesting you to distinguish between them, holding equally arenas super-positioned on mind as you resolve a single, huge geographical puzzle. In truth, however, someone could probably replicate this layout when they had enough pens, enough quadrille paper, sufficient energy and time, and when they were determined and smart enough.

The greatest reduction of the digital age.

However, Link to the Past isn’t only the map – it’s the detailing, as well as the figures. It’s Ganon and his wicked plot, but it is also the man camping out beneath the bridge. Perhaps the whole thing’s a bit like a jar, then: that the container is more critical, but what you are really after is that the stuff that is inside . CD

1. Ocarina of Time

Perhaps with the Z-Targeting, a remedy to 3D combat so simple you hardly notice it is there. Or maybe you speak about an open world that is touched by the light and color cast by an internal clock, where villages dance with action by day before being captured by an eerie lull at nighttime. Think about the expressiveness of the ocarina itself, a superbly analogue device whose music has been conducted by the newest control afforded by the N64’s pad, notes flexed wistfully at the push of a pole.

Maybe, however, you simply focus in on the minute itself, a great picture of video games appearing aggressively from their very own adolescence as Link is throw so suddenly in an adult world. What’s most impressive about Ocarina of Time is how it came therefore fully-formed, the 2D adventuring of previous entries transitioning into three measurements as gracefully as a pop-up book folding swiftly into existence.

Thanks to Grezzo’s unique 3DS remake it has retained much of its verve and influence, and even putting aside its technical accomplishments it’s an experience that ranks among the series’ finest; emotional and uplifting, it is touched with all the bittersweet melancholy of growing up and leaving the childhood behind. From the story’s conclusion Connect’s childhood and innocence – and that of Hyrule – is heroically restored, but once that most revolutionary of reinventions, video games would never be the exact same again.