The Legend of Zelda games, ranked

31.12.2023 - 15:57 / polygon.com

Throughout 2023, in honor of the magnificent Tears of the Kingdom, Polygon has been celebrating Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series. It’s been fascinating. Perhaps no other video game series is so rewarding to revisit, or presents such wildly different, refracted visions of its core idea — which nevertheless remains consistent throughout.

Created by the great Shigeru Miyamoto in the 1980s as an expression of his childhood love of exploring without a map, Zelda has always held a revered position in gaming culture, although it never quite enjoyed popular success to match — not, that is, until its unlikely rebirth in 2017, thanks to the runaway success of the Nintendo Switch and the revolutionary design of Breath of the Wild.

The series’ strong traditions are balanced by an ingrained habit of hitting the reset button. Across 16 mainline entries, only a small handful (Majora’s Mask, Phantom Hourglass, Tears of the Kingdom) are true sequels, and even these delight in reinvention. The Zelda timeline is more a tangle of rumor and myth than an established canon, and its lore is constantly rewritten.

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Ranking these brilliant, shapeshifting games is, in some ways, an absurd task. They’re all great (well, perhaps all but one); the top seven or so are masterpieces that could be arranged in just about any order. But it’s an interesting exercise in exploring a series of games that exist in a unique, echoing conversation with each other. In putting this ranking together, we paid at least as much attention to how fun the games are to play now as to their historical import.

A few points of order: Though they’re technically part of the main Zelda canon, we have excluded the multiplayer games Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, and Tri Force Heroes. They’re difficult to play as their makers intended now, and honestly feel more like spinoffs (though Four Swords Adventures, in particular, absolutely rules). Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, which were released as a pair, Pokémon-style, are counted as a single entry. And actual spinoffs like Link’s Crossbow Training or Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland are also excluded. The Zelda series is gloriously weird — but maybe not that weird.

Original release: 1987, on NES
Where to play now: Nintendo Switch Online

If the original The Legend of Zelda is the series at its most youthful, exuberant, and promising, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link represents the games’ awkward teen years. Fittingly, the Link we play in Zelda 2 is 16 years old, fumbling his way through new gameplay territory, as Nintendo explores the lite role-playing mechanics from a side-scrolling perspective. Spread across overworld segments of dangerous exploration and equally harrowing side-scrolling