Link to the Past. Partially the nostalgia hit, but even going back and playing it today just feels good IMO.

I really liked Spirit Tracks.

Train gameplay was actually enjoyable for me (especially the way it got used in one of the end game fights was so cool). It was also nice that Zelda was an actual part of the game and helped solve puzzles instead of some princess locked away in a castle.

I played Phantom Hourglass much later and Spirit Tracks honestly just felt much more polished and fun.

Ocarina of Time, for sure

I’ve only ever played the two Oracle games on gameboy color, they were excellent. Never dinished Ages though, too damn difficult. Something about this format (topdown, block-based…) works really well with my brain

Maybe I’m getting to be an old head but it’s OoT for sure

A link to the past for sure, it’s one of the greatest games of all time. My favorite modern Zelda is skyward sword, the dungeons in that game were so well crafted it’s insane the amount of effort and detail they contain. Least favorite has got to be breath of the wild, it’s a wonderful open world game, but an absolutely horrible Zelda game.

Old guy who has played every Zelda game there is. Breath of the Wild wins.

I’ve been playing the series since LttP. Twilight Princess is my top, for presentation and storytelling.

I feel like Skyward Sword tried to repeat that, but the dungeons and style / atmosphere of the world of TP still come out on top (even though I’m not very much into gothic style and furries). I think SS is way too cartoonish and happy-go-lucky for a world where the surface has been abandoned to the demons and yet everyone who lives there is cool (gorons, kiwis, moles, proto-Zora), that’s a massive tonal dissonance between the narration and the actual environment and it just takes me out.

The next ones on my top list are Minish Cap and Link Between Worlds.

Link’s Awakening. I played the shit out of that on GameBoy. If you knew the screen skip glitch you could break that game wide open.

My top three:

1. A Link to the Past. Basically gave the Legend of Zelda its identity, so many staple mechanics, so much lore, comes from this game. First appearance of the Master Sword, the idea of Ganondorf as a king of thieves/sorcerer before becoming a pig monster, Kakariko village. The creation myth with the three golden goddesses came from here. In fact, there’s a passage in the manual that basically reads like the design document for the next 30 years in the series, look it up. Gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, and it’s amazing how it has lasted with the randomizer community.

2. Ocarina of Time. A sequel which referred to previous entries and expanded on the lore without shitting on it. Imagine that! It’s amazing how right they got it as basically the first attempt of a game like this in 3D, even if controller technology had some evolving to do.

3. Breath of the Wild. While it does get a bit samey since there’s only so many enemies to encounter, and exploring the world will result in finding shrines or koroks, the openness with which it approaches puzzles aka “just get to the goal, we don’t care how.” I find very refreshing compared to the previous “you’re in a room with a lock and a key. Bet you can’t find the only existing solution to this puzzle” dynamic the games increasingly had.

My bottom three:

1. Skyward Sword. The artwork is charming, the soundtrack has a few gems in it but is mostly short repetitive and annoying loops, a lot of the gameplay elements are just blatantly recycled from Twilight Princess. The mysterious floating girl who flies back a distance when Link approaches to lead him somewhere would have been more effective if the Zora Queen’s shade hadn’t done it a few years earlier, and I fully expected Fi to explain the collect the light fruit games by saying “Yes Master, ‘this shit again’.” Combine that with the frankly terrible motion controls crammed in as much as possible and the “Master, I have detected a 97.3333% chance that the man you just talked to said that he lives here in town” nature of it all…fuck this game.

2. Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.

3. Tears of the Kingdom. Never before has a game been this much mile wide and inch deep. The story barely exists, there is more content in the Hudson & Rhondson’s daughter storyline than in the main story quest. There are two different crafting mechanics added to the game, plus the one from Breath of the Wild, but none are really explored because there’s no room, there’s no time. In addition to the original map, there’s the entire sky and the entire underground, both full of basically nothing. They could have gotten two games out of the concepts found in this one and explored the individual mechanics a lot more, but no. This game is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Gotta be Breath of the Wild, for me. Taken together with Tears of the Kingdom, the series’ storytelling and immersion has never been better, I think, and as a game, Breath of the Wild was the tighter, more-satisfying experience, overall.

Wind Waker is a veeerrrrrrry close second. I think it’s the most-polished entry in the whole series, in both categories. I’m really not sure what I would change, if given the chance.

Twilight Princess is the perfect LOZ game

Link to the Past for being my first. Twilight Princess for the modern era.

The Wind Waker for me. At the time, the open world and sea felt so massive, and the colorful cell-shaded graphics made me feel like I was immersed in a cartoon. I played other Zelda games before, but it was the first one to hold my attention all the way to the end. To me, it’s one of those games I wish I could experience again for the first time.

Honestly, I think Wind Waker is and I didn’t like it when it came out. The art style has grown on me over the years, the combat is satisfying without being to complicated, and the exploration is fun and unique for a Zelda game.