The Legend of Zelda Part 1

YOU HAVE HAD FAIR WARNING!!!!!!!!!! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!!!!!

Back in 2011, when the Legend of Zelda series turned 25 years old, I embarked on a quest to play every Legend of Zelda game.  I had owned every game in the series for quite some time, but had always been immensely distracted by my other gaming conquests.  I felt that the 25th Annieversary of the series was as good of a time as any to play them all and after a few years of reflection (and second play throughs of all the games) I have decided that now is the time to rank them.  I have put an immense amount of thought into this list over the past few years and hopefully it will spark some interesting conversation.

Ironically, I have to start this list with my least favorite game in the Zelda series:

16. The Adventure of Link (1987 Nintendo Entertainment System)

This is without a doubt the most controversial game in the Zelda series.  I would wager that most people who start this game never even come close to finishing it (How some people can say this is their favorite in the series is astounding to me).  I however have played this game twice in preparation for this blog (so you don't have to) and I can safely say that this game is one of the most frustrating gaming experiences I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing.  The game has an extreme level of difficulty, coupled with several unfortunate features that really make this game just plain rage inducing.  The game itself begins on the screen above with absolutely zero explanation as to what is going on, what your motivations are, or even an explanation of who the chick in the bed is.  If you happened to have the original manual for the game (I did not when I first played this and the internet was not yet a thing) then you would know that the woman in the bed is Princess Zelda, put into a deep sleep by an evil Wizard and a power hungry Prince who will stop at nothing to get the Triforce.  Link is charged with saving Zelda and is given 6 crystals which will unlock the doors in the temples and stop Ganon's crew from destroying the world!  So the story exists I suppose, but it certainly does not exist when you play the game.  Any NPC you talk to either tells you that you have to stop Ganon or rescue Zelda, not all that much in terms of actual story.

Upon exiting the first area  there's a moment (albeit a short one) when you think that the game might actually be ok.

There's a clearly mark path (maybe you go that way!), some trees, water, and mountains!  Look at all the places immediately available to you!  However, moments later as you begin walking it all goes horribly wrong.  The image on the right shows how battles in this game work.  As you are walking in the overworld, black sprites will randomly start moving around causing you to enter a battle screen (of sorts) when you run into them.

During these battles Link earns experience points, based on which enemies he kills, that increase either your attack power, hearts, or magic.  Now, this would be a cool system if you could control which stats get increased at what time, but alas, you cannot.  That's how so many things in this game work, they seem like initially cool ideas but they tend to fall flat on their face.  The image below shows a very typical battle screen, containing weaker and stronger enemies.  As you continue along in the game, the amount of experience you earn from each enemy barely increases (max you can get from any enemy is 50 points), while the amount of experience needed to gain a level goes up by over 500 points each time (maxing out at 9000).

  This leveling up system turns combat into a completely boring grind as you continually fight the same enemies over and over again, gaining little to often zero experience from enemies (only the first three or four stronger enemies on each screen give you experience).  Because this game is difficult, you can never just go through the game normally and hope to level up along the way.  Unlike most modern RPG's, you do not keep your experience points in this game when you get a game over.  So to actually level up in this game you have to find an area close to a town and fight the same enemies over and over; heading to the town to heal every ten minutes or so.  To make this whole process that much more difficult, the hit box for Link's sword is so small that unless you swing at the exact moment, you will miss and get hit by the enemy you were trying to kill.  This all wouldn't be so bad if you had a decent amount of health, but of course you don't.  Your life bar increases amazingly slowly as it has to wait for three more level gains before it can go up again.  So during the initial parts (the entire game really) you are constantly struggling to make progress due to lack of health and lack of magic to heal yourself.  All of this is further ruined by the fact that you only get three lives.  Once you lose that third life, this screen pops up:

Prepare to see this screen over and over again.  Because you will die over and over and over and over again.  When you die you (thankfully) get to keep the spells you have earned however you start off back at the opening screen with sleeping Zelda.  You literally have to backtrack over and over again, hoping against all hope you won't die en route (and trust me you will) so that just maybe you can advance further in the game (Eventually you can break some rocks and make the back tracking A BIT less tedious, but it's actually really easy to miss the spell that let's you do this.  Trust me, I didn't get it my first play through).  None of this is helped by the fact that as you make your way across the map you will encounter several towns along the way, all of which have a Wizard of some kind that teaches you a spell.  These spells are often useless beyond getting past a certain section of the map or killing one specific enemy.  My least favorite of them all is the "Jump" spell, whose literal only use is to allow Link to jump up to one ledge inside one cave in order to advance further in the game.   It's the same story for most of the other spells as well.  Good luck trying to figure out how to get the spells in the first place though, as each town, apart from the background color and the color of the houses, is completely indistinguishable from the one before it; as if that wasn't bad enough all of the NPC's are one of six different sprites.

I really could go on and on about how piss poor this game is.  I could tell you about each dungeon and how the puzzles, when they do come around, amount to nothing more than touch this thing and find where to go next.  The bosses are all either way too easy or way too hard and honestly, even getting to each boss is an accomplishment in and of itself.  Best of all, after all that work you put in, after all those enemies you painstakingly killed, after finding a few 50 experience point bags (enemies will occasionally drop these), you arrive at the boss of each temple for the first time and it it kills you (not once during this game was I able to beat a boss on the first try) which sends you back to the beginning again, all experience points obtained for that level will be lost.  Worst though of all of these things, Nintendo both created and shamed one of the most iconic names in the Zelda Universe: Dark Link.

This is the final boss of Adventure of Link.  After you get through the final dungeon, after you beat what you thought was the final boss, you arrive at Dark Link.  For those of you that remember the epic battle between Link and Dark Link in Ocarina of Time (many people's first experience with the character) , this fight will disappoint you to no end.  There are two ways to enter into this fight: you can go at it the traditional way, hoping that you can land some hits while you jump and swing your sword (highly unlikely considering you will probably have very little health/lives left) OR you can do what I'm sure 95% of people who beat this game have done (Link to Dark Link fight easy completion).   This game is an exercise in mediocrity and can be described as nothing short of self-mutilation.  Maybe this game was ahead of its time, maybe it had great ideas but poor execution, maybe......honestly I can't talk about this game anymore, it makes me sick.  Play it if you really want to but I have to recommend you play on the 3DS with save states.  Normally, I would completely deplore this kind of action when playing any video game but really, the game is zero fun without them and trust me, even with the ability to reload save states you will still die and gamble and make sacrifices.  This game is brutal, awful, and a pock mark on the Zelda series.  Even Miyamoto came out recently and said that this game was his most disappointing ever.  When Miyamoto says that, something about this game is horribly horribly wrong.

I am glad to say that this is the only Zelda game out of all 16 of them that I truly do not enjoy playing.  I wish that maybe they could take the same ideas and remake it into a semi-modern experience, but honestly I don't think anything can fix all of the problems this game has.  Thanks for reading!  Come back tomorrow and find out which is #15!