Game Discussion of The Week: The Legend of Zelda series

Are we just discussing the NES games here?

Series are often too heavy to discuss all games at the same time. I don't even remember how the whole series thread thing started. These were supposed to be game by game. It's alright though, but game by game is more appropriate.

Some of the 2D ones are okay, a couple of the 3D ones are playable. For a series this old you'd think they would've worked out the kinks by now, but nope, every new game is plagued with issues other developers left in the 80s where they belong.

Easily the most overrated series in gaming, closely followed by most other Nintendo franchises and Final Fantasy (as a series).

I never played any of them, but I wouldn't call them bad. But I guess everyone is entitled to their opinions.

I like the 2d entries better than the 3D entries from what I've played. Maybe it should've at least been split up like that because trying to talk about the series as a whole is not easy to do. To try and sum it up, I like how Zelda 1 actually gets the adventure portion of this action-adventure series right and is pretty open-ended, even though it has some questionable design choices. I like A Link to the Past because even though it starts some of the trends that would define the series later on, it still has excellent and relatively fast pacing which makes it fun to play.

My problem with the 3d games is that they don't excel at any single aspect in my opinion except for music or atmosphere, which I don't consider gameplay-related anyway. Not to say that any one game really does anything particularly bad either (aside from maybe pacing), but the games are just okay/mediocre to me. The adventure part is lacking since the majority of the games are almost on-rails and at most you'll get to make a slight change on what dungeon order you'll be doing or you'll get some stupid shit like find like skulltullas or poe souls. In MM's defense it actually had some good sidequests but the dungeon quality (and quantity) seemed to take a hit. Speaking of dungeons, while they're designed well enough for the most part, the puzzles that make up a majority of them usually aren't hard or thought provoking at all and often just serve to break the pace. Most of them aren't outright bad, but since puzzle-solving makes up such a large portion of these games it's a shame that they offer so little. The combat is the one thing I'll give a pass to the older 3d games, since it was actually good for it's time in terms of 3d adventure games. Still, it's very rare to be in a situation that's even remotely challenging let alone one that requires you take advantage of all your abilities, so it feels like somewhat of a waste. Also the bosses are a pretty boring affair. Again, I'm not saying that I think the 3D games are bad, but that they're just average in my opinion. Maybe BotW will change my mind on the 3D games once I decide the Switch is worth buying.

The series is bad, genuinely bad, it's incoherent, hasn't evolved well at all with some newer games having issues the older games didn't, you have little to no idea what to expect when a new game comes along, the quality is all over the place, one game can be perfectly fine, another can be downright crap, it has some good games in it, some even borderlining on greatness that sadly fall short due to unfortunate design choices and such, but as a series on a whole it's still bad, I won't pretend otherwise due to fanboy hype and popularity.

Nintendo is the Justin Bieber of gaming and The Legend of Zelda in like one of his most popular "albums" or whatever popstars release these days. iTunes downloadable albums maybe? I don't know, popular music is pure cancer. My point is, popularity and name brand recognition doesn't impress me, they actually need a good product for me say it's good and The Legend of Zelda series on a whole is a bad product.

It's like a Kinder egg, you never really know what you'll get, at best it's a small amount of good chocolate and a cheap little toy you get to assemble yourself that probably breaks off at least one pin before you even have it put together, but more often than not it's a fucking paper jigsaw puzzle or a stupid looking figure you don't even get to assemble yourself, leaving you disappointed and cheated of a good time.