The most overrated & underrated Zelda games?

Most overrated is easily Ocarina of Time, some refer to it as the best game of all time when in reality it's at best a mediocre, choppy, laggy, ugly mess of a shallow experience about unoriginal things as saving the princess from the bad guy, a story full of holes, poorly implemented time travel, uninteresting stock environments, an empty and boring hubworld that only serves to waste time until you unlock the ability to mostly skip it entirely, overly cryptic and annoying puzzles or overly easy and simplistic and annoying puzzles with no good middleground, topped off with awful controls, repetitive music and fetch quests galore!
It has a handful things that are okay but the vast majority of it is pure unfiltered garbage and the few okay things don't even begin to make up for all the shit, by far one of the worst games on the N64 and that says a lot for that shitfactory of a console when that is regarded as one of it's finest, which is very sad as there are a tiny handful games on it that are actually good.

Most underrated are easily the three CDi games, they're truly awful, yes, but by Zelda standards they're only worse than the very best in the series and they're far from the worst, yet they're usually referred to as some of the worst games of all time, yeah, newsflash, as bad as they truly are there are still thousands of games worse than any of those three turds and several of them are other Zelda games from Nintendo themselves on Nintendo's own consoles.

How dare you call Ocarina of Time overrated! You uncultured swine! 

I kid I kid

Most overrated: any given 3D entry, they're all serviceable but I personally wouldn't put them much higher than that.

Most underrated: I don't know if they're underrated but a lot of people seem to forget that the portable entries exist. I enjoyed my playthrough of Link Between Worlds, I really should get to those gameboy entries someday.

The most underrated is probably Zelda II. The other games that tend to be seen as bad, like Phantom Hourglass, really are very mediocre entries. Zelda II might be very flawed, but man is it a great NES game overall.

For overrated... I would say Twilight Princess. It's not as highly rated nowadays, but it got really good review scores when it was released and was praised as the second coming of Ocarina of Time during its hype campaign. I tried playing it and, well, it might've been the most boring game ever. I played it for around four or five hours and all of it was a condescending tutorial.

1) Cosmic Karnage is better than Ocarina of Time. lol

2) I liked 3: Link to the Past. I'm enjoying Oracle of Seasons right now.

3) Does Hyrule Warriors count?

4) Link's Awakening maybe getting a remake? Copypasta'ed from Forbes:

Of all The Legend of Zelda games, the original Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy is still my favorite. Its focused design and carefully honed craftsmanship make it eminently playable even today. So it fills me with mixed feelings to hear rumors of a remake of the game coming to the 3DS.

Currently, there are rumors from a variety of sources that claim a remake of Link’s Awakening may be in development at Grezzo. If you don’t know who they are, they did the excellent remakes of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask for the 3DS. Grezzo also made the rather great Ever Oasis on the 3DS and while that was critically well received it didn’t exactly do great in terms of its sales, which is a pity.

The interesting part in all this is that the game is being touted more as a spiritual successor to Link’s Awakening, a bit like a Link Between Worlds was for Link to the Past and that it will take inspiration from Breath of the Wild.

Apparently, the plan was to have this new 3DS game released last year but it was delayed due to gameplay changes. Again, that sounds promising if true because the more time a development team has in the backend to polish a game, the better it will be.



My only concern is that Link’s Awakening, for me at least, is the perfect Zelda game. It took everything it needed to from the NES and SNES games and whittled that down into something compact and focused. There was very little fat in game design terms, which in part was because the same team had already developed The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, also on the Game Boy, and that was almost a dry run for Link's Awakening.



As with all rumors, I am taking all of this with a large pinch of salt. However, I am definitely curious to see what this may end up as, especially as Eiji Aonuma already said there was a new Zelda game in development not that long ago. The only interesting takeaway from all this is that if this rumor is true, it shows that Nintendo is not done with the 3DS quite yet.


5) Link, Zelda will never give you that kiss. Hook up with Marin instead. 

teddykongcountry - The Oracle games are just SO GREAT. Especially when played in sequence and using the password system to get the complete ending. I played Seasons first and then Ages; next time, I'll play Ages first to see if there's much difference.

stratogustav - I don't know, I was bored even before the wolf parts. Even the very beginning of the game and the first dungeon already had a strange feeling to me, almost like Nintendo was really afraid that the players would not understand the game - every single step I took was heavily tutorialized with a lot of text boxes explaining everything. I thought it would be just in the first village and dungeon, but the tutorial messages kept going on and on and on, which was especially strange because the game was much more linear than any other Zelda before it and didn't present any new gameplay mechanics that needed explanation. I still want to give it a second try in the future, but it certainly felt like the worst Zelda game I've ever played.

centipede - Link's Awakening is my favourite game in the series and one of my favourite games ever. I would love a remake of it made similar to A Link Between Worlds or even as a full 3d game, though I find it hard to believe that Nintendo would be producing it for the 3DS. With the recent remakes (OoT and Majora EDIT: also Wind Waker and Twilight Princess HD) and semi-sequels (ALBW), I don't think it's impossible that they are developing or at least considering it; I just think it's improbable that such a big release would still grace the 3DS. Well, if it happens, count me in as first in the line to play it, I just love that game.

What are your opinions on Minish Cap? I remember enjoying it when I played, but I barely remember anything of the game now, which is a bad sign. It's also not a very famous entry in the series. As I don't remember much, I don't know if it's an underrated game or just a middle-of-the-road one.

but twilight princess came before okami.