- Tears of the Kingdom
- Majora’s Mask
- Breath of the Wild
- Ocarina of Time
- Skyward Sword
- Twilight Princess
- Wind Waker
My ranking might change in the future but right now I put the most recent entry at the top. Tears is flawed for sure but nonetheless one of the most awe inspiring games I have ever played. Every corner I turned there was something to pique my curiosity, every 5 minutes the game did something to surprise me. The fact that it leaves such an impression despite being literally built on the foundation of its predecessor is testament to the strength of its ideas and their implementation. Two months later I still keep thinking about it and have to fight the urge to replay it in the hopes that they will release Master Mode difficulty for it.
It's closely followed by Majora’s Mask which will most likely forever stand out as the most unique entry. It’s weird, it’s unsettling and emotionally resonant in ways that games rarely manage to be. Its time travel conceit is not just a neat gameplay twist but the central thematic lynchpin. Every time I go back to it I’m taken in by Termina and its inhabitants, twisted and often tragic reflections of Hyrule. It just goes to show how much you can do with very little.
BotW is a highly meditative and sublime experience, a game greater than the sum of its parts and the first 3D entry that managed to recapture that sense of adventure from the very first game. Zelda was starting to become more and more about following someone else's story rather than writing your own and BotW put the player back in the driver's seat. I was worried that the sequel might make it obsolete but I see them more as two sides of the same coin. Where TotK is all about community, BotW is about loneliness, nature and introspection. TotK pushed the mechanical complexity up to 11 whereas BotW still has its deceptive simplicity.
OoT is the blueprint, the most perfect execution of the formula and every game following in its footsteps has failed to match it. It has a little bit of Tolkien/Middle Earth syndrome in that it feels almost a bit generic or vanilla these days because later games (even from other series) mined so much from it. However, over the years its become even more apparent how expertly crafted it is and how it strikes that perfect balance of overworld and dungeon gameplay, something that later entries mostly failed at.
Then there's a big gap...
Skyward Sword is easily the "worst" game on this list but nonetheless an interesting (and in retrospect necessary) experiment in blending the series' various "layers". In the context of the series I respect it more for trying out new things even though it stumbles a lot. If it weren't for its misguided approach to repetitive content I think it could have been one of the all time greats.
This was a commonly expressed sentiment back in the day but the longer I dwell on it, the more Twilight Princess feels like a pastiche of Ocarina of Time. It's what you get if you took that game and just wanted to make something better without understanding what made it great in the first place, "improving" its various elements without any regard of how everything fits together. Twilight Princess has some of the best dungeons in the series and obviously Midna so I can't hate it for that alone. But it completely drops the ball when it comes to the connective tissue. It's also a really ugly game and they somehow managed to remove the only sliver of character it had from the HD version. I never expected a Zelda game to have this little sauce.
I will never forgive gamers for prematurely condemning Wind Waker when its aesthetic trappings turned out to be the few redeeming elements. It's not a bad game per se but just an exceedingly boring one most of the time. Almost everything in it feels a bit undercooked: The simplistic dungeons, the drab overworld, the intriguing story that just somehow peters off at the end. Even as a teenager, when I wasn't super tuned into the development side of games, I could feel that Wind Waker was unfinished. Revisiting it with the HD version just drove that point further home. Still, probably the most fun and charming rendition of Link and great vibes.