Zelda Series Playthrough Wrap-Up

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With my Zelda series lite playthrough done and my rankings locked in I just wanted to take a bit to reflect on how I feel after sampling the series in order.  Once again, here's how the rankings shook out for me personally:
  1. A Link Between Worlds (2013)
  2. A Link to the Past (1991) 
  3. The Wind Waker (2002)
  4. Oracle of Seasons (2001)
  5. Oracle of Ages (2001)
  6. Majora's Mask (2000)
  7. Ocarina of Time (1998)
  8. The Legend of Zelda (1987)
  9. Tri Force Heroes (2015)
  10. Twilight Princess (2006)
  11. Link's Awakening (1993)
  12. The Minish Cap (2004)
  13. Skyward Sword (2011)
  14. Spirit Tracks (2009)
  15. Phantom Hourglass (2007)
  16. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988)
The most surprising thing for me is how poorly the 3D Zelda games held up.  I enjoyed most of them a lot the first time I played them but going back to them in the greater context of the whole series made them feel clunky, slow, and just generally not as compelling.  Their 2D counterparts held up much better than I remembered and A Link to the Past completely blew me away with how great it still is.  It's one of the few games that I played through entirely, even though I decided to only do a lite sampling of the series.

Speaking of which, I'm happy I ended up tackling the series that way.  If I had committed to playing through and beating all these games I know I would have gotten bored and given up somewhere along the way.  A lot of them just don't hold up to my modern gaming standards, even if I loved them at the time.

Looking at my list, at this point I would only willingly replay the top five games on there.  I would still recommend a lot of the others to people if I knew their taste in gaming and knew they hadn't played some of the classics but there are also a few I will always steer people away from.

In a way this series playthrough was kind of weird for me.  My Final Fantasy series playthrough reaffirmed my love of that series and how great it is.  This Zelda playthrough has shown me how amazing a few of the games in the series are but it's also brought to light that I really don't like a lot of the games as much as I thought I did.

Before this I was considering someday, maybe, getting a Triforce tattoo.  Now I'm definitely not going to do that.

Overall, this was a fun project to tackle and I'm glad I did it.  Mostly it's just made me excited to see what they do with Breath of the Wild when it comes out next year.

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