7 Hardest Legend Of Zelda Games, Ranked
The Legend of Zelda franchise has resisted the pull of time, attempting to make it outdated constantly over the years. Moving from top-down dungeon crawler in the 80s to the 3D updates in the 90s and the various jumps in the artistic style of the 00s. This franchise refuses to die or wilt away from every new release being a massive moment for the gaming community.
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With the recent release of Tears of the Kingdom, The Legend of Zelda franchise has once again shown that it is atop the world of gaming. But over the years, one thing that has shifted and changed is the difficulty of the games being released. While modern Zelda adventures are incredible, many fans ask if they are as hard as the older games in the franchise.
7 Ocarina Of Time
Of all the many different titles that have been released in The Legend of Zelda franchise, there are few that have achieved the level of legendary success that Ocarina of Time managed, inspiring so many other games. Having one of the most ambitious stories in gaming, which was so expansive for its time that it ended up defining the very strange timeline of the Zelda franchise, Ocarina of Time is one of the best games ever.
Ocarina Of Time was the first Zelda game in 3D, and this meant that it was the first for trying out a completely different style of controls. While it did a great job, the controls were more difficult as a result than some of the later games in the franchise would provide. Ocarina Of Time also boasted an impressive list of bosses like the Death Hand or Volvagia, raising the difficulty for players by another few notches.
6 Oracle Of Ages
Something interesting about Oracle of Ages is that, despite being released simultaneously for the Game Boy Advance with Oracle of Seasons, the game is different enough that it can easily be called the more difficult of the two.
While Nintendo’s similar efforts with Pokémon games being simultaneously released almost always end up with a similar level of difficulty across the board, Oracle of Ages had one massive point going for its difficulty. This was the sheer complexity of some puzzles, which many fans point at as the hardest overall game for puzzles in the entire Legend of Zelda franchise. Players are still finding tricks to help with the high difficulty of these games today.
5 Majora’s Mask
Majora’s Mask was another 3D Zelda game that upped the challenge beyond what some of the more recent attempts in that realm have accomplished. There were some significant changes post-Ocarina, but the games used the same dungeon, and Majora’s Mask lessened the number of dungeons in order to focus on each individual one as its own larger challenge.
Majora’s Mask is an especially difficult game if players attempt to go for every mask, usually a Zelda 100% run isn’t so common but in Majora’s Mask, it feels perfectly reasonable for gamers to go on and collect everything, which makes for a lot of extra brutal work.
4 A Link To The Past
A Link To The Past had it all, it was the first great story in a Zelda game, there was a much more open feel to it, and it was still in the early era when gamers weren’t always told what to do or where to go explicitly. This in itself helped to increase the challenge of the game by a significant amount and made gamers feel like there was a lot of real reward in defeating the game.
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A Link To The Past wasn’t afraid of making gamers feel the challenge of wandering through hordes of enemies with nothing but a sword and hope. Gamers have taken to this with a large speed-running community because there are just so many dungeons and secrets that keep the difficulty raised, even for experienced players who have been through it all before. All of this has led to gamers continuing to revere this game even today.
3 The CD-I Trilogy
It would be difficult to choose just one, but the entire idea of the CD-I trilogy of Legend of Zelda games was that the system would be able to run the control system without it being incredibly difficult, and that didn’t work out exactly, making all three games incredibly difficult to play.
The Wand of Gamelon, Faces of Evil & Zelda’s Adventure were created through a Nintendo/Phillips deal, but the controls and way that players had to fight were all just so difficult that most gamers have never even tried to find a way to play through these entries in the franchise now.
2 The Legend of Zelda
The original Legend of Zelda game is very special to gamers today, it is a piece of history that is nearly forty years old, and it remains ingenious. But the controls have aged and are tricky, the style of games in that day was incredibly unforgiving and wanted players to have more of a struggle than games seek to create today, and the enemies made for intentionally distressing combat.
The Legend of Zelda was by no means the longest game to complete, even at that time, but the capabilities of the NES make this and most games for that platform seem even more difficult today by comparison with anything newer.
1 Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link
Zelda II is the oft-called black sheep of the Legend of Zelda franchise. There is one primary reason for this, the difficulty. The Adventure of Link was brutal, it created a 2D platformer where players had to fight a huge number of far more difficult enemies than the first game, all while Link was far weaker, and had worse range.
Most Legend of Zelda fans will revisit the first game and then skip over this one when playing through the series, due to the crazy difficulty and learning curve that has to be put in to get a victory over Dark Link. The Legend of Zelda franchise hasn’t often returned to side-scrolling platformers after this crazy entry.
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Source: GameRant
