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What's the worst Zelda game?

Skyward Sword. Those motion controls...... Hate it so much.

second place PH. But the game itself is quite fun. Its just the damn time temple thats make the game so tedious and boring.

You ever get problems with motion detection? People complain, but you can fix that easy by testing and calibrating the sensor bar. You can go into settings on the console and tweak it to a perfect spot. You should try something with the worst motion controls like an early dated game. If you can tweak that to play decent, the motion plus games will plays pin point.
 
Easily Skyward Sword...I couldn't even finish it. First time that has ever happened in a Zelda game...just awful. I mean why the hell do you have to tell me what an item I pick up is again just because I closed the game....GTFO!!!!
 
Zelda 2. It fucking sucked with horrible controls.

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Wind Wanker

Sparse, empty overworld, boring-ass sailing, minimal amount of dungeons, just plain unfinished.

I haven't played Skyward Sword.
 
All the Skyward Sword hate in this thread is making me sad, sure it has flaws but it also has the best combat in the series and the best 3D underwater controls of any game I've played. I'd easily rate it above the boring retread that was Twilight Princess.
Countless underwater items I kept missing and having to U-turn only to miss them again says otherwise. There will be a day when a motion controls will be more accurate for swimming in a 3D space than an analog stick but SS in 2011 was not that day.
 
for me so far it's phantom hourglass. I haven't had a chance to play Spirit Tracks yet.

Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess are right down there as well.

All the Skyward Sword hate in this thread is making me sad, sure it has flaws but it also has the best combat in the series and the best 3D underwater controls of any game I've played. I'd easily rate it above the boring retread that was Twilight Princess.

surely you must be trolling
 
Honestly I'm going with Zelda II. Even the so-called "bad" Zelda games I have enjoyed to some extent (though none of them are bad), but Zelda II is the least playable to me personally.
 
Editing my post because I forgot Skyward Sword was a thing.

The worst IMO is probably Skyward Sword. The tedious tutorials, getting into the dungeons took forever, there was some dumb timed mechanic too, I don't quite remember what exactly it was, but it was this super stressful thing where you had to freeze time or dodge enemies while picking stuff off the ground. Ugh I hated it.

Previously my post said that Spirit Tracks & Windwaker were the worst but they're great compared to SS imo.

This thread reminded me that I still need to finish my replay of MM on 3DS, and I also have one of the seasons games on my 3DS that I haven't started yet. Too many games and so little time.
 
Excluding spinoffs like Link's Crossbow Training and the Four Swords games. And the CD-i ones don't count, because of course they don't.

No need for debate or anything, just say what you think the worst real Zelda game is.

Why even make this question if you are going to disqualify the objectively correct answers?

If you do this you just opne the thread for people to come and shit on each other's fave zelda.
 
Skyward Sword has frustrating design decisions with the menus, Fi and overall slowness of the text with pop-ups repeating every restart. But the game is so good! It has some great dungeons and those timeshift stones segments are too good to just write the game off as the worst Zelda. Then again, I actually am a big fan of the motion control implementation. I think it works great and led to some awesome boss battles too (including one of the best in the series).

Well, I can understand the frustrating elements (and repetitive environments) make it the worst in the series for some people since it's not an easy pick.
 
You ever get problems with motion detection? People complain, but you can fix that easy by testing and calibrating the sensor bar. You can go into settings on the console and tweak it to a perfect spot. You should try something with the worst motion controls like an early dated game. If you can tweak that to play decent, the motion plus games will plays pin point.
You're probably not the first to say this, and I'd like to bring up something I said in my earlier post ( and others have brought up as well probably ); I calibrated my WiiMote / sensor bar and while that would improve the accuracy of the controls, it still was never 100% accurate. Even right after calibration, the game would occasionally either just not do what I did or do it inaccurately enough that it was a problem. I'd say that, on my end, at best the WiiMote performance was maybe 90% accurate, right after calibration. A control scheme that does not accurately process your input around 10% of the time is just not fun to play with. To add to that, the calibration of my WiiMote apparently got worse over time, as I had to occasionally re-calibrate it after a while of playing, and almost always upon starting the game up. I tried moving away from my screen, standing, sitting, moving closer to my screen and moving the sensor bar around, but nothing resulted in any significant improvements on these issues.

So I get that for other people it apparently worked perfectly fine from the start and without much need for calibration, but my experience was different through no fault of my own, and I take that personal experience with me in how I think about the game. Telling me that you had a certain experience does not change the fact that I had a different experience with it. You may say you liked the controls and they worked fine and speak the truth and I may say the controls just did not work for me at all and also speak the truth; these things do not cancel each-other out.
 
Skyward sword has terrible boss fights. And the most terrible of them (Ghirahim and the Imprisoned) are repeated like 3 times each. I mean, Koloktos can make up for one of them, but not both damn.
 
Skyward sword. The motion controlls made that shit unplayable for me. As well as the "dousing". Fuck that game. Though tp is in my top 3 zeldas so maybe I have bad tastes?
 
My bottom five has always been:

Oracle titles
The Wind Waker HD
The Legend of Zelda
Link's Awakening
Ocarina of Time

The original version of the Wind Waker would drop a couple of spots to be just above OoT.

This is excluding the CD-i games obviously.

My tastes obviously don't match the general fanbase.
 
Phantom Hourglass is a good candidate because it's topped in every way by Spirit Tracks and wasn't exactly stellar in the first place. I'm assuming people saying Spirit Tracks just forgot about Phantom Hourglass?

I've owned all the Zelda games at one point or another and never finished A Link to the Past, it wasn't compelling enough for me. I wouldn't want to play Skyward Sword again either.
 
I've always been a mega-fan, so I've beaten them all at least twice, even the ones I didn't care for too much. From that experience, I'd say Phantom Hourglass is the worst of the main series by a distance.

LttP is the game where the public's opinion of it and mine diverge most sharply. I've never liked it, not at launch, not years later. But it's a good game.

Of the 3D ones, Twilight Princess.

Of the classic ones, Zelda 2.

Of the handheld ones, Phantom Hourglass.

This is a good answer.
 
I can't help but imagine people furiously throwing their Wiimotes around and then complain that Skyward Sword's controls don't work.
 
Idk, personally I don't care for the 2 games on the NES. I didn't play them when they were new, and they haven't aged very well IMO.

Also didn't love Skyward Sword.
 
That is one of the strangest Zelda opinions I've ever heard. Links Awakening gets nearly universal praise while the DS games are always derided.

no zelda opinion surprises me. I've seen every game ranked as both the best in the franchise and the worst.

i've seen the DS games at the top, and ocarina of time at the very bottom. yes.
 
I'll go with Phantom Hourglass, I'll never understand why it was loved so much at launch. I didn't enjoy moving around as Link due to the terribly implemented stylus-based controls, and the godawful Temple of the Ocean King definitely deserves a mention. Spirit Tracks is a close runner up, though. At least PH had a better overworld.
 
My bottom five has always been:

Oracle titles
The Wind Waker HD
The Legend of Zelda
Link's Awakening
Ocarina of Time

The original version of the Wind Waker would drop a couple of spots to be just above OoT.

This is excluding the CD-i games obviously.

My tastes obviously don't match the general fanbase.

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Do I get this right? You actually think that OoT and LA are the worst ones? That is indeed... unique. But I would agree that OoT is the least interesting 3D Zelda.

I guess I'll go with Spirit Tracks and Zelda 2. I actually enjoyed Phantom Hourglass quite a bit.
I'm also not a huge fan of Oracle of Ages. Loved it as a kid but replaying it on VC was pretty boring tbh.
 
I'll go with Phantom Hourglass, I'll never understand why it was loved so much at launch. I didn't enjoy moving around as Link due to the terribly implemented stylus-based controls, and the godawful Temple of the Ocean King definitely deserves a mention. Spirit Tracks is a close runner up, though. At least PH had a better overworld.

People were still in the 'Wow! I'm surprised that they were able to translate this game mechanic to touch controls!' stage, and saw that as this big new innovation.

The fact that each of those game mechanics was reduced and made less interesting by being touch controlled wasn't seen as such a big factor back then. But the fact that most enemies in the first third of the game just wobble slowly towards you because the game designers are so uncertain about the player's ability to move Link and swing the sword shows just how much the new control system hurt the core gameplay elements like combat.
 
I hated Windwaker the most. I didn't understand feeding the fish to get Triforce pieces and it took me over 3 hours to sweep the damn map and feed fish, even after I looked up how to teleport in a guide. That's like 10% of the game time up to that point feeding fish. Are you kidding me? I'll never forgive Nintendo for their sheer laziness.

I'd rather go do that temple in Phantom Hourglass for the 6th time, at least that had variety.
 
no zelda opinion surprises me. I've seen every game ranked as both the best in the franchise and the worst.

i've seen the DS games at the top, and ocarina of time at the very bottom. yes.

I'm not sure if I'd place ocarina of time at the bottom but I certainly never understood the love. It's one place above Twilight Princess as the weakest 3D Zelda.
 
In more modern terms, Phantom Hourglass is probably the most forgettable/"worst" one IMO, although I do admit to being pleasantly surprised by how well the touch controls worked. It's telling that the only things I remember from it were (a) the dungeon you had to go through multiple times and (b) the close-the-DS puzzle. It felt gimmicky in the way that many earlier DS games did, and came across as more of a showcase for the DS's features rather than showcasing the world of Zelda.
 
i played all 3d Zelda games except Skyword sword, can some one explain to me why is it hated so much by the fans ? is it just because of the controls of the wii mote ?
 
Spirit Tracks is the only one I couldn't even force myself through. Incredibly dull all-around.

As far as 3D goes, TP's probably the worst in my book but it's still a pretty decent game.
 
This thread be like

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Just replace "Videogames" with "[Insert Zelda Game of Choice Here]"

Phantom Hourglass was pretty forgettable
 
i played all 3d Zelda games except Skyword sword, can some one explain to me why is it hated so much by the fans ? is it just because of the controls of the wii mote ?

The controls are the best part IMO, people that complain about the controls usual just don't like motion controls in general.

As someone who likes the game, the worst parts were the story, the constant hand-holding text that resets every time you shut off the game (seriously, it will explain what heart pieces are every time you encounter them after shutting off the game), and a LOT of reused bosses/areas (although I personally enjoyed the return to the 3 main dungeon areas, I would even say they were the highlights).

Personally I think it has the best boss fights in the entire series and also the best combat by far. The twilight realm sections were very tense too (since it was the 25th anniversary game, it includes something from most of the other games, and the twilight segments were a sorta stealth-speedrun thing).
 
Probably the DS games. Easy, pretty ugly, by the numbers, uninspired. And also took the wonderful WW ending and ruined it.

ST was a little better gameplay wise - some of the dungeons were pretty good (Or at least not terrible), I guess... But the train and the story was nonsense.
 
Phantom Hourglass is a good candidate because it's topped in every way by Spirit Tracks and wasn't exactly stellar in the first place. I'm assuming people saying Spirit Tracks just forgot about Phantom Hourglass?

I've owned all the Zelda games at one point or another and never finished A Link to the Past, it wasn't compelling enough for me. I wouldn't want to play Skyward Sword again either.
For me PH wasnt topped by ST at all. Maybe dungeon design, but in not really picky about that in my Zelda games. I liked Wind Waker a lot, so being able to have a pared down ocean to explore on a handheld was pretty cool. The ST world just wasn't enjoyable to explore.

ST has that stupid flute (blow into the microphone and slide the touch screen), and navigating the over world sucked because of that train, especially once they added evil trains. It even had the same kind of central dungeon you returned to like PH had, but I guess people just liked the Princess Zelda ghost mechanic more than PH's dungeon. (I think a lot of people missed the shortcuts you get in the PH main dungeon, I don't remember having to replay much of that dungeon because you're basically able to skip to the new floor really quickly, which ST does with the spiral staircase if I remember right)

The controls in both games were fine, but I think after playing PH I was pretty much done with them and didn't need to play a game like that ever again, so ST having it again made it a worse game for me.
 
People were still in the 'Wow! I'm surprised that they were able to translate this game mechanic to touch controls!' stage, and saw that as this big new innovation.

The fact that each of those game mechanics was reduced and made less interesting by being touch controlled wasn't seen as such a big factor back then. But the fact that most enemies in the first third of the game just wobble slowly towards you because the game designers are so uncertain about the player's ability to move Link and swing the sword shows just how much the new control system hurt the core gameplay elements like combat.

Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable explanation. The controls have probably aged poorly, too, so I'm sure that it's even harder to enjoy it if you're playing it for the first time now.
 
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