IGN lists top ten Zelda games of all-time

IGN often take it upon themselves to devise top ten lists, which can sometimes be controversial, but what’s a good list without some form of controversy? This time, the team have revealed their top ten games in the acclaimed The Legend of Zelda series. You are unlikely to be shocked by their No.1 pick for the all-time best Zelda game. So without further ado, here’s IGN’s top ten games in The Legend of Zelda series.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
2. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
3. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
4. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
5. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
6. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
7. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
8. The Legend of Zelda
9. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons
10. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

On The Legend Zelda: Breath of the Wild being No.1 Zelda game:

“The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvented a 30-year-old series in a way we rarely see. After Skyward Sword offered a slightly more linear, story-driven campaign than most fans were used to, Breath of the Wild readjusted dramatically in the opposite direction. Suddenly you could go anywhere and climb anything in any order you wanted, and goodness gracious was there a whole lot to choose from.

There are plenty of fair criticisms to throw at Breath of the Wild, with common ones being its lack of traditional Zelda dungeons and items. But what’s truly impressive is how much it maintained the heart of a Zelda game even as it altered nearly every system around it. To a certain extent, Zelda has always been about exploration and choice, and Breath of the Wild simply leaned into and enabled those aspects of itself above all else, now making the world a place that would react to those choices as well. There’s just so much to see, so many people to meet and secrets to find hidden throughout this long-since devastated version of Hyrule.

But while the options available to you are enormous in scale, there’s a subtle restraint at play here as well, with Nintendo refraining from cramming your mini-map full of markers and waypoints like so many other games do. Indeed, Breath of the Wild didn’t just reinvent Zelda in this way, it shook up the entire open-world adventure genre by empowering you to make your own moments rather than giving you an exhaustive checklist to methodically go down. No one is telling you to climb that one particular hill in the distance, but if you want to do so you better believe a Korok will be waiting there to reward you for the effort.

There’s always been a bit of a distinction between 2D and 3D Zelda games, but Breath of the Wild and its successors may end up defining a third category for the series going forward. Whether or not you prefer the more structured nature of the mainline games before it, the impact Breath of the Wild has had on both Zelda itself and the industry as a whole is undeniable – and the endless slew of magical, natural discoveries it provides make it easy to see why.”

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