The Legend of Zelda – JG Judgementally Comments…

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Link takes to the high seas but will it prove to be a storm in a teacup?

What’s The Game? The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (that’s the original, not the HD remaster with quality of life improvements)

What’s It All About, JG? Being the cutest darned game in the whole of toon town! But aside from that, while Link is having his coming of age ceremony, Tetra the pirate is dropped on Outset Island, his home, and Link rescues her. In the meantime, his sister is abducted, which means our feisty little fella needs to set out on the high seas to rescue her! Tetra’s along for the ride too, agreeing to help get his sister back. That means finding a special talking boat, the King of Red Lions, to safely ferry him across the open waters (and explaining any relevant plot details – Link very much sails the good ship Exposition in this game). Tetra and Link are eventually able to rescue Link’s sister, where a confrontation with Ganondorf reveals that Tetra has a Triforce necklace and is the descendant of Zelda herself. After visiting a sunken Hyrule under the waves, where Tetra is revealed to be Actual Zelda, not just a descendant, Link assembles the shards of the Triforce, using them to defeat Ganondorf in the final battle. But, in a twist, the King of Hyrule – Link’s boat, obviously – decides that the old order should be washed away and Ganondorf is turned to stone. Link and a restored Tetra escape while the King, Ganondorf, and old Hyrule are swept away forever.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Link is back in the sequel to Breath of the Wild! But can Tears of the Kingdom live up to the high standards of its predecessor?

What’s The Game? The second fully open-world Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom

How Much Did You Know About It Before Playing? A fair amount, this time out. I played through (though for reasons I’m not exactly sure about, didn’t write up) Breath of the Wild. I loved Breath of the Wild. It’s a fantastic game which I thoroughly enjoyed taking my time to explore so I was very much looking forward to playing the direct sequel. I have also watched my partner play through Tears of the Kingdom (well, most of it – he didn’t quite finish it) from A Time Before I Played Zelda when I didn’t especially know what was going on but nevertheless enjoyed seeing him play. So I was pretty clued up on what to expect going into this one.

The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

A second Zelda game grabs my attention but can it keep up the standards of the first one?

What’s The Game? Link’s Awakening, the 2019 Switch remake rather than the original.

How Much Did You Know About It Before Playing? Not a huge amount. I was aware that it was a remake, of course, and that the game generally had a good reputation. In particular, the remake I knew was thought of as retaining the charm of the original while updating the whole look, feel, and implementation for a more modern audience. And I knew that it wasn’t set in Hyrule so sidesteps a lot of the familiar aspects of Zelda games. Well, familiar to some anyway – given that I’ve only played one so far the trappings of Hyrule aren’t as engrained in me as they are for some people. Nevertheless, the little I did know of it was intriguing and it was exciting to get stuck into a second Zelda game after loving A Link To The Past so much.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past

What’s The Game? A Link To The Past.

How Much Did You Know About It Before Playing? 100% of nothing. I’ve been ~~corrupted~~ persuaded to play these by my fella. They are something that have been a huge part of his life and he wanted to share them with me. I’ve been meaning to get into gaming in some kind of form again for simply ages. I always loved playing video games when I was a teenager (Elite, the best game ever, was a favourite, which nicely dates me) but come university it fell away never to re-emerge. Since this was a good chance to get back into it, and also share something important with the love of my life, here I am gaming again.

Introduction

Don’t worry, it’s short!

I’m completely new to the Zelda series and a compelte, utter, and irreducable noob when it comes to gaming. Alight, not quite, but most of my experience has been with FPS (Quake, just to show my age, Call of Duty 2, that sort of thing) and nothing really along the lines of Zelda since the ZX Spectrum was A Thing. This is a series that, beyond the fact that it exists and has a dedicated following, I know absolutely nothing about. Not the background, not the lore, not the production, not even the age of the series.

So now, thanks to my fella, I’m playing Zelda games. On the Switch, if that’s relevant. I’ll write them up as I go through them, though how much detail I go into remains to be seen.

Anyway, first up, A Link To The Past!