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Farbklex

Afaik this is the first time that the second installment of a Zelda game per generation is better than the first one.

Zelda 1 is considered to be better than 2.

Ocarina of Time > Majora's Mask.

Twilight Princess > Skyward Sword.

Pretty darn good.

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I think a fair number of people, including myself, consider MM > OoT. They are very different games, but MM excels in areas that OoT doesn't.

You're right that this inversion is rare though. I think Phantom Hourglass is a great sequel to Wind Waker, but I can't reasonably claim it's better. (And Spirit Tracks was not better than Phantom Hourglass.)

> I think a fair number of people, including myself, consider MM > OoT.

I like Majora's Mask more, but Ocarina of Time is the better game.

And a fair number of people think BotW is better than TotK, including myself.

Majora’s Mask is such an incredibly ambitious title. The game loop is just super cool. The aesthetic is this super interesting depressed melancholic cheerfulness of people coping with their impending death. OoT’s ambition is of course noteworthy in its own right, but damn Majora’s is just so cool.

What do you mean by generation?

BotW was released originally for Wii U, wasn't it? Which belongs to the previous generation.

EDIT: I looked it up. It was first aimed to be a Wii U exclusive, but in the end was released simultaneously on the Switch.

Similarly, Twilight Princess should have been released earlier for the GameCube but was then released on GameCube and Wii simultaneously.

I think many people consider Majora to be better.

It's a very recent thing, from players liking to go against the grain for the sake of it. No one would have assumed that in the 64 era. In fact Majora was pretty unloved, which lead to the "for those who knows" phenomena about it.

I always thought MM was better

This seems pretty revisionist. I loved Majora to bits as a child, and I don't recall this being a contrarian opinion whatsoever on the Zelda Universe forums at the time.

Maybe there's a difference between critical and popular reception at play here?

This is definitely not the case. If anything the opposite is true, when MM was released those who played through it found it to be a better game and only with time have people (myself included) come to think of it as worse than OOT.

Spirit Tracks is usually considered better than Phantom Hourglass, but in a "cream of the crap" type of way.

I thought Spirit Tracks was way worse, the overworld is literally on rails

People hate Phantom hourglass because of the Ocean temple, despite the entire POINT of the ocean temple being improving your ability to skip most of it the next run. By the midpoint of the game, you can get to the midpoint of the ocean temple in a minute, without using any tricks. It's a speedrun integrated into a mainstream game that doesn't require stupid precision to be good at.

Meanwhile it had incredible music, looked really good, the combat was a great fusion of 2D simplicity with the openness and flexibility of Windwaker, the boss fights were fun and felt "Big", boat customization was great, the world was huge, writing directly on your map is a wonderful feature, the characters were lovely, I just don't understand the hate it gets.

I feel like a lot of people wanted it to be a 3D zelda game and that's why they were upset. 2D zeldas and 3D zeldas are basically two different franchises.

PH really is underrated. It's one of the only Zeldas I've gone back to for repeat playthroughs, and it's fun every time. You're absolutely right that the Ocean Temple is an integrated speedrun experience -- and even then, they really make it fun to go back through old floors to make use of new routes and obtain locked-off treasure chests.

Also, Linebeck is one of my top-three sidekicks out of any Zelda game. He really grows on you over the course of the story.

The multiplayer was not the best though.

My favorite part of the ocean temple was a simple trick on one of the early floors. You have to get a key out of a closed room, by sneaking around some guards and solving a puzzle. OR you have a boomerang that you can throw around the room, and it will go through the walls on it's way back to you but still pickup the key. You bypass the entire floor.

Link is better than Zelda 1

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