I would actually say that there are very few games that are much like the Zelda series. Lots of games get lumped into the action-adventure genre, but few are very much like the Zelda series.
I’ll let you define “zelda-like” for yourself, but here are my favorites.
Okami - greatest game of all time. Yep, I love it that much. It’s the best Zelda game ever, so much so, I wish Nintendo had released it as a Zelda game. It was amazingly different for the genre, but still fit in. An amazing game.
Twilight Princess - the best actual Zelda game. Yep, even better than Ocarina or Link to the Past. I’m playing it now for the third time and loving it. It has some quirks that can be frustrating(collecting those tears is annoying), but it is a very good game.
I also wish Zant had just been the final boss instead of working Ganon in very late game. Weird and minor complaint, but anyway.
Psychonauts - I’m counting it, but it tends towards platforming a bit too much. It also lacks dungeons, but the levels inside their minds counts for me. Funny, charming, and original. The Milkman Conspiracy is my favorite “dunegon” in any Zelda-like game.
Ocarina of Time - Yeah, this was just too amazing when it was new. Flawed in many ways, but even those flaws endear it to me. This game was like Windows 98 to me. I loved it, but XP(Twilight Princess here) was really the finalized version.
I’ll list more later, but what are some of your favorite Zelda-like games(and actual Zelda ones). Why?
Mask of Majora was my favorite. Had an aesthetic all its own, all the crazy masks led to a lot of neat puzzles. Also had that one castle where the gravity kept switching which is my favorite Zelda castle.
Also I like my puzzle games to be challenging. I stopped playing Twilight Princess part way through just cause, at least for the first part, it was just too easy to be engaging. The Zelda with the boat (can’t remember the name) had the same problem, even though the sailing concept was fun.
Star Fox Adventures for the Gamecube. One of the last great games from Rare. This is what the Gamecubes version of Zelda should have been. Instead they gave us Windwaker. Stunning graphics and real voices. A lot of fun to play.
It really doesn’t. I don’t get portable consoles.
I understood them when I was in high school and sneaking into a stairway to not get beat up and to play shitty little black & white games on a screen the size of a saltine was great. I understood them when I had to do something to deal with Algebra class. I understood them when bedtime curfews were fully enforced and grown-ups could see the light coming from under your bedroom door if you tried to read, but not the tiny pencil light I screwed my eyes with to play Tetris under the covers. Gameboys were made of pure awesome back then, they really were.
Now that nobody’s looking over my shoulder all the time, and anytime I want I can just whip out a giant fuckoff laptop and play *Civilization *or read e-books for hours on end and nobody gives a crap, why wouldn’t I do that, why could I ever want a DS for ? Who buys that crap ? It’s just not a product that makes sense to me anymore.
Ocarina of Time. I was at that age where when something is magical, it’s magical for the rest of your life. Nostalgia will always make me think it was the best game ever made. A friend and I decided to do a playthrough on the 10th anniversary of the release, and I still knew so many of those dungeons by heart. For the rest of my life, 23 is number 1.
This sounds stupid, but it led me down a road that has kind of defined a huge chunk of my life. The very first time I ever went on the internet was to zelda.com when OoT came out. Now I’m a web developer, and I’ll never forget that first time I sat down in front of a computer and someone had to tell me ‘open up Netscape Navigator’.
I absolutely loved Psychonauts. It was one of my top 3 games of that generation and top 10 of all time.
For whatever reason, I’ve never been able to finish a Zelda game. I’ve played most of the home console ones*. I just always end up at an impasse where “bored” and “stuck” meet.
*-The 2 NES Zeldas, the SNES Zelda, the first N64 Zelda, and the Wii Zelda, off the top of my head, but I might be missing one or two. I have a copy of the Wind Waker, but haven’t played it.
There’s a pretty significant luggability difference here. This is like asking why everyone doesn’t just use a laptop and Skype instead of a cel phone. There is value to be had in a small, portable gaming device.
That said, I don’t own any, and I’m frustrated that the games I like are increasingly moving to them, because I prefer to do my gaming in the comfort of my own home, and I don’t want to do it by inflicting muscle tension on myself by craning my neck to look a freakin’ portable. Things are ergonomic nightmares.
