my favorite video game of all time by a good margin

an absolute masterpiece

The art direction on TP is absolutely phenomenal, there is a reason why Nintendo TO THIS DAY still use art from TP for their promotional stuff at times (even if they've gotten in the habit of portraying Link as this "super edgy tough hard guy" which is kind of the opposite of what he is in TP but that's a different story). The same goes for the OST. It's a cold take to say that the Zelda franchise doesn't have many misses when it comes to it's score, but TP does it better than ALL OF THEM. Of course this is subjective and you could say from a technical standpoint BOTW and TOTK do a better job simply because the music is contextual to whatever you're doing in an open world, but the way TP uses Leitmotifs and weaves them in reminds me a lot of how the Lord of the Rings movies (my fav movies) do it and with that it almost does what i described with BOTW/TOTK (kinda).


The world actually feels alive and the slow start people often ♥♥♥♥ on the game for is actually an amazing addition to that as you actually spend like a good hour as Link just being a regular village boy before stuff starts to happen and that setup is oftentimes overlooked, as it's part of the reason why TPs world feels so grounded and real and why you actually care for all the NPCs in the game. Of course that's also due to the games amazing writing that honestly stands out even in a franchise as loaded as The Legend Of Zelda. The characters, minor or not, friend or foe, are all really fleshed out and actually grow and develop throughout the game. This is especially noticeable with the (in most people's opinion) best written character in the game: Midna. She's totally different from any other companion from the Zelda games, instead of serving you and being all there for you (or being really annoying), she's actually very mean and selfish, using Link for her own goals and it isn't until a couple of dungeons deep that she slowly starts to open up to you and give her motivation. Her character development however REALLY starts to shine when princess Zelda sacrifices herself to safe her and her entire attitude towards Hyrule changes but i could go on. Point is the writing is absolutely superb.


And so is the gameplay. Now it's not like its groundbreaking mechanics wise, Nintendo learned from the previous 3D Zelda games and implemented some nice QOL changes as well as just improve on the general way you go around as Link. The cool and big (and edgy) new feature for this game is wolf Link. You transform into a wolf. It's edgy and i can easily see why some people might not like playing as wolf Link, especially when the game forces you pretty early on into longer periods of only playing as wolf Link, but it's a really cool bit of fresh air from the old "You're Link and you have sword, now go and swing" formula the rest of the games follow, not that that's bad, especially in this game where there was extra focus on Link's combat. You don't need it, the old "swing block swing stun enemy swing" still works here, but there is a variety of fleshed out moves Link can learn and use and that actually ties in perfectly with the previous section about amazing writing as the one you learn the moves from, the hero's spirit, is actually the hero of time (the protagonist of OOT and MM) which is such an amazing bit of lore in my opinion but that's not relevant to the gameplay.

What is relevant to the gameplay is where it's elements are more often pushed to their limits- the dungeons and TP EXCELS in those. They are not only beautiful with amazing scores to undermine them in the background, but they're also pretty hard compared to some of the other Zelda games and actually require you to think and after you solve them you get to some of, if not THE best bosses in the Zelda franchise. Every boss in this game SHINES and i love how you always have to build upon the mechanics you learned in the dungeon they're in in order to defeat them.


All in all, i love this game SO SO SO SO much from start to finish, the ending is absolutely incredible and emotional and it wraps the game up in such a beautiful way that few pieces of MEDIA (not just video games) do.

Am i looking at this game through rose tinted glasses a bit? Of course, the game is not perfect, the gameplay can feel sluggish at times, the progression is pretty linear and instead of destroying the world when he actually has the time and opportunity to do so, Ganondorf just aura farms while we do the last like 3 dungeons? I don't know, but honestly, i don't even care. If you've bothered to read all of this, you already know how much this game means to me and you shouldn't be surprised that i don't actually care too much about its flaws. In my eyes it will forever be a 10/10.

oh yeah also you can hold cats