Why zelda is the best game ever

Sterling received death threats and DDoS attacks against his website from enraged Zelda fans. Poisonous gaming fans are nothing new. But the reach of this type of behavior has been magnified thanks to social media, and it has infected other types of entertainment as the internet has broadly mutated into an endless message-board flame war. The first negative review of Black Panther generated a raft of Twitter outrage from fans in February. The only reason such shenanigans are even worth the effort is because fans and news websites alike confer value on the numbers these aggregators spit out.

Ocarina was an outlier when it earned such gushing approval in But fan bases increasingly demand that their entertainment choices be validated through perfect scores and lavish praise.

Reviewers largely seem happy to oblige this desire— IGN has given 15 games perfect scores this decade, compared to just two in the previous one. Caligari , features 34 movies from the s. But the further along you get in time with games, the smaller the steps get. Though he gave Ocarina a perfect score, Gerstmann has never returned to the game since reviewing it. Hyrule Field is a barren green grass texture with few enemies or landmarks. The lack of a fully controllable camera can make the game feel claustrophobic rather than grand at times.

But Ocarina will continue to be revered because the elements the game got right—fluid combat, expertly crafted dungeons, a propulsive story line that truly places the world in peril—made Hyrule feel like a place worth saving for a generation of young heroes. He compares playing the game as an 8-year-old to visiting Disneyland as a kid. Aging has changed both experiences. I still remember it strongly, but it always is hard to recapture the feeling of being a child and entering a big world for the first time.

But for players, time really does flow in only one direction. Keeping the game on a pedestal helps to numb the pain of treasured moments fading into memory. Sometimes, memory resonates more deeply than the moment itself. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the fourth installment in the Zelda series; it is the fifth. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. We had no truly defining benchmark for how a 3D game should look, how it should play, and how expansive an open world title should be in when Ocarina of Time was released on the N But, Ocarina of Time is often the first game mentioned when the question of "best game of all time" is posed, so what has set it apart even 25 years after its initial release?

Well, let's start with the control scheme. Assigning a specific item to each button, such as health potions, gave players the option to access key items quickly without having to dive into their inventory - a decision that could be the difference between in-game life and death.

The legacy of remapping controller layouts and quick-mapping of buttons in various games since are proof that this idea worked. Another brand new concept - the Z-lock targeting system - sought to solve the problem of Link combatting more than one foe at a time.

Taking on multiple enemies at once had been a cornerstone of 2D fighting games for many years, but Nintendo wanted its combat sequences to play out in a different way. The best games of so far. At its core, Shadow of the Colossus is really a puzzle game. Each of these harrowing encounters will not only leave you sweaty, but reveal just the tiniest bit more about the vague, mournful plot that main character Wander has managed to find himself in. Part love story, part monster hunt, part parable, Shadow of the Colossus borrows heavily from what came before, but inspires much of what came after.

Though there'd already been two official entries in the Metal Gear series not counting Snake's Revenge, which we don't talk about it wasn't until Snake covertly slithered his way onto the PlayStation that this franchise cemented itself as a big deal. Though often lauded for its contributions to the "stealth" genre, it was billed as a "Tactical Espionage Action" game. The moment-to-moment gameplay was about being sneaky, and players were rewarded for outsmarting the defenses of Shadow Moses quietly and cleverly, but things frequently got loud during iconic boss fights and over-the-top action setpieces.

However, where Metal Gear Solid was truly groundbreaking was its emphasis on narrative and cinematic presentation. Metal Gear Solid looked like a movie, sounded like a movie, and felt like a movie, but still played like a video game, striking a delicate balance that the medium is still striving for over twenty years later. God of War didn't just pull off the impressive feat of reinvigorating and reinventing a franchise that had seemingly run cold, but it also smartly subverted what came before to create an adventure that both played to its past and stood on its own as one of the finest games of its generation.

Nearly every facet of Sony Santa Monica's Norse epic is working in concert with one another to craft a thrilling, memorable, and engrossing adventure. From its haunting score, to the beautifully written and acted story of Kratos and Atreus, to the incredible feel of the Leviathan Axe, God of War's impressive craftsmanship shines through at every step, honoring the past while forging its own path.

That sense of reality is what helps you empathise with Geralt, understand the world, and really understand how bad things have gotten when the crazy shit starts popping off. An RPG with enough complexity to satisfy the urge to tinker, but enough character never to feel impersonal, Wild Hunt is a staggering achievement no matter how you look at it.

Its story deftly balances cosmic threat and family drama, its choices feel truly meaningful and world-changingly effective, and it looks gorgeous in its own grubby way. Even its two DLC expansions are among the best ever released. So much story is embedded in the dilapidated hallways and shuttered rooms of Rapture, a decaying underwater labyrinth that demands to be investigated. The changes it makes are sweeping: it adds corporations, which add another religion-like layer, fleshes out the espionage system and victory conditions, and enhances the AI to put up a great fight.

Meanwhile, random events ranging from tornadoes to baby booms make every playthrough even more unique and eventful than ever before. There's not a ton left that we can really say about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time outside of the fact that it's indisputably one of the greatest games ever made.

Garnering nearly unanimous critical praise and fan adoration, Ocarina of Time was quickly regarded as one of the most important and groundbreaking games of all time, and for good reason.

A sweeping, epic tale that introduced new characters, new lore, and an ever-expanding timeline theory, this version of Zelda took what was great about its predecessors and expanded on those themes and ideas exponentially. Solving puzzle across time, riding Epona through the vast expanse of Hyrule, and the final confrontation with Ganon are moments that will stick with Zelda fans forever, but in they were mind-bending, genre-defining, and more than enough to earn The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time a spot on our Top list.

The premise of Minecraft is incredibly simple. Mine materials such as stone and wood, and build things with it. Yet the possibilities are incredibly limitless. Then as the sun rises and you watch all the enemies burn to a crisp, you are finally free to explore again, you are hit with a joyous urge to explore and dive even deeper into the game.

Will you keep your first house, or search for a better landscape? Will you become an unground dweller, or live atop a mountain? Halo didn't invent the first-person shooter. Not by a longshot. Nor was it even the first console FPS. But it was the first FPS to finally get it right on a console, and the industry hasn't been the same since. Halo: Combat Evolved simply felt at home on a gamepad, and the fact that it had a likeable and heroic protagonist, a rich sci-fi universe that felt fleshed-out despite this being the first game in the series, and Halo became an instant smash hit.

But its story was only half of its success. Halo was quite simply one of the best multiplayer shooters ever upon its release, thanks to its incredible complement of weapons two-shot death pistol FTW!

That it was all set to the chanting-monks theme song that, like the game itself, became legendary. When Half-Life first came out in , it was immediately obvious how transformative a game it was. Valve not only proved it was possible to tell a real, atmospheric story from within a first-person-shooter, but did it so brilliantly that its lessons have informed virtually every shooter campaign since. That technique was surprisingly effective at making me feel like Gordon and I were one in the same.

Iconic monsters — most notably the Alien facehugger-like Headcrabs that transform scientists into gruesome zombies — and impressive soldier AI gave Half-Life a spooky atmosphere backed up by enemies that pose a real threat. Great and memorable weapons, from the simple crowbar to the silent sniper crossbow and the biological homing weapon that shoots alien bees, made fighting through the spooky ruins of Black Mesa a fantastic battle.

This was the game that stripped the Metal Gear formula down to its very core and proved that it could still function even outside our expectations. It forced us to take what we knew about espionage and infiltration and learn how to apply it in a new, unfamiliar environment, and it did so with a bold and elegant understanding of its own systems. You could have all the stealth know-how and military training in the world, but out there in the unpredictable jungle of the Russian wilderness, you were exposed, vulnerable… a Naked Snake.

And it worked. This weird shift in tone, structure — it all worked beautifully, and with a poetic edge that is unrivaled in other Metal Gear installments. Snake Eater is arguably one of the most interesting love stories ever told in a game, one of the strangest and most exciting Cold War-era adventures, and one of the first games to truly make me reflect on my actions as a player. It manages to be tragic, sometimes devastatingly so, and yet still maintain that absurd comedic flair that I admire about this series.

I still think about three moments in The Last of Us at least once a week, nearly five years later. I knew I was in for something so narratively special from Naughty Dog.

That dissonance struck me, but made so much sense. The Last of Us marries its storytelling with its gameplay, and nothing made me feel more than that last moment. DOOM changed my life. My gaming life, at least. Having spent my entire existence up to that point playing platformers, side-scrolling action games, etc. Everything about DOOM was incredible. The graphics were colorful and convincing. Lightning was spooky. It felt like you were on a Martian moon. It's music was memorable.

Weapon design was brilliant, and enemy design even more so. From the imps to the Cacodemons to the Cyberdemon, nearly every creature in DOOM was the stuff of nightmares — and in a then-unheard-of gameplay twist, they hated each other as much as they hated you.

And then there was DeathMatch. And, incredibly, it's still fun. Chrono Trigger is widely regarded as the greatest RPG of all time, and for good reason. There's a reason first-person puzzle games far and wide are constantly compared to Portal — though a brief adventure, its gameplay, tone, writing, and structure so cohesively work together to create one of the most memorable, challenging, and fascinating puzzle games around.

Arming players with the now-iconic Portal gun and the devastating - and lethal - wit of Glad0s, Valve guided players through a fantastically orchestrated and escalating set of physics-based puzzles. Learning to use the seemingly simple Portal gun in increasingly more complex, all culminating in perhaps one of the most memorable end-credits songs of all time. But for as great as its puzzles are, and the way they take the simplicity of two portals you can shoot almost anywhere into such fascinating territory, it's also Portal's world-building that equally makes the game such a memorable touchstone.

From secrets and scrawlings hidden within the walls of Portal's testing facility, to the way it slowly uncovers the mystery of who Glad0s is offers environmental storytelling at some of its finest. Players learn just enough to paint a vivid picture while Valve leaves enough blank space in its story to let the player fill in their own details.

The cake may be a lie, but it's not a lie to tell you to play Portal if you haven't already. The most boring thing to note about Dark Souls is its difficulty. Because it stops you from focusing on all of the things that make it the most influential game of the last decade.

You fail to mention how incredible Lordran is — a single continuous location that spirals from lava-flooded ruins to a glistening city of the gods. A place where new paths often lead back to familiar locations, so that exploring it for the first time feels like solving a puzzle.

You overlook its precise, nuanced combat or the fact it has the most interesting and meaningful bosses of any game. And you certainly never get round to discussing its story, which revels in ambiguity and invites interpretation like no other. Yes, Dark Souls is challenging, but the rewards it yields to the persistent and curious are limitless. What can you say about the definitive fighting game, the game that has spawned countless imitators, acolytes, and sequels?

While exceptionally balanced, the imaginative design and high-end graphics for its time helped set it apart. Street Fighter II became perhaps the first fighting game global arcade smash.

Over the years, Capcom kept updating and refining the combat, allowing players to play as more characters, speed up the combat, and see new special moves for their favorite characters. Its ports kept getting nominated for awards years after its initial release. Mario's move out of arcades, away from Donkey Kong, and into the Mushroom Kingdom changed our hobby and our industry as we know it, setting of a chain of events Nintendo's rise from the game industry crash's ashes, the popularization of the platformer genre, etc.

Super Mario Bros. Its influence cannot be overstated. Example: literally everyone reading this can hum its theme song, right now, from memory. Now it's playing in your head again. You're welcome. Few games had more of a buildup prior to their release than Halo 2, and even fewer managed to live up to them in the way that Halo 2 did. Master Chief taking the fight with the Covenant to Earth was epic, action-packed, and visually stunning on the original Xbox.

Sure, the campaign didn't so much end as much as stopped, but the shocking reveal of the playable Arbiter and his story that mirrored the Chief's was a twist no one saw coming. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, Halo 2 was the killer app for Xbox Live. It brought the party system and matchmaking hopper concept to consoles, instantly making every other online console game look archaic in its infrastructure by comparison.

Of course, it helped that the multiplayer gameplay was, well, legendary. The maps were almost all memorably brilliant, the match options were vast, and the ranking system kept you fighting night after night to try and move up.

Halo 2 remains the gold standard for console first-person shooter multiplayer, despite the fact that it's been 15 years since its release. Symphony of the Night is beloved by gamers the world over thanks to its responsive controls combined with its expansive, rewarding game world. It has devilish new enemy patterns, new bosses, and fantastic new equipment.

Not bad for a secret that is easy to miss entirely. Symphony of the Night is much more than just a fun side-scroller with an awesome twist, though. Alucard and all of his monstrous foes are lusciously animated.

Art, animation, sound, gameplay, design… even replay value, thanks to multiple playable characters. It all comes together perfectly. Turn it on and pick a street. Any street. Analyse it; really absorb it. Look at the asphalt, worn and cracked; punished by the millions of cars that have hypothetically passed over it. Look at the litter, the graffiti.

No game sells 90 million copies by accident. Mario games are synonymous with fun and innovation, and perhaps Mario 64 is the best example of the latter. It was still recognisably Mario — he collected mushrooms and ran and jumped his way to success, but he was forever changed.

He could now long jump, triple jump, and backflip. While the underlying challenge remained the same and the locations were reassuringly familiar, the shift in perspective changed everything.

Mario 64 might now look a little blocky but it remains bold and brilliant, too. If you're reading this list and haven't played Red Dead Redemption, go find yourself a copy of the game and the appropriate console to play it on. Right now. Not only did I get completely lost in the massive single-player world, to the point where I'd started talking with a bit of a drawl because I was so used to hearing it, but it also drew me into online gaming unlike anything I'd played before.

Sure, CoD was fun for a bit and racing games were okay, but never before had I so successfully crafted my own stories and adventures with friends and strangers alike than in Red Dead's Free Roam mode. It was the kind of game you couldn't wait to discuss with your friends the next day. The only real downside to Red Dead is that it never came out on PC — which is mostly sad because my died years ago and I really want to play it again.

Half-Life 2 forever changed our expectations for what a first-person shooter could be. Its richly imagined world and wonderfully paced gameplay is a delight, never letting up and brimming with invention. We get to set Antlions on our enemies and in which we play fetch with a robot Dog. In short, it is a truly memorable piece of game design. The classic Russian title-matching puzzle game by Alexey Pajitnov blew my mind way back in the day.

Even as a little girl, I was obsessed with Tetris. I still remember spending hours sitting in front of the TV with the Nintendo Entertainment System sitting at my feet, rotating brightly colored puzzle pieces as they fell from the abyss, attempting to arrange them into horizontal lines that when assembled correctly would disappear and cause me to advance to the next stage.

It was crazy fun, even when blocks began to fall at an alarmingly fast pace and I fell into a frenzied panic. But no matter how many times I had to start the game over, it was just too much fun to stop.

I never got tired of it, and even now Tetris remains one of my favorite games of all time. As a kid, I played almost any game that had a cool character on the box or starred my beloved Ninja Turtles. So when I received Super Mario Bros. The game exceeded my every hope and wish for it, and I spent hundreds of blissful afternoons defeating Koopa Kids, rescuing kings, and discovering secrets strewn throughout Mushroom World.

Mario 3 earned a place on my list of favorite games way back in , and 25 years of gaming progress have yet to dislodge it. So much of what we consider so quintessentially Mario — the suits, the boos, the overworld — all actually originated here. The planet Zebes is atmospheric, oppressive, and extremely lethal.

But then you start to look more closely. The parasite-riddled dead soldier outside of an early boss room. The crashed, half-submerged alien spaceship that may or may not be haunted. The techno lair of the space pirates hiding under your nose the entire game.

An energy tank embedded in a seemingly impassable wall. A pair of missiles only obtainable from the collapsing blocks above, leaving you no idea of how to get up there, just with the knowledge that you can get up there. What makes it truly special is its genius combination of puzzle-solving, atmosphere, storytelling, exploration, game design, and gameplay.

Portal undoubtedly came out of nowhere and shattered the mold, but Portal 2 took that raw and incredible concept and managed to shape it into a more polished and impressive package. It cranked the dials up on just about everything that made the original so special. The mind-bending puzzles, the surprisingly dark story, and the ridiculous humor that balanced it out - each piece of that picture was refined and refreshed to build a sequel that actually surpassed the ambition of an already extremely ambitious game, making something both familiar and altogether new.

It gave us a deeper look into the wonderful world of Aperture Science without completely dragging all of its mysteries out into the light. Couple that with a seriously good co-op campaign and even a full-on custom level builder and sharing systems added post-launch and Portal 2 has stayed the high bar by which all first-person puzzle games should be measured, even nearly a decade later.

This iteration of Hyrule was more than just moving between enemy-filled screens, it encompassed everything an immersive experience should be: a vast open world that teased you with secrets hiding just beyond your reach, begging you to come back with new and inventive tools.

This version of Hyrule more than any other before or since, is the one I fell most in love with. In nearly three decades no game has supplanted Super Mario World as the best game ever made Which is stupid. Super Mario World is a relatively simple game to describe.

Super Mario World is the crescendo to the slow build in technology and game design that started with Super Mario Bros. And that crescendo featured a cool, simulated 90s slap bass track.

So look, we want to play a better game than Super Mario World. We dare you to make a better game: Puzzling, but not opaque; tough but not intimidating; beautiful, funny, joyful, and universally recognizable.

And, while we have your attention, dinosaurs are always a plus. Start at 5 Get started! Released Borderlands 2. Divinity: Original Sin 2. Final Fantasy VII. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Burnout 3: Takedown. Fallout 2. Dan Stapleton Starting the journey of Fallout 2 as a tribesman with nothing more than a loincloth and a spear to my name and gradually fighting my way up to a power-armored, gauss-gunning killing machine is a fantastic and surprisingly natural feeling of progression — one that few games have been able to match.

Miranda Sanchez A small child falls into the world of monsters and suddenly finds themselves the target of an ancient grudge that calls for their death. League of Legends. Miranda Sanchez League of Legends exists in a magical place that lies somewhere between intense competition and fun and enjoyable strategy. Brendan Graeber Thief II took everything right about stealth games, and then added a dash of steampunk-infused magic. SimCity Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Monster Hunter: World.

Casey DeFreitas Kill a monster, make gear out of its parts, and hunt a stronger monster sounds like a gameplay loop that can get old fast, but Monster Hunter: World has taken that decade-old hook and downright perfected it. Resident Evil 2 Remake.

System Shock 2. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Persona 5. Stella Chung Fortnite changed the playing field of battle royales upon its release in Fable 2. Ryan McCaffrey The original Fable, while very very good, never quite lived up to co-creator Peter Molyneux's lofty "plant an acorn and it will grow into a tree over the course of the game" promises. GoldenEye Super Smash Bros. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Brandin Tyrrel Skyrim was a pivotal turning point for me and my over twenty-year love affair with role-playing games. Battlefield Dota 2. Miranda Sanchez Dota 2 doesn't end when the final unit on the map goes down, or even when you close your client.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Jonathon Dornbush Mario Kart 8 Deluxe may be a re-release of the original Wii U kart racer, but its function as both a fantastic kart racer in its own right and a more complete package of an already great game. Andrew Goldfarb Spelunky is a game about patience.