Where to start with The Legend of Zelda
Zelda is almost forty years old and hardly any of it is a sequel in the way that word normally works. There is no ongoing plot to catch up on and no required order, which sounds freeing right up until you are looking at twenty games and pick the wrong one first.
The honest answer is that the right starting point depends on what you actually want out of it — a world to disappear into, a tight dungeon crawl, or the one everybody argues about. These are five entry points and who each one is really for.
- 1The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Start here if you want to be left alone. It hands you a glider and a map with nothing marked on it, and almost everything you can see is somewhere you can actually walk to. It is the least like the rest of the series — fewer dungeons, far more improvising — and that is exactly what makes it a good first Zelda: nothing in it assumes you have played the others. The trade is a thin story told mostly in flashback.
- 2The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
The template. Nearly every 2D Zelda since is a variation on what this one set down: two overlapping worlds, a dungeon order that teaches you one item at a time, and a map that quietly opens up as you collect them. It is from 1991 and moves faster than most things released this year. If you want to understand why people are so attached to the shape of these games, this is the shortest route to it.
- 3The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
The one with the reputation — and the one most likely to disappoint if you arrive expecting the greatest game ever made. Play it for what it did rather than what it scores: it invented the vocabulary 3D action games still use, from lock-on targeting to context-sensitive buttons to a world that changes on a timer. Take the 3DS version if you have the choice; the original camera has not aged kindly.
- 4The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Do not start here, but get here eventually. It runs on Ocarina's engine and almost none of its mood: a three-day clock that undoes everything you failed to finish, and a town of people whose small private disasters play out on a loop while you keep not saving them. It is the strangest thing Nintendo has ever published, and it only lands if you already know what a normal Zelda feels like.
- 5The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Only after Breath of the Wild — it is a direct sequel and it assumes you know the map. What it adds is a building system that turns the physics engine into a toybox, and it is genuinely hard to go back afterwards. Start here and you get the better game with none of the context that makes it land.
