What am I missing about TLoZ games

I've tried to get into these games but I've never enjoyed them, not as a kid either when I played Twilight Princess with a friend at his place a few times.
I've played a bit of the original game, ALttP, Majoras Mask, Link's Awakening and Wind Waker but I can't say that I enjoyed a single one of them except for the top down games a bit.
The world is mundane, I would rather explore a forest or walk up a mountain close by than explore the world in TLoZ.
The combat is incredibly dry and you have such a limited move set.
To progress I have to find these bullshit items scattered around the map and have to backtrack super slowly throughout the already boring world while fighting unimaginative enemies with boring combat.

What do some of you see in this franchise that I don't?

(You) better check this 5

Nintendo properties are all stale as fuck. You're not missing anything.

I've never been able to really get into the series either, I always felt that they were meant to be these grand adventures with a focus on exploration, but instead I'd get gated linear worlds. Which is why I fucking love BotW

I fucking hate environment puzzles so I never played them either.

...

>I would rather explore a forest or walk up a mountain close by than explore the world in TLoZ

Maybe video games aren't for you.

You're just missing this 4

>Why do you have different opinnions
>Why do you like things I don't
Jeez I don't know. Why do you think you have to force yourself to like it? If you don't like it you just don't like it, the end.
People that like LoZ usually started playing the games when they were kids and found the puzzles to be challenging or just liked the characters or the story or whatever.

I love exploring other worlds in games like in the 'soulsborne' or Bioshock franchises but TLoZ is just forests and mountains, I'm surrounded with mountains where I live and can find some planted forests. The whole game environment just feels unimaginative.

Thats ok daling, its just not for you.

the best zelda game is Majora's Mask because of its inventiveness and involved character-based sidequests
aLttP is a fucking meme propagated by retro purists, it was a game of its time and advances in gaming and narrative since then have rendered it mostly obsolete and/or annoying
Ocarina of Time is similar except it has really good music and an alright storyline, and some of the dungeons are great, and it's more linear and thus has a greater focus on continual narrative and linear expansions of gear to facilitate puzzle solving
the 2D ones by Activision are pretty good games
the DS games are shit
Wind Waker is too easy and lacks content, but the ~experience~ and overworld is comfy as fuck
Twilight Princess is just Ocarina HD with some new mechanics and slightly better dungeons
Skyward Sword is limited content made long through backtracking and time trials, and the Wii Motion Plus is slightly buggy but is otherwise really neat because of how it's incorporated into the gameplay and combat
ALBW is like the bastard lovechild between aLttP and the Majora's Mask 3D remake, everything is super easy and because you can do dungeons in every order every single dungeon's puzzle is le wall-paintwalking plus [item used to gate dungeon access]
BotW i haven't played, it seems really good and the weapon degradation keeps you on your toes but the overworld is mostly empty outside of shrines and korok challenges, and the ability to "do whatever as long as you're good enough at games" is a throwback to one of the few things that made aLttP good

1/2

2/2
you play Zelda for ~the experience~ and sometimes you get some GREAT gameplay and combat out of it, but most of the time it's mediocre design riding on brand power

it's more adventure than action, and more action than RPG

when it's good it's REALLY good, and when it's okay it's disappointing, and when it's bad it's a circlejerk over the degeneracy of modern gaming from 30 year olds who play more SNES than all other platforms combined

t. mechanics/gamefeel autist who grew up on n64

>'soulsborne'
oh it's another souls faggot who's butthurt zelda is more popular than his meme games nothing to see here

Thanks, exactly what I was looking for.
I can call the franchise mediocre but it's determinedly not for me.

>the 2D ones by Activision
Capcom hasn't fallen so low to be confused with Activision yet.

>bioshock
Sounds like you just don't like video games.

Maybe they just don't click with you.

I'm like that with sports games. I fucking hate FIFA even though my dudebro mates love every new shit edition.

Don't worry about it. Play something you enjoy.

You should still give Majora a try, honestly. The world is mundane at first glance but the density of character sidequests makes up for it. It's a game about people, not a world. It's slow, but it's neat.

FUG

>To progress I have to find these bullshit items scattered around the map and have to backtrack super slowly throughout the already boring world while fighting unimaginative enemies with boring combat.
They fixed all this in BOTW.

I wasn't really a fan of the 3d zeldas but liked the top down ones, as well as the old 2d Ultima games from the 80's which were also open world, and some other modern 3d open world games. So I sprung for BOTW and so far it's been pretty amazing. It's big enough to give you a decent sense of scale, you can turn off the map and get lost in just the desert area. And there are nice immersion moments like sneaking around a mobin camp while they're hunting elk, then raiding it later that night and finding fresh meat. Or climbing up a mesa and notice the setting sun casting the correct shadow of me on the opposite rock wall as I'm climbing.

I named two franchises off the top of my head that had great atmosphere and an original world, I couldn't care less about the popularity of games that I enjoy. This was not some attack at the franchise because it was more popular, I'm just interested in what other people see in it that I don't. Fuck off.

checked

Yeah to be honest I really like the little that I've seen of BOTW, I'm sure I'd enjoy it more than any other Zelda game I've played.
I feel like I should give Majoras Mask another try too, it's the only one that I find beautiful and has a world that I want to visit and see. I've heard the gameplay in it is also weird and original.

>original world
what's original about souls world, it's trite dark fantasy bullshit that looks like a cradle of filth album cover and reuses the same environments every game

wow l can't wait to explore more oversized gothic architecture and misty forests for the fourth game in a row so original

If you don't like Zelda then you don't like Zelda man what the fuck

>aLTTP is a meme

Opinions discarded

of course it was discarded, it offended your autistic purist sensibilities

name 1 important thing that it does, unique to or better than other games in the past 30 years

I've only played Bloodborne and am currently playing Dark Souls. Bloodborne had a beautiful lovecraftian/gothic horror world full of weird imaginative creatures. You could enter nightmares, visit an abandoned frozen castle by a horse wagon and many more weird original areas. Dark souls has a dark fantasy setting with a beautiful forest full of giants and mushroom people, a beautifully lighted city with huge buildings that you can enter, a crow and demons that transport you between areas etc, etc. I could talk about Bioshock and many other games like this too. TLoZ is just set in a super unimaginative almost realistic fantasy setting is more what i meant.

>aLttP is a fucking meme propagated by retro purists

nice b8 m8

You should persevere with oot and majoras mask more. The other entries in the series are kind of hit and miss, and outright boring at times, and I say that as a fan. OoT and MM however I think have a lot of redeeming qualities and they're very playable

Play OoT and MM at least. They're the good ones.

Yeah, I feel like I should give those 2 more of a try after this thread. Majoras Mask interests me a lot too.

If you couldn't get into LttP or OoT, I don't know what to tell you, the genre just isn't your thing. That's about the best the series has to offer.

>The combat is incredibly dry and you have such a limited move set.
There's a number of combat options in the better entries of the series, but most of it is dependent on the creature you're fighting. Which brings me to my next point.

>To progress I have to find these bullshit items scattered around the map and have to backtrack super slowly throughout the already boring world while fighting unimaginative enemies with boring combat.

While I'd say you can subjectively dislike Zelda or find it boring. What you said here is just flat out objectively wrong. The enemies in LttP especially shine with a wide variety of monsters and an even more great array of bosses.

Can't hit an enemy with your sword because of its shell? Flip it over. Enemy mimicking your moves? Set a trap and walk it into it. Reflect enemy projectiles, use appropriate staffs in various combat situations, etc. I dunno man, I guess I'm probably responding to bait but you're just wrong on this one.

If exploring in a game and finding new gadgets and abilities isn't your thing, then games like Zelda and metroidvanias just aren't for you.

LTTP is the best, followed by MM and then BotW

I think they way other people describe the Zelda games distorts the perception of a new player of the series. A lot of people call it an open world game with a big adventure, but they fail to say a few things. One thing is that a lot of Zelda games are linear and you can't do dungeons out of order (at least not very often). The second is you can't go literally anywhere at any time in these games.
From what you're saying, it sounds like you would enjoy Breath of the Wild. The rest aren't really open world besides maybe the first 2 NES Zeldas. It's more appropriate to call them Action/Adventure and Puzzle games.

I can't bring myself to finish OOT it's so fucking boring but the combat and the overworld are very inovative for it's time.
You can feel that games like Dark Souls are inspired by it

It did the OoT formula first and in more polished form. From then on the series has been trying to recreate ALTTP in 3D until BOTW.

Other than that the original 2 are better for pure exploration, but you don't even mention those so I guess I'm dealing with an underage pleb.

Fair point although I'm a fan of metroidvanias. Metroid zero mission and Dark Souls are two games in that franchise that I like, what I hated about the Zelda games is that you literally can't progress without an item that's halfway across the map that you'll use once. In Metroid you gain abilities that you'll use throughout the game and you can play a lot through dark souls with just a sword, another thing I liked about that game is that the item you need is usually in the area you're in or you always get it from beating a boss. If I miss a hint in a Zelda game I just can't find the item I need.

>not as a kid either when I played Twilight Princess

There's your problem. You are too underage to understand.

You grew up in a world where exploring game worlds was normal.

We grew up in a world where Zelda was the ONLY thing that existed that could provide the experience of exploring a fully realized fantasy world.

Zelda's current popularity is just nostalgia and franchise loyalty, it doesn't actually do anything special that other games don't. Same as other great classic franchises like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.

>as a kid either when I played Twilight Princess
Hmmm....

Yeah, I'll be 19 this year but I still very much enjoyed other older games like Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, Diablo -2 and Silent Hill. It's stupid disregarding my opinion because I didn't grow up with the older Zelda games

lol yeah shitty open world games like skyrim sure are as good as zelda right?

it was almost the inverse of the OoT formula, OoT by way of LTTP item/area skipping was insanely obscure and relied more on engine tricks than sheer gameplay

LTTP is just people who like muh open world but also want to venerate everything that came before the 32-bit era because they're autistic purists

It doesn't matter what you enjoy. You are unable to understand the appeal of Zelda because you have never lived in a world where big, explorable fantasy worlds in video games didn't exist. Zelda introduced this first in 2D and then in 3D as well.

>more popular
You can't be serious. Souls is flavor of the past 5 years, BotW is the most mainstream attention Zelda has caught for a while and even then...

You can't handle games before the 5th gen? Yeesh, you're a waste of my time.