Somehow I only came across this six months after it was posted:
At the risk of pissing off fans of the 3D games, I think I agree with pretty much everything he says about
Ocarina here. (Confession: I never actually finished
Ocarina. In fact, I can't think of a single 3D Zelda game that I actually finished. Also, I haven't played
Skyward Sword or most of the others enough to evaluate if he's on point about them). There are way too much fake difficulty, way too much forced waiting, way too many fetch quests, way too little actual exploration. This may have been what got me bored with some of the more recent 3D entries as well: the fact that you have to do pointless, annoying minigames before you can get on with the thing that made the original few Zelda games true standouts, namely exploration. There seems to be less and less exploration in the more recent games and more and more hand-holding, and the more the series drifts from its roots in that respect, the less interesting I find it.
On the plus side,
Link Between Worlds seems to buck this trend judging from every review and gameplay video I've seen, and the promise of an "open-world" 3D Zelda game is even more encouraging, so maybe Nintendo is finally wising up to this.
I flip-flop between the original and
Link to the Past as being my favourite Zelda game.
Link's Awakening is pretty great too.
