Every Legend of Zelda Game, Ranked

by Fox Van Allen, for Metacritic – March 7, 2017

Updated May 2023 to add Tears of the Kingdom.

The Legend of Zelda, now over 35 years old, is one of Nintendo’s strongest, most popular and longest-running franchises. The latest Zelda title, Breath of the Wild for the new Nintendo Switch console, has drawn rave reviews from critics, with many giving it a perfect score.

Is Breath of the Wild just a great Zelda game … or the greatest Zelda game of all time? To answer that question, we have ranked every Zelda game by Metascore. (Note that some of the older titles are not available on Metacritic, and in those instances we have used scores from our sister site, GameRankings.)

Additional content by Jason Dietz

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84*

#17: The Legend of Zelda

NES, 1987

This is it: The 8-bit game that started it all. The Legend of Zelda, first released in Japan in 1986 as a launch title for the Famicom (and issued in America a year later for the Nintendo Entertainment System), was the first adventure game of its type: a non-linear fantasy where the focus is on exploration, not obtaining a high score. It was a massive hit for Nintendo, selling 6.5 million copies.

In 2004, GameSpot’s Jeff Gerstmann wrote of the game’s re-release on the Game Boy Advance: “Though the game is old and has been followed up by plenty of other, deeper games in the series, The Legend of Zelda still holds up quite well.”

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