I think Warriors is handsome but pretty. But I think First is Handsome and Brooding, which enhances the handsome. there's a big difference. Does that make sense ?
Between a multitude of PC ports and a dash of emulation, here are the Zelda games I generally prefer to play on my Steam Deck instead of original hardware. Not that I have anything against pirating 20+ year old games on principle, but I do legally own all of these titles in one way or another. Read below for more details and a link to each port, because it’s so sick to have the games I love on PC with quality of life improvements!
The Legend of Zelda NES Recompiled
This one is unfortunately broken on Steam Deck (graphical glitches, save states don’t work) so if I ever want to play Zelda 1 I just emulate it. But on windows it does work presumably. The fact it’s running natively on PC is cool enough to check it out. It seems to be under active development so I'm keeping my eye on it.
Zelda Again: Link is Adventuresome
This port of Zelda II has tons of Quality of Life improvements and some extra content, but oddly does contain copyrighted assets—you don’t have to provide your own ROM. So if you have any interest in it, I’d snatch it up before it gets taken down. Zelda II is my least favorite game in the series, but having it in this improved form is cool.
Zelda 3 Reborn
A Link to the Past has never looked this good. Widescreen, shaders, legacy bug fixes, toggles for various QoL updates, multiple equippable item buttons, the works. This is a fork of another port, so it's currently in prerelease, which means there are still some bugs that the developer is working out. They're currently pretty responsive in the project's Discord server, so if you run into something you can just let them know.
The dev of the original work, Zelda3, went MIA from their discord server earlier this month. While Zelda3 is more stable than Z3R, and has a dedicated Linux build, Z3R is more feature-rich. Up to you which you'd rather play. Note that there is an in-game settings menu for Z3R, but you have to manually edit the .ini file of Zelda3 to make QoL changes. It's not too much of a hassle but it's less convenient than the options being right there in the menu.
Link's Awakening DX HD
Once again a port that provided its own copyrighted material, which led to Nintendo taking down the original itch.io release. Thankfully you can still find archives of it in various places on the web. The best way to play it is through the launcher I've linked to, which updates the original game once you've found it. This port is built from the ground up, has free-map scrolling like the Switch version, up to six item slots, and loads of features. While there are options to make it play as close to the original experience as possible, it does have a modern UI. I think it's fine.
Ship of Harkinian
A true masterpiece and the poster child of decompilation ports. Ocarina of Time is THE classic, and unless you really prefer the graphics and form factor of the 3DS version, Ship of Harkinian is THE way to play it. The QoL features and bug fixes go absolutely crazy. The customization is insane. There's a randomizer! All around a fantastic experience. Aside from items on the D-pad and boots-as-items, the standout features here are widescreen support, higher internal resolution, and frame interpolation.
OoT natively runs at a blistering 20 frames per second, but this port can use all sorts of fancy math to create frames in between frames, practically as many as your monitor supports! It's so buttery smooth if you want that experience. Of course I often like to play OoT with nostalgia in mind, so I go native 4:3 aspect ratio, 2x resolution (as it appeared on the Wii virtual console), and 20 fps. So I basically don't use the standout features. The point is that these options are there if you want them, or you can go old school.
2Ship2Harkinian
As the name implies, this is the sequel to Ship of Harkinian: a port of Majora's Mask. Once again, widescreen, frame interpolation, higher resolutions, quality of life features, time savers, customization, oh man it's wonderful. I'd never do this but you can even choose to skip the entire intro of the game and start playing right after learning the Song of Healing. Between 2Ship and Project Restoration on 3DS, it's hard to pick which version of MM I want to play whenever I start a playthrough.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Zelda 64 Recompiled, the other fan PC port of MM. That one has almost no QoL features built-in, and you need to download mods to get it to be as good as 2Ship2Harkinian. But there are some mods that do things that 2ship doesn't do at all. So you can pile on a bunch of shit onto Z64 Recompiled make it the ultimate experience, or use 2Ship and enjoy it out of the box. It's a great time to be an MM fan.
Better Wind Waker
This isn't a port like the others featured here. Rather, it is a patch for the GameCube release that can run either on Dolphin emulator or original hardware if you have the means to do that. They basically implemented all the QoL changes from Wind Waker HD that they possibly could within the limitations of the original game. This includes the Swift Sail. With near-parity of features to WWHD but preserving the charming lighting of the GCN release, this is how I prefer to play WW.
Four Swords Adventures
Not much to say here because this isn't a patch or port, just straight up throwing the ISO into Dolphin. But you can play multiplayer pretty dang easily. Just set up each controller port as "GBA (integrated)" and rearrange the windows to your liking. No need for separate consoles and link cables. It's a ton of fun.
Project Picori
Back to PC ports, this is a pre-release port of The Minish Cap. As of version 0.4.0, you can get all the way up to the final dungeon before a bug softlocks you. But man up to that point it's so good. Multiple item slots my beloved. No more items constantly fighting for A and B. Various other QoL's too. It's great. Love it. Can't wait for 1.0.0. While I would normally prefer to play GBA games on my DS or 3DS, I swear to God those item slots make it worth playing here for me.
Dusklight
An incredible port of Twilight Princess. There's another one in development by a different team, but this one is fantastic. Higher resolutions, widescreen, frame interpolation, AND several QoL's from TPHD all wrapped into a single package. With HD texture pack support and future mod support, this is the definitive way to play TP for me by far. I'm looking forward to seeing what Courage Reborn (the other port), because this friendly competition is a total win-win for players.
Link's Crossbow Training
... is also here. Eh, it looks better on Dolphin than on Wii U, so I threw it on here too. And finally...
The Bells' Arietta
Neither a port nor a patch nor even an official game, The Bells' Arietta is a fan game where you play as a tiny BotW-style guardian and solve puzzles in a shrine of trials. It's incredible the work the solo dev did here over several years. It is, therefore, a sincere shame that the dev took down the download before Nintendo could even set its eyes on it. They were apparently overwhelmed by the attention it got on the internet. Still, people like me were able to get it in that short window it was available, and some have uploaded mirrors where you can find it. It's a good time.
That's all! Thanks for reading if you got this far. I love Zelda and I love the Zelda community for putting together such amazing fan works. This is art preservation at its finest. Nintendo will eventually stop releasing the N64 release of OoT. It still hasn't made Twilight Princess available for Switch or Switch 2. But these ports here? They're gonna last as long as one person still has the files on their hard drive. Alright, peace!
anyway heres more ravio art (ft. link) since albw has been rotating in my head for the past week which led to me getting inspired to draw again
also i can't get over the relationship between these two,, especially the line that ravio says to link at the end is so beautiful and hits me right in the feels
Throughout the course of Skyward Sword, Fi transforms from a completely robotic, unfeeling servant to a kind, gentle person who feels deeply for Link. One well-known incident displaying this change takes place at the top of Skipper's Retreat in the Lanayru Sand Sea: when sitting on the stool in the center, Fi notes that she hears bugs coming from above and outside. Many first-time players are initially disappointed and annoyed to make the trek outside and above Skipper's shack only to find the bugs making the noise, as they are used to being directed by Fi to only plot-relevant details. However, this one seemingly out-of-character piece of dialogue proves that Fi is no longer so mindlessly single-focused: as Link rests, she hears bugs from outside, and having taken note of the bugs players tend to enjoy catching throughout the game, she lets the player and Link know that there are bugs to catch. It is an imperfect, misconstrued method of love, but love it is nevertheless.
High school AU? Prince Link x guard Zelda AU? Genderbent AU? Zora AU? Florist x tattoo artist AU? Modern royalty x bodyguard AU? Everyone lives AU? Childhood friends AU? Nah. DoorDash AU.
The Wind Waker is far from my favorite game in the franchise but it was still very important to me to capture the essence of the game and characters and do them justice in this little art nouveau series - hope you enjoy!
BOTW's story works a lot better than TOTK's story because of the difference in their driving questions.
For BOTW, the main question you ask from the start is "Who am I?" and also "What happened to Hyrule?" You learn the answers to these questions over time as you journey across the land and remember things about your past. The answer to "who am I" is "I am the chosen hero," and the answer to "what happened" is "We failed to save everyone." When you learn that, the goal changes from "go and do the quests because the old lady said to" to "Do what you couldn't do back then and save everyone."
In TOTK, the question is "Where the heck is Zelda?" and it's not your question, it's everyone else's. All the NPCs want to know where she is and you're just kind of standing there while everyone discusses it. And then the game throws you an early game side quest where they tell you exactly what happened to Zelda, and then you just have to putter around for 99 years and watch everyone run blindly towards Fake Zelda while you just follow them without saying anything until the final hour.
And then they force you to listen to the exact same spiel about the Imprisoning War, 4 separate times, without changing a single word. Whereas in BOTW, you get to learn about the Champions and who they were and their relationship to you, and explain the Calamity to you in one cutscene.
Plus, they don't expand on anything from BOTW in TOTK. Link and Zelda are just living perfectly fine in society despite having basically been dead for a century. And instead of expanding on the Sheika mythos, they just try and pretend they never existed and put the Zonai in their place as the Ancient Precursor Race with all the Ancient Technology That's Been Lost To Time.
So yeah, I'm a little bit disappointed in the story of TOTK. BOTW had an interesting narrative that meshed well with the open world format and was executed perfectly. TOTK just had an excuse plot with no substance.
Time might have helped but Legend owes Four 200 rupees!
There’s a bit of text from Minish Cap that I thought would work well between these two! Also, it looks like Four’s shield is probably the same small shield given to him by Zelda at the start of MC. If so, I think that’s just so incredibly wholesome.
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