Spirit Tracks gets way harsher critique than it deserves to, and I think it's almost entirely because of the train thing, which just kinda feels weird to me. "oh but it's on rails so you don't have as much freedom to explore", what, like wind waker didn't just have you sailing through nothing between islands? that sure was gripping gameplay, glad they let me have that amazing adventurous choice.

the ost has a delicious windy style, all panpipes and yumminess. cole is kinda goofy, and I do have to admit the trains thing seems very out of left field, but why not make goofy games? who cares! link gets a little train driver outfit! also zelda's an actual character with thoughts and feelings for, like, the first time ever in the series? this game is better than people say it is, and better than it has any right being.

I unironically like Phantom Hourglass a lot. the music is pretty good, the plot is good, it features Linebeck who might be one of the top ten characters in the entire series. I do find it lacks a certain amount of charm and generally feels like it's treading water (har har) in comparison to the other DS/3DS games. Link Between Worlds fits the zelda style to a T and uses the ready-made template of a "Zelda Game" to practically perfection. Spirit Tracks divulges from the usual Zelda standard but does so with a huge amount of charm & unique presence. Phantom Hourglass... doesn't really do either of those. it's just kind of... there.
Three stars & Linebeck adds an extra half.

i don't even have wooooooooords for twilight princess, man. yeah it's kinda edgy, yeah it's kinda cringe. but deep down, aren't we all kinda edgy? aren't we all kinda cringe? no, but we can be when we run around pretending to be a shadow-cursed wolf in a Dark Evil Scary Land and then a glowing lizard tells us about our evil girlfriend who floats through space and stabs us.

perfect game. no zelda will ever do dungeons like TP, no zelda will ever do a soundtrack like TP, no zelda will ever do the hero's journey like TP. if TP was a married man i'd ignore his ring and take such good care of him that I wouldn't walk straight for a month.

hello, is that the underrated gems department? you're gonna wanna see this.

by no means perfect and admittedly one of those "games you love almost entirely because you played them when you were 7 for eighteen hours a day", minish cap is worth way more than it's known for - which is like, nothing? nowhere near enough people care about this game! go and try it rn! the music, despite the GBA bitcrushiness of it all, is fun and charming; the graphics are evidently indie-game inspiring (once you play MC, you'll never look at independent pixel artist's top-down tree sprites the same way). the dungeons are good, the plot has enough to give you a little "oho!" moment now and then. perfectly harmless, does what it says on the tin. plus, vaati's here, and he's gay or something! show some respect for the roots that allowed ghirahim to thrive. amen.

[dominatrix voice] you're a bad little boy, aren't you? you never liked wind waker, and everyone knows it, you dirty little bitch. now bend over and tell your little cuck friends how much you love spirit tracks.

anyways, i think this game is just kind of okay outside of the music (which is largely outstanding, great sea my beloved). i know this is one of the biggest zelda nostalgia bombs and people get mad if you don't like it but idk, I never really gelled with the story, the dungeons never interested me much, the bosses never challenged me much. not bad, not good... just... wind waker.

oooh, baby, ocarina of time but with weird fan theories! or, y'know, more of them. majora is just the most wonderful proof that ocarina wasn't a one-hit wonder, nor was zelda a series that was going to run out of ideas anytime soon. mix all the best parts of ocarina with the things that majora does right, like the almost disgustingly detailed NPC-schedule-time system, and the general theme of despair, and you get a masterpiece. more dungeons would have been wonderful, but this game was made in a year, i'm not about to go crazy on that. my favourite thing about majora is the NPCs, since they annoyed me so much in OoT: everyone felt very lifeless. but in majora, everyone's weird as fuck and has all kinds of shit going on, and everyone needs to go to therapy! i love this game and it's dark little heart. ty for being the counterargument to all the weirdos who were mad that twilight princess "made zelda edgy"

nostalgia and favouritism is ocarina's sourest legacy, but not it's biggest, considering how it's footprint has not only remained on all-but every zelda game since, but also on a majority of all 3D action-adventure RPGs since. there are parts that have aged a bit awkwardly, and replaying it recently with a friend who's never played it before (and only ever played very modern games), it's faults shine through pretty obviously, not to mention the fanboys that insist on OoT being the best thing since sliced bread. aside from that, this game is just yummy. koji kondo, aonuma and miyamoto at their best and most iconic.

the og is good in a charming, old-school way, but this remake fucks HARD, almost entirely (for me) because of it's ability to stick hard to it's theming. LA:remake's whole shtick is looking like a physical toy set, as though you're moving a link figurine around a lego background or something, and it just looks so beautiful and the theme sticks perfectly throughout the whole game. I love the new style, and that it's very new for Zelda (considering how the only cartoony link we got for a good while was, well, Toon Link™). The music even fits, being played on a lot of toy instruments! Cute, simple, hard to put down, perfect game to play on a console like the switch.

controversial opinion time, i'm glad they cut the pokedex for this game. this has been the first main-series pkmn game i've ever wanted to (and succeeded to) complete the pokedex. music in this game is top notch, some of the best. i love the characters, i love that we have a dickhead rival again (ily bede). dynamaxing is probably my least favourite pokemon gimmick so far, but the max raids are so perfect that I can't argue with it too much. this game is fun as hell and if you pissed yourself and whined about it on release, you're probably a bit of a dumbass

ahhhhh. i wanted to like su/mo a lot more than i did. it hits so many really good targets, the characters are really, really good - i love the kind of "darker" story, as much as pokemon can get dark. su/mo's soundtrack blows a bunch of the others entirely out of the water, and the alolan pokemon contain some of my favourites. plus, this game introduces regional variants, which are some of the best new things pokemon introduced! this would be so much higher if they stopped holding your hand at every second, though