Every Legend of Zelda Visual Aesthetic, Ranked From Worst To Best

Why are The Wind Waker’s Nintendo DS brethren dead last? The Wind Waker’s cel-shaded art style works because of its intense shadows, vibrant colors, and the fact that it isn’t trapped on a 256x192 resolution screen. But even when imagining a modern remake of Spirit Tracks with amazing skyboxes, 4K textures, and insane draw distance, it would still be just a slow train ride across a flat world.

Perhaps a better case could be made for Phantom Hourglass, The Wind Waker’s true sequel, but it still lacks all of the nuance, breathtaking locals, and scope of Link’s seafaring GameCube venture. Character models still look fun and whimsical in this aesthetic, but everything around them feels bland. Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks set out to make a fun gameplay experience on one of Nintendo’s most unique consoles, but when stacked up to its artistic inspiration, it’s death by comparison.

When A Link to the Past came out in 1991, it defined a specific type of Zelda game. The sprite-based, top-down dungeon crawler coexists next to 3D Zelda adventures even today. Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons brought A Link to the Past’s style of adventuring to the smaller, portable, Game Boy and Game Boy Color.

While the sprite work on these games is superior to Nintendo’s previous 8-bit entries, they don’t come close to the level of detail of their 16-bit older brother, A Link to the Past. On the other hand, 1993’s Link’s Awakening has always been applauded for its surreal, dreamlike tone. Seeing classic NES Zelda enemies and a Chain Chomp from Super Mario Bros. on the same screen makes Awakening feel strange, whimsical, and distinct from other games in the franchise.

2001’s Oracle of Ages and Seasons for Game Boy Color brought this style of sprites to the world of, you guessed it, color. They came out on the same date (similar to how Pokémon likes to double dip) and took advantage of the portable’s full color spectrum. The games’ locales transition from warm to cool tones. Some areas even capture the essence of an autumn day. Character designs are minimal but the hardware was able to render memorable locals like Ricky, Moosh, and Dimitri, who are all dudes I would get a beer with. Especially Moosh.

While all three of these games handled the task of fitting a large Zelda adventure onto a portable console, their aesthetic has aged poorly. An extremely serviceable look for the time, but when considered in the context of a ranking, there are simply 12 titles that look better.

Four Swords Adventures is a weird game. 2002’s Game Boy Advance port of A Link to the Past had a multiplayer mode called Four Swords, which would later be spun out into the full-fledged cooperative Zelda game Four Swords Adventures on the GameCube. The hook of this game is that you and three friends can play as four different Links at once, solving puzzles and battling in unison.

Its aesthetic is a marriage between the sprites of A Link to the Past with the special effects and design of 2002’s The Wind Waker. It made for a fun opportunity to see the hero’s Toon Link design and other iconic characters like Gorons, Gerudos, and even Epona translated into this aesthetic for the first time. The font and special effects are also inspired by The Wind Waker, creating a unique 2D-3D hybrid look. Fire creates a wobbling distortion on the ground and enemies burst into dazzling light when defeated.

Unfortunately the game just isn’t very memorable. Link feels like even less of a character than usual and visually the game feels more like a Frankenstein Link to the Past rather than its own distinct experience. The game has no “moments,” no visually striking locales, no atmosphere, no unique character design.

This Legend of Zelda multiplayer experiment had a lot of interesting ideas, but its overall design didn’t quite hit the same highs as the sum of its parts.

Nintendo 3DS’ A Link Between Worlds, the Link to the Past sequel 21 years in the making, is a Zelda game that’s all about perspective. It sticks to a top-down perspective but reimagines the world and art style of A Link to the Past with 3D assets. Every Zelda game these days has a hook; this one is Link’s ability to magically merge with walls and turn into a painting, shifting the gameplay onto 2D planes that wrap around the perimeters of walls.

Art and gameplay design intersect especially closely in A Link Between Worlds, as the game world has to be fully rendered in a way that makes sense to the player and the camera in multiple dimensions. Even more impressive is the fact that Link can merge with almost any surface at any time.

The new 3D graphics bring to life the sprites and tiles of A Link to the Past. Looking at these games side by side, you can see the love and care that went into adapting every pixel to 3D. Link himself looks like a chubby cherub, and when he’s merged with a wall he takes on an almost hieroglyphic design. So much of the thought put into the art and design of the game is great, but ultimately the game’s aesthetic feels a bit off. Taking the timeless sprites of A Link to the Past and translating directly to 3D polygons doesn’t translate well. The three dimensional character models and world in this game look ugly, chunky, and made out of low-resolution Play-Doh.

The story of how we got the dark and gritty art style of Twilight Princess is one you might’ve heard before. It starts with a GameCube tech demo Nintendo showed at the Space World 2000 video game tradeshow, featuring a sword fight between Link and Ganondorf, in their Ocarina of Time aesthetic, rendered with some of the bells and whistles the upcoming GameCube would offer. Fans lost their minds after seeing the footage.

Fast forward a few years and the next Zelda game wasn’t a gritty remake of Ocarina of Time but the cel-shaded playable cartoon, The Wind Waker. Subsequent poor Wind Waker sales in the North American market led the artistic pendulum to swing toward an aesthetic that featured an adult Link in a dark and twisted Hyrule.

Twilight Princess doesn’t really bring anything new and exciting to the rich visual tapestry that is The Legend of Zelda. One of the biggest inspirations for Twilight Princess was another popular intellectual property at the time: The Lord of the Rings. This would give the game epic moments, like the Eldin Bridge battle at dusk, but would also give it a muddy, brown, desaturated color palette.

The twilight realm is this game’s version of a “dark world,” and it does bring a certain visual texture unseen in other Zelda adventures. Portals that coalesce as perfect black squares before becoming a mass illuminated by a colorful, magical circuitry are juxtaposed nicely against Twilight Princess’s aforementioned bland color palette. One of the game’s final areas is the Palace of Twilight, which is the best example of the game’s strongest aesthetic choices. An ancient architecture lit up by that same, angular, colorful magic. This whole area feels like an earlier version of the Sheikah and Zonai shrines we’d later see in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Character design is very good in the game, giving us some of the best versions of Zelda and Ganondorf we’ve ever seen. And the real star of the show is a very good boy, Wolf Link. I don’t know if anyone ever asked “what would Link look like as a wolf” but I’m so glad we have the answer now.

Twilight Princess is overall a bit of a drab adventure. A game that wants to be as memorable as Ocarina of Time and as gritty as The Lord of the Rings led to a Zelda outing that looks derivative and bland.

Originally released for the Wii in 2011 before getting a 2021 HD remaster on Switch, Skyward Sword was pitched as the earliest game in the convoluted Zelda timeline. A lot hinged on its art style and aesthetics; it needed to feel iterative of the games that came before but also act as the proto-Zelda. Skyward Sword’s ended up with an art style that feels like a watercolor painting inside a children’s story book. It goes to great lengths to feel like Link’s first adventure.

The issue with this art style is that there’s no edge. The world feels like a puffy Fisher-Price toy. Zelda works best when its brooding darkness creeps in from the corners. With a childlike pastel aesthetic, there’s an opportunity to juxtapose that style with (for example) a creepy mood, but Skyward Sword never takes the chance to do anything like that. Eerie vibes aren’t a necessity in a Zelda game, but that or something similar could add a tonal dimension that this game is missing.

There’s something timeless about sprite-based art. Maybe it’s the level of creativity that comes with the restraints of older tech. Developers had to figure out the best way to design a character and build a world with the few, simple pixels they had at their disposal. These two NES games served as the template for all Zelda titles that followed, inspiring decades of boss fights, Hylian countrysides, and princesses. So many games, not just ones in the Zelda series, owe a creative debt to these 8-bit darlings.

Remember instruction manuals? Within both games’ respective booklets, we are presented with the art that these pixels inspired in the minds of their creators, like a drawing of Link holding the triforce against Ganon’s towering specter amidst an inferno. If this was a ranking of promotional and concept art, it would look very different.

It’s hard being the first games of a franchise in the context of a ranking and I’m struggling with where they landed. In some ways it’s the most inspired art style in the series. Games are a unique form of art that are conceptually iterated on, sometimes for decades. I’m not usually one who subscribes to the concept of “respecting your elders” but the level of engineered originality in these games is something we must respect. As for why they’re not even higher in my ranking? I think what’s sometimes more impressive is the art their legacy inspired.

It’s hard to talk about any Zelda game without mentioning A Link to the Past, a game that’s I’ve already mentioned repeatedly for its timeless sprite art. Skyward Sword aims to be the narrative proto Zelda game, but A Link to the Past is the game that solidified how we view the franchise today. Since much has already been said about an art style that has so boldly stood the test of time , there’s just one scene in the game I want to discuss that encapsulates the conversation around its aesthetic.

As the player you enter an area called the Lost Woods, a foggy mysterious labyrinth of trees and brush. After finally navigating the maze of woods, you know when you’ve finally reached your destination; a hidden grove with cute little critters running in your path. In the grove there is a stone plateau, and in its center is the legendary blade, the Master Sword. Pulling the blade from its pedestal (the first time we ever do this in a Zelda game), takes time. Music swells, a bright light blinds us, and when we finally free the blade, the fog clears, changing the woods, and the character of Link, forever.

That is a vibe, communicated through aesthetics, giving us one of the greatest moments in video game history.

A fan-favorite and a game often talked about any time the “best video game ever made” conversation comes up, Ocarina of Time is at the very least a banger. This 1998 Nintendo 64 classic had the herculean task of bringing Zelda into the new world of 3D gaming, and did so by using the new dimension’s greatest strength: scope. Ocarina feels huge, and Link feels small. Entering the Temple of Time feels like stepping into a truly sacred place. Being atop Death Mountain feels like conquering a treacherous climb. What Ocarina also brings to the table, artistically, is balance.

The games world is divided perfectly into different biomes that all have their own aesthetic and vibe. A Link to the Past is the obvious template for many of these now-3D locales, like castles, quaint towns, and mountainous vistas, but Ocarina had plenty of new aesthetics up its sleeve. This is the first Zelda game to feature art that was dark and unsettling as in The Well and The Shadow Temple, areas that are filled with zombie-like creatures, coffins, and the Dead Hand, a guy I would not get a beer with.

A major dynamic of the game is its two distinct time periods. When playing as young Link, the world is whimsical, lush, and alive. After you pull the Master Sword from its pedestal and become adult Link, the world changes. Hyrule Castle’s marketplace is no longer a bustling city center, but a dilapidated ruin filled with zombies. Areas that were lush become desolate and characters that were kind become bitter. It was impressive to see how the game world changed with the passage of time.

This was a new visual thread added to the artistic fabric of The Legend of Zelda. Never before had players felt things like fear or discomfort when they played these games. These emotions were integral to the core narrative of the game, about a child flung into a dark and adult world.

If someone wanted to make the argument that Majora’s Mask is a horror game, I wouldn’t argue. The direct follow-up to Ocarina of Time reuses the previous game’s engine and assets but rearranges everything, making something that’s entirely new for the Zelda franchise. The familiar imagery of Ocarina is now surreal, unsettling, and even more compelling.

The design philosophy feels like the definition of macabre art. The antagonist of the game is the Skull Kid, who possesses the titular Majora’s Mask. But your real enemy is time itself. Link’s mission? Save the land of Termina in three days by stopping a very evil-looking moon from crashing into it.

The game’s atmosphere is grim. The only thing standing between Termina and the apocalypse is Link. The game is designed from multiple angles to make you, the player, feel anxious about time. The HUD shows a ticking clock at the bottom of the screen. The game’s main hub area, Clock Town, is located in the center of the world map. In the center of the town is a giant ticking clock that houses the game’s final boss, further communicating to the player the game’s real enemy.

Majora’s Mask is gruesome. The Zelda franchise’s equivalent of body horror happens anytime Link puts on one of the shapeshifting masks, with Link recoiling and screaming in pain as he changes into a Deku, Goron, or Zora. This visual representation of pain ties into the bleeding heart of the game: Link acquires these transformations by healing fallen characters and embodying their pain. Majora’s Mask feels very purposeful, its multifaceted aesthetics working synergistically to create something bold, unsettling, yet tearfully tender.

2004’s whimsical little Game Boy Advance adventure shrinks the art of The Wind Waker down to 16-bit sprites. Aesthetically the game is similar to Four Swords Adventures, but with enough differences to feel distinct and fresh by comparison. This Hyrule isn’t a remixed SNES A Link to the Past overworld. It’s a new land that features a bustling city center with gorgeously designed characters and shops.

The Minish Cap is another Zelda game that likes to play with perspective and scale. Link, using his magical talking hat, can shrink down to an impossibly small size and interact with the Pecori, tiny creatures who fill out the nooks and crannies of Hyrule. Because many of the locales in the game can be explored at different scales, it makes the game feel both large and compact.

Wind Waker and sprites go together like peanut butter and jelly, and it’s a shame that Minish Cap was the final Zelda game to use this exact aesthetic.

2D sprites are beautiful and timeless, but if you absolutely have to remake them, then the Switch 2019 remake of Link’s Awakening is the way to do it. Developers of the remake described its art as “retro-modern.” They aimed to make a diorama-like world with toy-like characters. The character models look like they’re made out of plasticine and dropped into a stop-motion film. Vibrant pops of color make the island setting feel humid and tropical. The game’s camera is at a tilt shift, altering a typical top-down perspective to show more depth. Deft use of depth-of-field pulls every element of this new art style together, making an incredible-looking adventure.

This remake feels respectful of its roots, aiming to elevate the Game Boy classic’s art style, not replace it. The remake’s remarkable aesthetic has huge potential to revitalize other classic games, and I would love to see this approach be tried in remakes of various other 2D Zelda favorites.

2002’s The Wind Waker reminds me of that scene in Back to the Future after Marty McFly plays that insane guitar riff to an audience of 1950s-era dorks and says “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet…”

It took a long time for people to realize how beautiful The Wind Waker looked. Sales didn’t meet Nintendo’s expectations, causing a course correction that ultimately relegated this aesthetic to underpowered handheld experiences. This is a shame, because once Wind Waker’s Wii U HD remaster came out in 2013, many finally saw its true potential.

Nintendo’s goal was to create an interactive cartoon using an art style known as cel shading (or toon shading). The basic concept behind this style of graphics is to give everything in the game a “flat” shape with shadows that lend a hand-drawn aesthetic to both character and environment.

One of the most beautiful and atmospheric games in the series, The Wind Waker frees itself from the shackles of “realistic” graphics trends, giving it every opportunity to be stylistic. Monsters and explosions leave behind curly, cartoon clouds. Link’s giant cartoon eyes are expressive and look toward player objectives. Wind Waker feels like your favorite animated film brought to life, and it is one of Link’s prettiest adventures.

Video games are a unique form of art that are conceptually iterated on for years, sometimes decades. The Switch’s Breath of the Wild and its sequel Tears of the Kingdom feel like Zelda in its final form. These games take artistic elements from every adventure that came before them. We see the return of cel shading. The world feels huge, with glorious vistas high above the clouds and dark depths below the surface. Some of the most stunning moments in the game occur when you just stop to pan the camera around Link, watching all the meticulous details of the world sway in the wind.

This is the Hero of Time’s best look to date, too. Link’s blonde locks flow in the wind or tumble down his back as he dive-bombs from sky to land. He even gets a sick arm-sleeve tattoo in Tears of the Kingdom. In both games, Link is our own personal Ken doll that we can dress up in fun outfits. When we put on his classic fits from other Zelda titles, we see how quintessential Link’s design is in all these games.

Both games have dark corners to explore. The first descent into The Depths of Tears of the Kingdom is anxiety inducing; diving into a black void surrounded by poisonous goop. When we enter a shrine in either game, we are introduced to a whole new visual layer: a unique art style at the intersection of magic and technology that presents the player with various puzzles to solve.

It’s hard to imagine any Zelda game looking better than these. It’s easier to imagine this as the final style, a flexible, cel-shaded adventure with various vibes, flora, and locales. Who knows what exciting new art is on the horizon for The Legend of Zelda, but it’s safe to say that lovers of the franchise will come along for any adventure, no matter how Link looks.