The Legend of Zelda (Series)

The Legend of Zelda is a video game series that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Hyrule. The protagonist of the series is Link, a young man who is destined in most of the games to save Hyrule. His primary goal in most games is to rescue the Princess of Hyrule, Zelda, from the clutches of the evil thief Ganondorf or his alter-ego, the dark beast Ganon. Some of the games feature different protagonists such as Navi the fairy, Ezlo the Minish Cap, or Midna, who serve as sidekicks throughout the course of the game, or different antagonists, such as Vaati the wind mage, the general of darkness Onox, or the ursuper king Zant.

The Beginning
The market of video games was in its infant stages back in the mid-80's, and a relatively small gaming company known as Nintendo, which had its origins in toys and card games, had just begun to make a run at the video game market, starting with small games that caught no interest. It wasn't until they let the creative mind of Shigeru Miyamoto join the ranks of the R&D department that such classic franchises as Donkey Kong, Mario, and of course, Zelda, began to enter the scene.

Miyamoto wanted to create a game that challenges the gamers mind with puzzles and a rich atmosphere. He created The Legend of Zelda in February, 1986 (in Japan; released July 1987 in USA) for the Famicom Entertainment System (Nintendo Entertainment System outside Japan) and it became an instant classic. The game was set in a fantasy world and a young man dressed in green set out on an adventure to save the princess by recovering a mystical item known as the Triforce. The game started the series and introduced all the major elements known to all Zelda fans.

The instant success of the game sparked a sequel less than a year later. In January, 1987 (in Japan; 1988 in USA), The Adventure of Link was released. Instantly it fell under heavy crticism by gamers. Instead of the overhead view the original had given fans, the sequel featured side-scrolling combat and exploration, like the Mario series. Some hardcore fans disregard Zelda II as a "Zelda game" for this reason.

Jump to Super Famicom
Video games were becoming more and more popular toward the end of the 80s. The NES was an 8-bit system, the simplest form of graphics available for a console at the time. In 1989, rival company Sega, released the Sega Genesis, a 16-bit system, and in 1990 (Japan, 1991 in USA), Nintendo responded by releasing the Super Famicon, (known as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, outside of Japan). The console boosted the amount of colors available. With that, A Link to the Past was released.

Zelda in 3D
The first 3D Zelda game produced was Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64, an instant classic in many gamers' books, considered by many to be one of the greatest games of all time. Like Super Mario 64 before it, OoT managed to stay true to the Zelda formula in its translation to 3D, and as such it has set the standard for 3D Zeldas. Several years later, using the N64s expansion cartridge, was the release of  Majora's Mask , the direct sequel to OoT, and the second adventure of the Hero of Time.

Zelda titles in the next-generation were met with much controversy. The first Zelda title for the Nintendo GameCube was The Wind Waker, and it received many mixed reactions from fans. It featured cel-shaded toon graphics, a sharp contrast to the more realistic, anime style of OoT's graphics, and it also featured a large, open sea as the main environment, as opposed to the land environments (usually Hyrule) seen in previous games. Nevertheless, it received due praise, and was very successful.

At about the same time, the Nintendo/Capcom team released a remake of A Link to the Past for the GameBoy Advance, which included a new, seperate multiplayer Zelda title: Four Swords. Four Swords also received mixed reactions from the gaming community, but was successful enough to establish itself as a subseries of the general franchise, and to spawn two companion games: Four Swords Adventure (also multiplayer, released on GameCube) and The Minish Cap (single-player, for GameBoy Advance. While none of the "Four Swords" games ever acheived the popularity of mainstream Zelda titles, they were important in establishing the workability of a multiplayer mode in Zelda.

And in December of 2006, within a month of the initial release of the fifth-generation home console, Wii, in the States, Twilight Princess, one of the most anticipated games in the history of video games (certainly in the history of the series), was released worldwide for both GameCube and Wii. It has been extremely successful for its duration on both consoles, but its reactions from the community, like the other games of its generation, have been mixed. Overall, the praises are divine, and it is heralded as one of the greatest games of all time, and, by some, the greatest Zelda title yet.