I wonder if those reviews are more Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess. In fear of upsetting die-hard Nintendo fans I won't specify what I mean by that :)

But time will tell.

Either way, I look forward to it, will give me an excuse to dust off my old WiiU.

Do people not like Twilight Princess? I really enjoyed the feel of the game, my only complaint was that the pacing felt a tad slow and the combat was spammy

I believe a lot of people really like it, but it was more an issue that game reviewers got A LOT of flak if they didn't give the game a 9+/10 (at a time when point reviews were more of a thing than now).

I don't think many people thought it was bad, only that it wasn't THAT good, and that seemed to upset some hardcore Zelda fans at the time, and in various parts of the internet, possibly still.

You can google for "Twilight Princess Jeff Gerstmann review" for example. He gave the game "only" an 8.8.

I was thinking about this when I read about the perfect scores from GameSpot and Giant Bomb today. That review basically created Giant Bomb...or at least helped him leave GameSpot later on.

Yeah, and at least to a small extent I think it opened up for more against the grain reviews. Grading games on aggregate scores of graphics, sound, story, etc was kind of pointless (pun intended).

On the topic of that new review, it was written by Dan Ryckert. Even if he has integrity, that guy even loves Yoshi Island and thinks Taco Bell is the greatest restaurant in the world, so clearly there's something wrong with him. :) He's basically wrong about everything other than movies.

But that's kind of the point with reviews IMO. Scores (even if looking at metacritic which is better) only works when you know who graded it, since it obviously ultimately is a subjective thing.

I enjoyed it a lot as well. The impression I have is that it's Skyward Sword, not Twilight Princess, which had a big divide between critic and user reviews.

I guess I just have weird taste, Skyward sword is my favorite Zelda game. Apparently Zelda games are just divisive in general

I would have loved Skyward Sword if I could have skipped all the dialog, and if it didn't have that shitty linked chest mechanic. That game has some amazing moments, but the pacing really drags. It took over an hour for me to get into the first dungeon and feel like I was actually playing a game.

Breath of the Wild is interesting to me in that it has elements from all of my least favorite Zelda games but somehow makes it work. It's like Wind Waker except there's actually interesting stuff filling up all that empty ocean. It's like Skyward Sword without the rails. It's like Ocarina of Time if you didn't have to wait forever to get an opening to attack. It also feels a bit like Dark Souls but with a much more palatable aesthetic, and it's kinda like an Elder Scrolls game without the experience points.

Probably because people can't decide if ocarina of Time or the NES/SNES games are the "true" Zelda games.

Why not both? And throw in Link's Awakening too, which was a fantastic title in its own right.

Once I got past the slow start, I quite liked it. But the first time I played it (rental, IIRC) I didn't care enough to get past that part.

The second time I played it (bought, for Wii U) I didn't get any further.

But the third time I finally decided it was time to get somewhere in that game, and I ended up playing it until I beat it, over a couple weeks.

I'm still debating whether I care enough about Skyward Sword to deal with the idiotic controls.

I like the controls in Skyward Sword. It's the dialog that kills it for me though. It takes about an hour to get to the first dungeon. Some day I'll re-play the game in Hero mode so I won't have to listen to all the dialog. Or I could just play Breath of the Wild forever I guess.

For me it was just the point where I got really tired of the formula, having played most of the previous games.

Yeah, AAA games have a mandatory review floor of 80 and Zelda games have a floor of 90. If you go below that, the developers starve because their bonus is, literally, structured around Metacritic scores.

Compare: a mediocre Zelda game (Skyward Sword) got 93, a mediocre AAA game (Dragon Age 1) got 86, only a really bad game (Dragon Age II) goes negative at 75.

I'm more surprised by THPS2 having 3 different editions in the top 13 games. It's a great game, but feels weird considering it one of the greatest games of all time.