General Zelda Which Installment Could the Series Do Without?

[Random Person]

You'd think AoL would be the obvious choice, but I'm objecting to that. The reason being is that AoL showed Nintendo what not to do which in term is a heavy influence on the series. Now one could argue that Nintendo would've gone that route anyway had AoL never existed, but nonetheless, AoL does exist and does teach Nintendo what to not do.

And with that out of the way, I would probably say the winner in this category is Majora's Mask. I'm not going to say MM didn't influence the series at all, because it does, but not nearly as influential as other games. Storywise, essentially nothing of significance happened. The Hero of Time went on a side adventure that had nothing to do with Hyrule. It ended pretty much how it started * "And Link mysterious left" * It was even about a character from OoT who had extremely little significance.
Gameplaywise, hardly any of its significant mechanics were reused or if they were reused, one would not easily link them to MM. (Like some of the songs in TP) The exception is the post man whom I believe was first seen in MM. (Correct me if I'm wrong and no the running man from OoT doesn't count).

Don't get me wrong, MM is my favorite Zelda game and I honestly don't think there's much wrong with it. But there not much I see in the games that came after where I say "Oh, that clearly came from MM" whereas I do so much more easily with other games. I would love to see things like Zora's swimming mechanics, or Kafei and Anju, appear in other games... but they just don't.

 

[Wolf Sage]

The Zelda series in general should never have existed to begin with. That way, no one would have to be subjected to such griping, complaining, and negativity from all the insuperably unsatisfiable, unappreciative, spoiled "fans" whose actions and words have a negative influence on newcomers to the series...all the goddamn time.

Scratch that, screw gaming altogether... *hurls self off a cliff*

In all seriousness, though, I don't think that there's a single installment that the series would be better off without. In my opinion, each game has its own merits and has contributed something to the series as a whole, even if said contributions were not readily recognizable to the untrained eye. Some installments were even designed after (and/or re-implemented) a previous games' unused, developmental material. This means that without such underdogs as Spirit Tracks and Adventure of Link, who knows where the series would have wound up? The fact of the matter is, not everyone is going to like every game in the series...

 

[Link-of-Lylat]

Phantom Hourglass because it was practically a "what if" scenario, and was very boring to me.

 

[DarkestLink]

The Zelda series in general should never have existed to begin with. That way, no one would have to be subjected to such griping, complaining, and negativity from all the insuperably unsatisfiable, unappreciative, spoiled "fans" whose actions and words have a negative influence on newcomers to the series...all the goddamn time.

That's cause you're on the online community. You need to join a real Zelda community. It's actually a lot nicer. Although it's also a lot more mainstream than the online community, so some of the discussion might not be as interesting.

 

[Salem]

To be literal, its the last titles, SS and ST, only because their the newest and they literly contributed the least to the series, however if we started this thread years later after the release various wii u/3ds titles in the series, then they as those hypothetical future titles would have contributed the least to the series and SS and ST would influence them in some way...