Gossip Stone: What Is Your Definition of a Zelda Item?

Being a life-long Zelda fan can sometimes be difficult.  To have an interest in a puzzle solving adventure game, it’s ironic that I find myself often having trouble solving one puzzle in particular: Which Zelda is my favorite? With nearly 20 years of personal experience with the franchise and having played all 17 of the canonical games, it’s hard to really know which game is my favorite. My go-to deciding factor is usually the amount of the items found within the game.  Because of this, A Link to the Past had always held the highest position in my mind as it seemed to have the largest number of items.  However, once I started really looking at the items themselves, I found it harder and harder to determine what really counted as an “item”. So what exactly is a “Zelda item”?

Hit the jump to find out more!

As with any perplexing problem, I did what any self respecting nerd would do: I created a fact comparison spreadsheet.  I chose my favorite aspects of the games such as the number of items and dungeons, 3D vs. 2D, if the game had a magic meter, and if the game took place in Hyrule or another land.  I then compiled this information into a handy spreadsheet so that I could easily compare each game in the series to determine which one really is the best.

Yet, there was a large problem with one column in my sheet: the Item column.  At first I simply counted the number of items found in the item screen.  However, the more looked at the obtainable items in the Zelda series I began to realize that my original definition was far from being all-inclusive.

Take for example two of my favorite Zelda games, Ocarina of Time and A Link to the Past.  A quick look at the item menu and it appears A Link to the Past has a couple more items than Ocarina of Time.

From the Ocarina of Time 3D item screen we see 21 items (not counting the trading sequence item). In A Link the Past there are 23 items (when counting all 4 bottles). Then I started noticing a problem when I looked back at the original Ocarina of Time‘s item screen where it gives a different item slot to each of the elemental arrows.

So I decided to count the arrows as separate items since they do have different uses and are found separately, bringing Ocarina of Time to 24 items. Then of course there is the question of the boots. The Iron Boots and Hover Boots were originally part of the “equipment” screen but to make them easier to activate, Nintendo decided to add them to the “item” screen for the 3DS remake.  This made me change my definition of an “item” to be anything that you had to manually equip to use. Then for Ocarina of Time we have to include the tunics, shields, and swords as well.  This brings the game up to whopping 31 items and that still is not including “passive” equipment such as Zora scales, quivers, bomb bags, or the all-important power gauntlets. Not to mention the fact that in all of this I was still completely forgetting item upgrades.  Even the first Zelda game had item upgrades and many games include them as dungeon items or side quests.

If this wasn’t perplexing enough, I soon discovered that these two games were not the only problematic games. With magical rings, transforming masks, handy medals, and even various treasures, this was becoming a seemingly herculean task to nail down.  So I decided that I don’t have to figure this all out on my own.

 
What do you think is the definition of a Zelda “item”? Should there be distinctions between equipable items and passive equipment? Does an item’s location or requirement to continue the story matter? How important is the number of items in a Zelda game to you? Leave a comment below!