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The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has been out for awhile now, and a good chunk of the fandom has beaten it. Some have even beaten it twice through Hero Mode. So the time has come to decide whether or not Skyward Sword has surpassed Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda game ever made.

IGN has already asked the question and are asking fans to vote. They are comparing the games through four main categories: controls, equipment, bosses, and story.

Through an interactive video, which you can watch below, you can vote for which of the two games performed best in each category, while listening to arguments from both sides.

Voting will continue until January 1st, giving those who have been waiting for Christmas break to play through Skyward Sword a chance to cast their opinion too. IGN will then tally up the votes and announce the winner next month.

After going through the video myself, I ended up giving the Controls and Equipment categories to Skyward Sword and Bosses and Story to Ocarina of Time. Overall I still consider Ocarina of Time the better game.

While I liked Skyward Sword, I think I ran the hype train for too long and saw too many spoilers to enjoy the game properly. Basically, my experience was spoiled; most of the game wasn’t new for me. However, I try to judge the game with my initial reaction to spoilers in mind too. For example, I had seen most of the environments by the time I actually sat down to play the game, but I can still remember the way I felt when those environments were revealed by Nintendo prior to the game’s release.

As for specifics concerning each category, I think Skyward Sword had the better overall gameplay (there was a great level of improvement in mechanics). It used items in a more logical way than Ocarina of Time, and allowed you to use them in a greater number of ways. While Ocarina of Time did develop the revolutionary Z-target, I think Skyward Sword‘s motion controls have a slight edge over Ocarina’s, but only slight. However, if we are talking about ocarina versus lyre controls, I think we all know who the real winner is.

However, Ocarina of Time had the better story and bosses. The bosses in Ocarina of Time are certainly the most memorable, and while Skyward Sword had some good bosses (Ghirahim, Koloktos) they could have been a lot better.

As for the story, I cannot deny that the acting was superior in Skyward Sword, but that is because of advancing technology. Ocarina coudn’t have featured the same level of animation. However, it had the same quality of cinematics and still attempted to include performances with the limited animation they could impment at the time. It successfully told an emotional story in a way that had never been done before in video games.

As for the plot itself, both games prove to be crucial moments in the timeline, having great impact on future events (i.e. Hylia, timeline split, etc.). In the end though, I feel like Ocarina has the more dynamic story with better twists and characterizations. While I adore Link and Zelda’s portrayal in Skyward Sword, they were about it, besides Ghirahim, Impa, and Groose. Fi was a hardly a charcter at all, and you spent most of the game in isolation (aside from some quirky Gorons). In Ocarina you had the Sages, all of whom were very different from each other, and all of them experienced actual conflict (seriously why couldn’t Fi have inner turmoil at becoming more human because of Link? Why?).

All in all, I place Skyward Sword as number three on my list, with Ocarina of Time at number one, followed by The Wind Waker. But this is just my personal opinion, and you are all entitled to your own.

Source: IGN