What order to play the Zelda games
Two different questions get asked as one here. 'What order did the Zelda games come out?' has a flat factual answer. 'What order does the story happen in?' has an official answer that Nintendo published in 2011 and has been quietly amending ever since. Neither is the order most people should actually play them in.
The reason is that Zelda is not a serial. Almost every game is a fresh Hyrule with a fresh Link, and the connective tissue between them is thematic — a sword, a name, a recurring villain — rather than narrative. You are not going to be lost. What you can be is bored, and that is the real risk when someone starts at the 1986 original out of a sense of duty.
The short answer: start with a good one, not the first one
Pick an entry point that matches the kind of game you want, play it, and let it tell you whether you want more. Four of them work as a first Zelda, and they are very different from each other.
Breath of the Wild is the one to start with if you want the modern open-world version of the series and have never played any of them. Tears of the Kingdom is its direct sequel and is better in almost every measurable way, but it assumes you have spent eighty hours in that map already, so playing it first spends a lot of goodwill you have not banked yet.
A Link to the Past is the one to start with if you want the classic top-down formula at its tightest. It is thirty-odd years old and has aged remarkably well, largely because it was already the refined version of what the first two games were reaching for.
Ocarina of Time is the historically important one, and it is still good, but it is the entry most likely to feel its age in the moment-to-moment — the camera and the pacing of its opening hours are of their era. Play it because you want to see the hinge the whole series turns on, not because you feel you have to.
Link's Awakening is the smallest and strangest, and the 2019 remake makes it the easiest to recommend outright: about twelve hours, self-contained, and it has nothing to do with the timeline at all.
- Want a big open world → Breath of the Wild
- Want a classic dungeon crawl → A Link to the Past
- Want the historically important one → Ocarina of Time
- Want something short → Link's Awakening
Why chronological order is a trap
Nintendo's official timeline splits into three branches after Ocarina of Time, on the basis that its time-travel ending produces more than one outcome. That is a fun piece of lore and a terrible instruction manual. Playing chronologically means starting with Skyward Sword, which is the earliest story but was released in 2011, has the most divisive controls in the series, and opens with several hours of tutorial.
It also means bouncing between hardware generations constantly. Chronological order will send you from a 2011 Wii game to a 2000 Nintendo 64 game to a 2006 GameCube game inside the first three entries. Every one of those transitions costs you a re-acclimatisation you did not need to pay for.
The deeper problem is that the timeline was assembled after the fact. These games were not written as a continuous story and it shows the moment you try to play them as one. Treat it as trivia you enjoy after the fact rather than a route.
The sequels that genuinely are sequels
There is a short list of games where order really does matter, because they are direct continuations with returning characters and a world that assumes you were there. These are worth respecting even if you ignore everything else.
Everything not on this list can be played in essentially any order without confusion.
- Majora's Mask follows Ocarina of Time — same Link, immediately after
- Tears of the Kingdom follows Breath of the Wild — same map, same Link
- Phantom Hourglass follows The Wind Waker, and Spirit Tracks follows Phantom Hourglass
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link follows the original, and is the odd one out in the whole series
Nintendo's timeline, briefly
If you want the lore version: Skyward Sword is first, followed by The Minish Cap and Four Swords, then Ocarina of Time. Ocarina then splits the series into three.
The Child Era continues with Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess. The Adult Era continues with The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. The third branch — the one where Link loses — runs A Link to the Past, the Oracle games, Link's Awakening, then the original Legend of Zelda and Zelda II.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom sit thousands of years after all of it, deliberately far enough out that the branch question stops mattering. Nintendo has been fairly explicit that pinning them precisely is not the point.
A route that actually works
If you want a single recommended run rather than a decision tree, this one front-loads the games most likely to keep you going and puts the historically interesting but rougher entries later, once you have enough affection for the series to meet them halfway.
Stop whenever you like. This is a series where finishing four entries and moving on is a perfectly good outcome, and treating it as a completionist obligation is how people end up resenting a hobby.
- 1. Breath of the Wild — the modern entry point
- 2. Tears of the Kingdom — its direct sequel, once the map means something to you
- 3. A Link to the Past — the classic formula, still sharp
- 4. Link's Awakening — short, strange, self-contained
- 5. Ocarina of Time — the hinge the series turns on
- 6. Majora's Mask — only after Ocarina, and much better for it
- 7. The Wind Waker — the one whose art style outlived every argument about it
- 8. Twilight Princess, then anything left that appeals
Keeping track of a run this long
Nineteen mainline games across nine consoles is exactly the kind of list that gets lost in a notes app. The useful thing to record is not just which ones you have finished but which order you decided on and why, because that decision is the part you will forget by the third entry.
A play-order collection handles this better than a flat list: the run is an ordered sequence you set once, each game carries its own status, and the branch points — 'play Majora's only after Ocarina' — are visible as structure rather than as a comment you left yourself. It also survives the gap. Series runs this long are usually measured in years, not weeks, and the thing you actually need in month eight is a reminder of where you were.