Ocarina of Time Is the Wrong Zelda to Start With
Forty years in, The Legend of Zelda is getting a birthday broadcast of its own. The Legend of Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct airs Tuesday, September 8 at 7am PT (4pm CEST), runs about 30 minutes, and, in VGC's words, will "share information about how Nintendo plans to commemorate the Zelda series' 40th anniversary." A second, general Nintendo Direct follows on Wednesday, September 9 at 7am PT, about 45 minutes on Switch 2 software releasing this winter, with a Treehouse Live stream straight after. VGC notes it is the first time Nintendo has held two full Directs in the same week.
Nintendo has not said what is in the show. Only one Zelda fact is already nailed down: a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is due later this year, and a 30-minute birthday broadcast is the obvious place to show it. So the likely centrepiece of the 40th birthday is a game from 1998, and the argument that reopens is the one Zelda fans never finish. Is Ocarina the best one?
For someone starting the series in 2026, the honest answer is no. Ocarina is the most important Zelda ever made and the wrong one to play first. That crown goes to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the case is below.
What Ocarina actually did
Start with what it solved. In 1998 nobody knew how to make a sword fight work in three dimensions. Ocarina answered with lock-on targeting and a single context-sensitive button that meant dive, talk, climb or attack depending on where you stood. Every third-person action game you have played since runs on some version of that answer. It also gave the series its shape: a child Link, a seven-year jump, an open field ringed with dungeons, and a soundtrack that half the internet can still hum.
That is why it belongs at number two and why the remake is the right birthday present. It is also why it should not be your first Zelda. Ocarina's field is a hub with roads rather than a place. Its dungeons have one solution each. Its greatest moments land hardest when you can feel what they replaced, and a newcomer cannot feel that yet.
Why Breath of the Wild wins
The first Zelda, the 1986 The Legend of Zelda, dropped you on a screen with no map, no instructions and a cave, and let you walk in any direction. The series then spent 30 years adding structure to that idea. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild removed it again. You leave the Great Plateau with a paraglider and a handful of tools, and everything you can see is somewhere you can go. Climb it, cook on it, set fire to it. Weapons snap, rain makes cliffs slippery, and the game never once tells you where to go next.
That is the strongest argument for putting it first for a newcomer: it teaches you to think like a Zelda player without the series' baggage. No item-gating, no memorised dungeon order. Then, when you go back to Ocarina, the older game reads as the ambitious first draft of a Hyrule you have already lived in, which is a far better way to meet it than as a museum piece.
The fair objection is that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom does all of this with more toys, and it does. But it is a sequel that assumes you already know this Hyrule and its ruins. Play it fourth, not first. It is the best second helping the series has ever produced and a poor introduction.
Three Hyrules, three ideas
The other three, briefly
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the top-down Zelda that fixed the formula: a Light World and a Dark World laid over each other, a new item in every dungeon, and not one wasted screen. If Breath of the Wild is the series at its widest, this is the series at its tightest, and it is a weekend's play. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask reuses Ocarina's engine and its Link, then traps him in a town with 72 hours until the moon lands. You rewind, you learn the residents' routines, you fix one small life at a time. It is the boldest game on this list and the worst place to start, which is why it sits at four and not two.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker replaced Hyrule Field with an ocean and Link with a cartoon, and fans howled at the cartoon before they played it. Now it is the one everyone wants back and nobody expects. Nintendo Life's prediction piece for the September 8 show guesses at a long Ocarina trailer with a release date, a teaser for the live-action film, and a special-edition Zelda Switch 2 console, then adds that it may be time to give up on a Wind Waker and Twilight Princess double pack. All of that is guesswork. Nintendo has promised a commemoration and a remake, and nothing else.
What to do this week
Watch Tuesday, September 8 at 4pm CEST (7am PT). Then, if you have never played a Zelda, start Breath of the Wild and ignore every guide until you have fallen off something. Save Ocarina for the remake later this year, then follow it with Majora's Mask while the controls are still in your hands. If Tuesday's show hands Ocarina the crown by default, argue with it. Nintendo already did, in 2017.
