3 Legend Of Zelda Games Most People Have Never Actually Beaten

The Legend of Zelda games are usually worth playing through to the end, even if there are some trials and tribulations along the way. While it's easy to occasionally fumble around trying to figure out what triggers the next step of progression in some of the older games, giving up halfway through the journey just isn't as satisfying as pushing through to defeat Ganon or anyone else who happens to be terrorizing Hyrule.

Even the most hardcore The Legend of Zelda fans, however, usually haven't beaten a few games in the series. This isn't about difficulty or length so much as playing the games to begin with, as certain titles have never achieved the widespread popularity of all the mainline entries in the series.

Zelda's Adventure

Not to be confused with Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link or Princess Zelda's more recent outing in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Zelda's Adventure might be the most infamous game to ever bear the Zelda name. While the idea of playing as the princess was intriguing, Zelda's Adventure doesn't deliver a satisfying experience.

Developed for the Philips CD-i system, Zelda's Adventure came in the wake of the CD-i games Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, which are both fairly infamous in their own right. At the same time, the first two CD-i games had some strengths, and their rough points live on in culture partly due to their unusual charm. The same can't be said for Zelda's Adventure, which was handled by a different studio and failed to incorporate many redeeming qualities at all.

From its unattractive photo-based graphics to its sparse sound design, Zelda's Adventure hasn't compelled many Zelda fans to play through it. It's certainly an interesting experiment, but there are much better Zelda games out there.

Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip Of Love

If the name doesn't give it away, Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love is a truly unusual Zelda spin-off. Putting players into the shoes of the familiar salesman character — or rather, into the shoes of an ordinary salesman in the modern world who becomes Tingle through the power of a book — this essentially acts as a point-and-click adventure with plenty of puzzles to solve.

Despite following a Zelda character, there isn't much about Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love that has anything to do with the broader series. The central characters borrow more from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz than from Zelda, and it's set in its own fairy tale world rather than serving as an addition to the Hyrule canon.

Before Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love, Tingle also starred in Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland and Tingle's Balloon Fight DS, based on the NES title Balloon Fight. While these are all fairly obscure compared to the average Zelda game, Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland did at least make it to Europe, while Tingle's Balloon Fight DS and Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love remained exclusive to Japan. If there's any lesson to be found here, it's that Nintendo didn't consider the rest of the world ready for balloon adventures.

That being said, Nintendo doesn't always have the ultimate say. A fan translation of Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love was eventually released, giving English-speaking fans a chance to check it out years after its original release.

BS The Legend Of Zelda

There's a lot to say about the BS The Legend of Zelda games, but when you boil it all down, the key point is that they've historically been inaccessible to the vast majority of Zelda fans. Rather than receiving a traditional cartridge release or even a modern digital download, BS The Legend of Zelda and its follow-ups were distributed over the Japanese Satellaview peripheral for the Super Famicom, requiring players to tune in during broadcasts to play.

BS The Legend of Zelda and BS The Legend of Zelda: MAP2 remixed the basic formula of the original Legend of Zelda with an art style based on A Link to the Past, new dungeons, and more. Shortly after, BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets acted as a sequel to A Link to the Past, taking place six years afterward. Lastly, The Legend of Zelda: Triforce of the Gods was also released through the Satellaview, but it was essentially just a port of A Link to the Past.

The BS The Legend of Zelda broadcasts were a neat idea, and the games were popular for Satellaview owners. Ultimately, though, that market was a very small niche compared to the overall Zelda community that exists worldwide.

Plenty of Zelda diehards would love to beat BS The Legend of Zelda today, and fans have managed to reconstruct the original game and its follow-ups to some degree. Its original distribution method means that key pieces of the game (like the vocal tracks that accompanied the broadcast) remain inaccessible, making this a game that the vast majority of The Legend of Zelda fans will never be able to beat in its original form.