The Legend of Zelda franchise has resisted the pull of time, attempting to make it outdated constantly over the years. Moving from top-down dungeon crawler in the 80s to the 3D updates in the 90s and the various jumps in the artistic style of the 00s. This franchise refuses to die or wilt away from every new release being a massive moment for the gaming community.

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With the recent release of Tears of the Kingdom, The Legend of Zelda franchise has once again shown that it is atop the world of gaming. But over the years, one thing that has shifted and changed is the difficulty of the games being released. While modern adventures in the franchise are incredible, many fans still believe that the hardest Legend of Zelda games are past entries.

Updated on March 9, 2024, by Chris Harkin: While Legend of Zelda fans continue to be intrigued by Tears of the Kingdom, many other games have been revisited of late, prompting fans to wonder what other games in the franchise are especially challenging. As a franchise that is unlikely to end anytime soon, more challenging Legend of Zelda games will likely be released in the future, as the franchise continues exploring new avenues like the highly popular open-world concept. With other spin-offs and classic games always being revisited, the Legend of Zelda franchise will remain atop the gaming industry, possibly forever.

13 Skyward Sword

Game FAQ Difficulty Rating: 3.07/5

The main Legend of Zelda release for the Nintendo Wii brought a lot of challenges to it. In spite of making good use of the Wii controls, Skyward Sword troubled many players throughout with challenging dungeons and the unusual style with which the controls for certain areas and mechanics were handled.

Once players got used to the controls, they were able to control Link much more intricately than with most previous entries in the series. However, the Wii remote did add difficulty for aiming with weapons, and many of the puzzles in Skyward Sword were real head-scratchers that introduced a lot of unexpected challenges.

12 Ocarina Of Time

Game FAQ Difficulty Rating: 3.08/5

Of all the many different titles that have been released in The Legend of Zelda franchise, there are few that have achieved the level of legendary success that Ocarina of Time managed, inspiring so many other games. Having one of the most ambitious stories in gaming, which was so expansive for its time that it ended up defining the very strange timeline of the Zelda franchise, Ocarina of Time is one of the best games ever.

Ocarina Of Time was the first Zelda game in 3D, and this meant that it was the first to try out a completely different style of controls. While it did a great job, the controls were more difficult as a result than some of the later games in the franchise would provide. Ocarina Of Time also boasted an impressive list of bosses like the Death Hand or Volvagia, raising the difficulty for players by another few notches.

11 Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.09/5

The Hyrule Warriors spin-off franchise features Legend of Zelda characters and settings mixed with the gameplay of Koei's Dynasty Warriors franchise. While the first game was a lot of fun, the sequel adds a fascinating story as well as more difficulty to the proceedings.

Becoming a prequel spin-off of Breath of the Wild, Age of Calamity is set 100 years earlier during the events of the Great Calamity. Players have to take part in strategic actions, as well as engage in hack-and-slash combat during massive battles, which is really fun and completely different from most Legend of Zelda games, while also being a real challenge, which some hack-and-slash games don't manage to balance so well.

10 A Link To The Past

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.15/5

A Link To The Past had it all. It was the first great story in a Zelda game, there was a much more open feel to it, and it was still in the early era when gamers weren’t always told what to do or where to go explicitly. This in itself helped to increase the challenge of the game by a significant amount and made gamers feel like there was a lot of real reward in defeating the game.

A Link To The Past wasn’t afraid of making gamers feel the challenge of wandering through hordes of enemies with nothing but a sword and hope. Gamers have taken to this with a large speed-running community because there are just so many dungeons and secrets that keep the difficulty raised, even for experienced players who have been through it all before. All of this has led to gamers continuing to revere this game even today.

9 Tri Force Heroes

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.16/5

Taking on the visual style of A Link Between Worlds, this online game features up to three players working cooperatively as three different versions of Link as they attempt to solve puzzles and survive a variety of dungeons. The biggest challenge of this cooperative experience is life, as the hearts are shared by all players in the game.

That means that there is no way to continue with one or two players if one takes a lot of damage, the whole group goes down together. While the challenge of many puzzles isn't too severe, the reliance on other players can make this a frustrating experience at times, as with many cooperatively focused games.

8 Tears Of The Kingdom

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.21/5

The most recent entry in the franchise has added some difficulty back into the series, earning a place among the hardest Legend of Zelda games in the process. Tears of the Kingdom was a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild and managed to give players some shocking level of challenges at times.

The open-world nature of the most recent entries in the franchise is often paired with the capability to level quickly in order to beat main missions more easily. However, Tears of the Kingdom manages to be challenging, between puzzle work and immense boss fights, keeping players fascinated even after their first victory in the game.

7 Oracle Of Ages

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.22/5

Something interesting about Oracle of Ages is that, despite being released simultaneously for the Game Boy Advance with Oracle of Seasons, the game is different enough that it can easily be called the more difficult of the two.

While Nintendo’s similar efforts with Pokemon games being simultaneously released almost always end up with a similar level of difficulty across the board, Oracle of Ages had one massive point going for its difficulty. This was the sheer complexity of some puzzles, which many fans point at as the hardest overall game for puzzles in the entire Legend of Zelda franchise. Players are still finding tricks to help with the high difficulty of these games today.

6 Cadence Of Hyrule

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.3/5

Like Hyrule Warriors, this is a spin-off from the main Legend of Zelda franchise which features the characters and world of the series mixed with the gameplay of a different franchise. In this case, Crypt of the Necrodancer brings its brand of rhythmic action to Hyrule.

Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the Necrodancer featuring The Legend of Zelda is a fantastically fun adventure, but it is surprisingly difficult, especially for players not used to rhythm game style, to stick to the beat and be as effective in combat as they need to be to survive and save Hyrule by making it through all the randomly generated dungeons.

5 Majora’s Mask

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.39/5

Majora's Mask was another 3D Zelda game that upped the challenge beyond what some of the more recent attempts in that realm have accomplished. There were some significant changes post-Ocarina, but the games used the same dungeon, and Majora’s Mask lessened the number of dungeons in order to focus on each individual one as its own larger challenge.

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Majora’s Mask is an especially difficult game if players attempt to go for every mask, usually a Zelda 100% run isn’t so common but in Majora’s Mask, it feels perfectly reasonable for gamers to go on and collect everything, which makes for a lot of extra brutal work.

4 Breath Of The Wild

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.42/5

This huge moment for the Legend of Zelda franchise managed to launch the series to new heights of success. Despite always being popular, the release of this first major installment for the Nintendo Switch was a huge step forward for the Legend of Zelda franchise as a modern IP.

Breath of the Wild did exactly what it needed to do. It produced a hard Legend of Zelda game that managed to be hugely fun, while fully embracing the modern popularity of open-world games. All of this provided a template for massive success, which continued with Tears of the Kingdom. While Breath of the Wild contains a lot of playtime and challenges, it isn't the hardest Legend of Zelda game ever to exist.

3 The CD-I Trilogy

Game FAQ Difficulty Score (Average): 3.59/5

It would be difficult to choose just one, but the entire idea of the CD-I trilogy of Legend of Zelda games was that the system would be able to run the control system without it being incredibly difficult, and that didn’t work out exactly, making all three games incredibly difficult to play.

The Wand of Gamelon, Faces of Evil & Zelda’s Adventure were created through a Nintendo/Phillips deal, but the controls and way that players had to fight were all just so difficult that most gamers have never even tried to find a way to play through these entries.

2 The Legend of Zelda

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 3.74/5

The original Legend of Zelda game is very special to gamers today, it is a piece of history that is nearly forty years old, and it remains ingenious. But the controls have aged and are tricky, the style of games in that day was incredibly unforgiving and wanted players to have more of a struggle than games seek to create today, and the enemies made for intentionally distressing combat.

The Legend of Zelda was by no means the longest game to complete, even at that time, but the capabilities of the NES make this and most games for that platform seem even more difficult today by comparison with anything newer.

1 Zelda 2: The Adventure Of Link

Game FAQ Difficulty Score: 4.16/5

Zelda 2 is the oft-called black sheep of the Legend of Zelda franchise. There is one primary reason for this; the difficulty. The Adventure of Link was brutal. It created a 2D platformer where players had to fight a huge number of far more difficult enemies than in the first game, all while Link was far weaker, and had worse range.

Most Legend of Zelda fans will revisit the first game and then skip over this one when playing through the series, due to the crazy difficulty and learning curve. Not to mention that the final boss is extraordinarily difficult if players try to beat it legitimately instead of just crouching in the corner. The Legend of Zelda franchise hasn’t often returned to side-scrolling platformers after this crazy entry.

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