As one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time, The Legend of Zelda has seen numerous incarnations over the years. Link has been cartoony and serious, adventuring solo or with friends, sailing on a ship and riding horseback through Hyrule. His story has been told in comic books and even a television show.
Before players take their first steps in Link's shoes, they see the game. The Legend of Zelda has had some gorgeous cover art over the years. Some games even had lackluster covers until they were re-released in another country or on another platform, getting an aesthetic upgrade as a result. Here is some of the best cover art the series has seen yet.
8 Link's Awakening (2019)
The original Link's Awakening was released in 1993 for the Game Boy, but it was remade in 2019 for the Nintendo Switch, going on to become one of the platform's bestselling games. The cover depicts a world that is brightly lit and colorful, yet the determined expression on Link's face and the sword in his hand leaves no question that this is a world of danger, regardless of how cute it looks.
Link's own chibi-inspired design with its big head and simplified features weren't to every fan's taste, but it perfectly conveyed the tone of the title, which is one of the most important things cover art can do. The contrast between Link's toylike design and armaments may be unusual, but it helped make Link's Adventure what it was.
7 Tri Force Heroes
Link is a brave and accomplished warrior and doesn't necessarily need a helping hand, but a helping hand is just what Tri Force Heroes gave players: four hands, in fact, since the game offered a three-person cooperative experience.
The cover art for Tri Force Heroes strikes an interesting balance, featuring childlike characters in a perilous situation, standing atop a platform with weapons at the ready to ward off their encroaching enemies. The character designs are a bit more mature than in Link's Awakening, and the cover art makes the intelligent decision to keep its brightly-colored heroes front and center, letting the dull palette of the background structures keep the focus where it's meant to be.
6 Four Swords Adventures
The cover art for Four Swords Adventures maintains the trend of colorful, childish heroes seen in Tri Force Heroes, but the tone is darker here. None of these heroes are smiling: pressed back to back, weapons drawn, surrounded by a sea of enemies, the tension is palpable, impressing upon the player the need for cooperation in battle.
Link's foes are drawn in a somewhat more realistic style and painted with dark, muted colors, setting up a simple but effective visual contrast to tell a story: the heroes are all that stands between the forces of the darkness and a happy end for Hyrule, and everyone's help is needed if they are to finish their quest.
5 Skyward Sword
Skyward Sword is a far more mature title than many others in the series, taking many of the mechanics and story elements that made the previous games great and fusing them together into one powerful experience. It's therefore fitting that the cover is more serious than those of other entries.
Of the three main characters depicted, Link is the only one with true solidity, as the clouds and sky beyond bleed through the bodies of the others. The art shies away from the exaggerated and cartoonish aesthetic of other titles, leaning much more towards realism. The cover of Skyward Sword even goes so far as to include lens flare, as if the cover were a camera looking out onto Hyrule itself.
4 Wind Waker HD
When it was first released on the Game Cube, Wind Waker was criticized by many for its unique cel-shaded art style, a first for the series. That wasn't the only way in which Wind Waker was unique, however: rather than galloping around Hyrule on Epona, Link set sail on the King of Red Lions, battling the wind as well as sea monsters as he traveled from island to island.
The cover art maintains the art style of the game with one significant change: the color is leeched from the world around Link; other characters and objects are depicted in sepia tone instead. This design choice lets the cover keep Link front and center in players' minds while still giving a teaser of the cast and events to come.
3 Twilight Princess
Twilight Princess did its best to innovate in certain areas while remaining true to the series' roots in others. Transformations have been an important part of the franchise for years, and Twilight Princess added a new one, hinted at by the cover art: Wolf Link.
With its contrasting colors, diagonal bifurcation, and inverted wolf's head, the game's cover has a great deal of visual interest despite its colors which--at least in comparison to the aggressive brightness and cheeriness of other titles--are rather muted. Link and the wolf are drawn in a style more reminiscent of concept art sketches than finished paintings, giving the cover an added sense of mystery and potential.
2 Majora's Mask 3D
Another title in the series that received an update, Majora's Mask 3D (released on the 3DS) overhauled the graphics and fine-tuned some mechanics to try to provide the best moon-crashing-into-panicked-citizens experience possible. 15 years after the original appeared on the N64, the Majora's Mask 3D showed up to remind fans of what made the title great in the first place.
Majora's Mask is something of an oddity, even by Zelda standards, with its apocalyptic, Groundhog Day plot, and the cover art for 3D captures many of the characters who help make the game such a fun, albeit unusual, experience. Rather than readying himself for combat, Link is preparing to don a mask, partially obscuring his face and hinting at the many mysteries to come.
1 Breath Of The Wild
The gold standard for quality in the Zelda franchise, Breath of the Wild gave fans an open-world experience the likes of which they'd never seen before. As fans of the genre know, open-world games live or die by the quality of those worlds, and the player's first real look at the land unfolding before them will help set the tone for dozens if not hundreds of hours to come.
Link stands with his back to the camera, seeming prepared but not tense despite the sword and shield in his hands. Standing on a mountaintop, all of Hyrule lies at his feet, and the golden light shining through the clouds over the cool blue earth seems to beckon him. Never has Link's adventure felt more imminent or more impressive.