The Legend of Zelda franchise has gone through many iterations, with bold stories in various worlds, usually including the Kingdom of Hyrule, having seen a lot of terrors and near-apocalyptic events. However, even when the world doesn’t end and Link saves the day, there are often horrible deaths along the way.

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When these deaths come, they are heart-breaking to players, especially ones that they weren’t expecting. There are a lot of terrible ways to die, and the Legend of Zelda franchise has managed to showcase a few of them. From redeemed villains to beloved heroes, this franchise has killed off a surprising number of characters in brutal fashion.

1 Wind Waker Ganondorf

Turned To Stone

There have been many versions of Ganon throughout the Legend of Zelda franchise. However, some of them are more brutally dispatched than others. In The Wind Waker, Link kills Ganon when he is still in his human form for once, and he does it in a surprisingly harsh way.

Ganon is one of the few characters who can be assuredly deserving of a bad death. Instead of simply being stabbed with the Master Sword and dying, Link stabbed it directly into Ganon’s head and turned him to stone before allowing the seas to reclaim him. This was almost more savage than seeing Ganon properly die would have been.

2 Zant

Driven Insane & Crushed

Twilight Princess is one of the darker Legend of Zelda games in general, and the battle with Zant is a fascinating representation of that. This character was already fairly mad, but the way that Link wore him down was a slow physical and mental breakdown for Zant that seemed pretty horrific to go through.

This death wasn’t considered by players as brutal as some others, simply because Zant is another character who had earned his fate as Ganondorf’s follower and usurper of the Twilight Realm. But the way Zant was slowly broken before being crushed by the amazing Midna was a savage death, even for such an evildoer.

3 Queen Sonia

Killed With All Hope Lost

Though it was sudden, the death of Queen Sonia seemed brutal in Tears of the Kingdom, a big reason behind this being that Ganon killed her in his moment of triumph, betraying her and the king in the process as he set out on his destructive path to become the demon king.

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This moment was one of the most horrific and sudden in the Legend of Zelda franchise. Despite it all being in a flashback, Sonia seemed like a truly heroic character, and this loss was a horrible one that affected the history of the newfound Hyrule kingdom, which leaves some mysteries about the game open.

4 King Daphnes

Drowned With His Kingdom

• The Wind Waker

After being one of the primary companions of Link throughout his adventure in The Wind Waker, King Daphnes had a surprisingly harsh death. Even stranger is that he chose it for himself instead of running from the flooding kingdom with the others.

When Ganon has been defeated, Zelda pleads to the king to come with them and escape the kingdom, but he simply encourages them all to live for the future instead of repeating his mistakes. He stays and drowns, the death being a sad one but not seeming quite as brutal as a drowning can be due to his acceptance of death. There have been several different versions of this character, but this was definitely the best.

5 Byrne

Obliterated Magically

Despite Byrne being a villainous character for the majority of Spirit Tracks, he does manage to become good at the end. Unfortunately, he does this at the cost of his life, and he is destroyed by his former master, Malladus, in a fairly extreme fashion.

While there are a lot of players who don’t feel much grief at the loss of Byrne, his journey to stepping in front of Malladus and becoming willing to stand against his evil, only to be completely and viciously obliterated by him, does leave many with a true feeling of sadness for the character.

6 Deku Butler’s Son

Has His Soul Stolen

Majora’s Mask in general is an incredibly and surprisingly dark entry in the Legend of Zelda saga. But the idea that an innocent character had his soul stolen and was killed by Skull Kid, only for Link to wander around wearing the mask infused with his soul, including in front of his father, is brutal in many ways.

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It is hard to imagine having one's soul stolen, but the idea is a brutal one, and not something that a franchise as friendly as Legend of Zelda would usually delve into. The way that the masks in Majora’s Mask work is terrifying, and an idea as brutal as this doesn’t often come up in the franchise.

7 Anju & Kafei

Crushed By The Moon

• Majora's Mask

The side quest story about reuniting Anju and Kafei in Majora’s Mask is another horrible one since there is no real happy ending. There are three possible ways their storyline can end, two of them with the couple never reuniting, proving them some of the unluckiest characters in the franchise.

But even in the version of the tale where Link successfully brings them together again, their ending simply involves them looking up to the sky and deciding not to hide but to face the apocalypse together. While Link eventually prevents this apocalypse in the good ending of the game, there is no mention of this pair, and their fate remains unknown. This last morbid moment between them is one of the most brutally depressing events in the franchise.

8 All The Twili

Transformed Against Their Will

• Twilight Princess

Twilight Princess was a fascinating and controversial Zelda game that managed to have one of the most brutal acts in the franchise’s history. That was the Twili, an innocent tribe living in the Twilight Realm, who were transformed into monsters and used by Zant to attack Hyrule.

This was done against their will. The very idea of being transformed forcefully into a monstrous creature and made to attack other innocent creatures is savage. The sad part is that, while Link manages to turn some of them back, he is forced to fight and kill many more of them, meaning they never have the opportunity to be saved. This helps make Twilight Princessone of the darkest Zelda games for sure.

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