No joke, before I read your second sentence I was beyond indignant, and started getting up to get my N64 out of the closet to nab a screenshot.

"These games also featured the only appearance of helper animals…"
Whither Epona and the Crimson Loftwing?

I would argue that Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks follow the 2D Zelda formula. Paricularly in their dungeons.

Isn't he the guy who can knock you off the stage, forcing you to climb back up and restart from scratch? Yeah, he's a bastard.

Yeah, the Goron Roll made getting Epona back feel kind of pointless.

They also did a really good job in Skyward Sword, I thought. I never felt like I had quite enough money, and was constantly making hard decisions on what to buy.

Same. Similarly, I played through Final Fantasy VI not knowing about the World of Ruin.

A true speed master z-targets to face perpendicular to his destination and jumps sideways.

I remember being blown away by Zelda II. The map gets huge, and you realize that the Hyrule from the first game was just a small portion of the new world you were exploring.

Not all. A lot of it was marked as Moby.

I always loved the little hidden things you could only find by backtracking. The first time I got serious about trying to get every heart piece and skulltula token in Oot, I discovered that you can re-enter the Dodongos cavern as an adult, and there's several places you can only get to with the hookshot. Absolutely…

That reminds me of one of my favorite Isaac Asimov quotes. Somebody asked him when was the Golden Age of science fiction, and he responded, "13." When the interviewer didn't understand, he clarified with, "Whatever science fiction you read when you were 13, that was the Golden Age of science fiction."

It's my favorite Mario, but whenever I saw that out loud somebody tells me I'm a tasteless clown for preferring it to Maio 3.

There's a Wallmaster in the Shadow Temple in Oot that may have been programmed into the game by Satan himself.

Oh shoot, I forgot to mention Star Fox 64 in my above comment. I devoted my college years to getting the highest possible score that I could in that game. My record is in the low 1800s.

Oh man, I've gotten 96 exits in Super Mario World an uncountable number of times. After that, I think Ocarina of Time is my most played through. Last year, beat with 3 hearts and no deaths, and conquering it thus gave me a profound melancholy. What is there left to do or see in that old friend?

That may very well be the case, but I read those books when I was twelve and operated under a very strict "swords and magic = high quality" paradigm.

Now that I think about it, I'm kind of surprised no one has tried to adapt Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.

This story is almost as sad as my story about my parents not letting me own Mortal Kombat, and me pretending my Tiger Electronics LCD version was actually just as fun.

Don't worry, after he's been leader for a bit, we won't call it "the free world" anymore.