Nepiki
A gamer and writer at heart who wants to combine his hobbies into one. I am 25 years old and I'm from the Netherlands. Having played many games over the years, I wanted to express my love for them, however obscure they may be!
Last week I covered The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past in my review as a birthday special. But given how special this game is to me, I figured I would not end it there. The question for me remained however: what do I do? I’ve considered delving deeper into the randomizer for the game, but I didn’t want to play the same game back to back, so I’m keeping that for another day. I had a few other ideas as well, but I feel I’m not yet qualified to work out these ideas. What could it possibly be? Secrets, I like secrets! So my best next idea was rankings, but what did I want to do… bosses, items, dungeons? …Why not all three?
This is sort of a weird tier list because it combines a total of three elements into one, but I just couldn’t bring myself to make a separate tier list for each category. This is also because, taking items as an example, I would be done quite quickly talking about most of them. The same could be said about bosses because I am not analytic enough to break them down and give a detailed explanation on why I like them or not. Argos Knights jump around and you hit them with an arrow, good boss but wooo I have almost nothing else to say, at least not here. But yeah, this way I can hit all three topics at once, and describe what a dungeon excels at over the others. Also, this idea was partially inspired by McKenna’s Year of Zelda which I’ve been following the past year, so be sure to check out her ranking of the dungeons as well!
The dungeons are ranked on the following criteria:
- How fun the dungeon is to play through, the quality of the puzzles/enemies etc.
- The item that can be found inside. If the item is not able to be equipped (Moon Pearl, Power Glove) or used for combat, I judge it based on how much the world opens thanks to this new item.
- The boss of the dungeon.
Without further ado, let’s get on with the tier list! Click any of the links below to go to their tier, select a page or go to the very end to see the complete tier list!
Average Dungeon tier
Good Dungeons tier
Great Dungeons tier
Favourite Dungeons tier
Complete tierlist
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Thanks for the shoutout! This is a great ranking!
You’re welcome and thank you, I’m glad to hear!
Of all the 2D Zelda games, A Link to the Past has my favorite set of dungeons. The Palace of Darkness is a great choice for the top tier; I really like how when you check the map screen, it says “Level 1”. It really signposts to the player that the gloves are off and that the first five dungeons were just practice.
That’s definitely an interesting way of describing the Palace of Darkness yeah! The Light World and the dungeons it had were solid on their own but when the Palace of Darkness shows up, that’s when the game truly starts and all your skills are put to the test.