It would be safe to say that, generally, Legend of Zelda games are well-designed. Most dungeons are intricately designed, mixing clever puzzles and an unmistakable flow that defined the series for the longest time. Enter the dungeon, find an item, use it to advance and defeat the boss. It’s a refined formula that was ditched with the arrival of Breath of the Wild, but at its core, The Legend of Zelda still relies on the precise balance between holding the player by the hand, and giving the player enough freedom to make one feel smart💯 when solving problems.
There are, however, exceptions to that statement. There are some in🌄stances where Nintendo seemingly forgot about its detailed quests, instead featuring frustrating and tedious sections in an otherwise enjoyable game. Be it annoying gameplay mechanics or never-ending trade sequences, every game in the franchise has at least one situation where the difficulty peaks at a surprisingly high level. These quests can still usually be beaten through grinding or with divine-like patience, but they stick out from the rest of their respective g♑ame because of how out of place they seem.
We have reunited fifteen of the woꦜrst offenders in the following list. These quests are often difficult at first; they can🔥 get easier with each subsequent replay, but they never get any more fun.
15 The Lost Pilgrimage (Breath Of The Wild) 🐼
Breath of the Wild is a wonderful game with an unprecedented sense of freedom. “The Lost Pilgrimage,” a side quest where you have to follow a Korok ෴trekking through the forest to find a shrine, sticks out li💃ke a sore thumb. This sounds simple enough, but several factors make it more frustrating than necessary.
First, the Korok is incredibly small, and can easily be lost in the tall grass. Second, the color palette of the forest makes it so the Korok blends in perfectly with the surroundings. You will therefore often end up closer than intended to the little guy, triggering another failure. Finally, just when you think you’re clear, the Korok turns around suddenly and starts running towards you. Since you will most likely be crouching, it’s nearly impossible to run out of the way, so you lose ag🍌ain. Let's not forget the Korok’s cry for✱ help when he’s faced with wolves, which you should ignore. That’s right. You must risk letting the little guy get mauled, or you fail.
“The Lost Pilgrimage” is out of place in Breath of the Wild because it feels unnecessarily cheap. , but 🦋even those solutions make successful completion seem random.
14 The Temple Of The Ocean Kin🐎g (Phantom Hourglass)
A bad quest can ruin the flow of a game, forcing you to take a break just so that the frustration can wear off. If the quest lasts for too long, it can take what should be a fun game dangerously close to feeling like a chore. Now imagine what happens if a bad quest is a central idea around which a game is based. Phantom Hourglass boldly decided to find out.
Phantom Hourglass is a decent game at its core, one which proves that touch screen controls can work surprisingly well for a Zelda adventure. However, whatever goodwill it gets from its mechanical prowess is wasted with the Temple of the Ocean King. The temple must be visited five times over the course of the game, usually after beating a regular temple. Every time you come back, you must redo the rooms you had already solved in the past before proceeding to the newest floor. By the time you go in for your final showdown with Bellum, you have already seen most of the dungeon, but you must still retrace your steps, solving the same puzzles a fourth or fifth time. It’s a tedious process which makes Phantom Hourglass one of th🦄e least replayed games i🍬n the entire series.
13 The O🥃riginal Water Temple (Ocarina Of Time)
The Water Temple in Ocarina of Time has acquired an unfortunate reputation, with some lists claiming itꦡ is one of the worst dungeons in the series. I would argu💧e that the design of the templ꧙e itself is sound, but that the dungeon is ruined by its reliance on the Iron Boots.
In the Nintendo 64 version, the Iron Boots are not a c-item, like the bow or the bombs. Instead, they are a regular piece of equipment, which must manually be equipped from the pause menu. Some sections of the dungeon require putting them on and taking them off a dozen times or so in a short amount of time. Every few seconds, the player must pa𒆙use the game, switch to the inventory menu, put on the boots, and unpause the game. A few seconds later, pause it again, go back to the menu, take off the boots, and unpause, so on and so forth, and so often, that the “difficulty” of the dungeon becomes a legend.
The 3DS remake realized the problem and made the boots an item instead of a piece of equipment, making the process much more efficient. They also added neon-coloured lines all over th🃏e dungeon to guide players towards the right direction, making the Water Temple much more palatable.
12 ꧂ Collecting The Tadtone🌊s (Skyward Sword)
In Skyward Sword, there comes a time where Link must go into the flooded Faron Woods in order to find the Song of the Hero. Because nothing in Zelda is ever simply given to you, you must find all of the Tadtones, little musical notes-shaped tadpoles, before you are bestowed the sacred song. ♊That sounds like a simple fetch quest, which might not be the most fun thing in the world, but it looks straightforward.
Or so you would think! To find the Tadtones, you must swim to the bottom of the flooded woods, all the while fighting against the clunky controls of the Wii Motion Plus. It works well enough when swinging the sword, but it’s not a good control scheme for precise swimming. You must also battle your limited oxygen supply, which can be further depleted if you bump into a poison bubble, most of which masqu𝄹erade as the Tadtones you must collect. Also, the Tadtones of similar colours must be collected within a few seconds of each other. Otherwise, you must restart their entire sequence. The sequence is easily disrupted by the many enemies swimming, or just floating around, Faron Woods. In the end, a quest which should take no more than ten minutes can easily be transformed into an hour-long marathon from hell.
11 Finding The 8th Dungeon (Legend Of Zelda)
For first-timers, the original Legend of Zelda is a challenging game which offers m𝕴inimal clues as to what to do next. Even for experienced (but average) players, such as myself, the game remains challenging because of some enemies are so unpredictable. Enemies like the Wizzrobes are tough as nails to deal with. Moreover, some dungeons are so well hidden that, during the fiveꦜ years or so between each occasional playthrough, it's easy to forget their entrance's location. The worst offender is definitely level 8, also known as “The Lion.”
The entrance to level 8 is hidden behind an inconspicuous bush in the middle of a screen. If you encounter it early enough, you don’t have the candle necessary to burn it down, and thus you walk back and promptly forget abღout it. By the time you need to find the dungeon, there is nothing to tell you where th๊e entrance is supposed to be. Not even the Old Man can be bothered to give you a badly translated clue to let you know where you are supposed to go. For first-timers, it will be a matter of luck regarding how fast they stumble upon the screen which contains the one tree which looks out of place.
And for returning players, you’ll just remember that there’s a bush somewhere that needs to be burned, but your pride won’t allow you to go online to look at a walkt🍸hrough. Good luck figuring out which tree in the𒊎 128 screens is the right one.
10 ಞ Cutting It A Little Close With The Gilded Sword (Majora's Mask)
The strongest sword in Majora’s Mask takes a lot of effort to obtain. While most of the steps needed are fairly easy on their own, it’s the fact that they all must be accomplished in🐎 a single thrꦡee-day cycle which makes it complicated. Furthermore, some of those steps take an entire day, severely limiting your margin of error.
The sequence of events unfolds like this: Beat the Snowhead Dungeon in its entirety, then go back in time. Go straight to the smithy and upgrade your sword a first time, then waste an entire day waiting for them to finish the job. Claim your sword, beat the boss of Snowhead again, and then goꦗ to the Goron racetrack and win the race. This step is the most difficult because it’s easy to get knocked off ꦺthe track by the other Gorons, which forces you to restart. Assuming you managed to beat the race with more than a day left, you can take your reward (the gold dust) back to the smithy, leave them your sword for another full day, then pick it back up before the moon falls. Interrupting that sequence at any time to warp back to the first day will reset the whole thing. It’s a nightmare of time management and repetitiveness.
9 Protecting The Carriage (Twilight Princess) 🅺
When a Zora boy is found injured in Castle Town, the owner of the local bar decides that there’s only one thing to do: get the kid to Kakariko Village, where he might be able to receive proper treatment. In Hyrule, that kind of job is problematic for two reasons: ambulances do not exist, so it must be done via horse-drawn carriage. Also, most of Hyrule has been taken over by dangerous creatures that love nothing more than wrecking travelers. And thus was born one of the most frustrating escort missions in Zelda history.
The carriage must arrive in Kakariko Village in one piece, which is easier said than done. Bad guys will try to set fire to the cart, in which case you have a split second to target it with the Gale Boomerang and put it out. Second, demonic birds drop bombs on your party, sendi𝕴ng the carriage off course. Your main means of defense is the bow, which must be used while you are riding your horse. This is already a difficult proposition when playing with a controller, but the Wii version relies on motion controls for aiming. The controls are particularly twitchy when it comes to precision shooting. Thankfully, you get unlimited tries, but your patience’s limit will most li⛎kely be exceeded before you reach the end.
8 Collecting The Triforce Shards (Wind Waker) ✃
The original quest to find the Triforce shards was not complicated. However, it was ridiculously stretched out and felt unchꦆaracteristically empty. Every shard can be found using a corresponding chart, and the tasks necessary to find these charts are varied, both in objective and difficulty. You might have to solve a simple sliding puzzle, or you might need to go down the first 30 floors of a 50 floors dungeon filled with enemies and with limited life refills. Once the charts are in your possession, you must then bring them to Tingle, who will charge you an astonishing 3184 rupees for the job. If you are short on cash, this means tacꦗking a rupee grinding quest on top of your Triforce responsibilities. Finally, you must travel to wherever the charts send you so you can fish the shards out of the water like any other regular treasure.
The sequence of events is an exhausting one, and the HD remake eases the pain a little bit by replacing most of the charts with shards at the end of the various tasks you must accomplish. Only 𓂃three charts need to be deciphered, greatly reducing the time nece👍ssary to complete the Triforce (and your interactions with Tingle).
7 Finding And Fusinꦑg Kinstones (The Minish Cap)
Minish Cap introduces Kinstones to the series, small circular stones that are split in half, which you can collect and then attempt to find the owner of the other half for a reward. It sounds like a fun idea, but the game does the concept wrong. It would have been fine if the fusions were only used to give smaller rewards, such as rupees or mysterious shells, but some fusions are necessary to advance the game or to get items like bottles or heart pieces. In an example of the snake eating its own tail, fusing Kinstones will so﷽metimes reward you with a different Kinstone. To make matters more complicated, the location, or even the person who has the other half of yওour Kinstone, is often randomized. As for the treasure chests that are sometimes revealed after a successful fusion, they are not always in the immediate vicinity. Even using a walkthrough, you will need luck to complete the quest.
Should you be patient enough to accomplish all 100 Kinstones fusions available, your💝 only reward will be the Tingle Trophy, which does absolutely not🎀hing at all. You can’t sell it, and you can’t use it. The ending of the quest is as misguided and disappointing as its entire execution.
6 The Last Two Heart Pieces (A Link To The Past) 🥃
The Heart Pieces in A Link to the Past are mostly cleverly hidden at the end of a short puzzle. S𒆙ome pieces are visible from the overworld, taunting you, and yet they are inaccessible until much later in your quest, when you acquire the needed tools. T🎶wo of the heart pieces, however, can only be found through pure luck, and it makes completists and speedrunners alike go crazy.
The first one is found in a chest game in the Dark World. The game has 16 chests, and for 30 rupees, you may open two. The Heart Piece changes location randomly, so it could be a dozen tries or so before you succeed. The second piece is in the Treasure Field, another minigame where for 80 rupees, you can dig as many holes as possible in 30 seconds. Digging up the heart is also a matter of chance, as it changes location every time, and no spot on the map is more likely to have it. Of course, it is possible to finish the game with just 19 hearts, but most Zelda players are familiar with that nagging feeling that makes you feel incomplete sh🌳ould you leave even on♏e collectible behind.