Examples specific to the first game can be found here.
The series in general
- The first and second games have you find whole heart containers outside of dungeons instead of Pieces of Heart, which are segments of heart containers and require the player to collect several to get an additional heart. After the first two games it became quite rare to ever find an entire heart container except for when the player completes a dungeon and defeats a boss, at most you might get a heart container as a reward for completing a major sidequest, but even that was more likely to be a Piece of heart rather than the whole thing. This mechanic was later resurrected in the two Nintendo DS installments: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.
- The original two games also don't have treasure chests. Important items are simply lying on the ground. In the first game, hidden grottos had an NPC in them who would give Link rupees and items.
- This trope also applies in terms of aesthetics and plot. In the first game, the Triforce has only two parts, with the Triforce of Courage and the appearance as flat, golden Sierpinski triangles not featured until Zelda II; in fact, the artwork, the cartoon, and the CD-i games actually portray it as glowing, gem-like tetrahedrons. While the standard look for the Triforce is codified in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it's portrayed as actually speaking to Link. Link also has brown hair, the expanded Hyrule in Zelda II (which had Death Mountain on the southern part of the Overworld Not to Scale instead of the usual northern location and had eastern and western regions separated by water) is never heard of in any other game, and races that became iconic aspects of the series in later games (e.g. Gorons, friendly Zoras, the Sheikah) are completely absent in early games. Finally, the early games have zero hints to the eventual timeline issues that would develop in large part thanks to Ocarina of Time, which would not be settled until Nintendo released an official timeline on the game's 25th anniversary. Said timeline places the early games in a third timeline in which Ganon won in Ocarina of Time; even the creators seem to agree that the early installments were weird.
- Link in the first two games has brown or reddish-brown hair, as depicted in official art. All other incarnations are varying degrees of blond. Link also originally had a long nose (which is used as a joke at least once). After Ocarina of Time, all Links have had smaller noses.
- Ganon is consistently portrayed as a large, blue, evilly-dressed pig-like creature in the early games. His weapon of choice is magic, and eventually a trident, and battles take the form of hit-and-run rather than a direct duel. While A Link to the Past established that he was once human, this form was never shown, and there are no Morphic Resonance elements that suggest a redhead with dark skin. Simply put, his human "Ganondorf" form didn't properly exist until Ocarina of Time, and certainly was not expected at the time to be his iconic default form for every subsequent game. A few later games in the franchise similarly only feature his beast form, undoing the tradition of his human form being his "main" one.
- Ganon's weakness in the first game and A Link to the Past are Silver Arrows, which are replaced with Light Arrows from Ocarina of Time onward. In the first game, that was also his only weakness, as the iconic Master Sword didn't exist yet. Ocarina of Time introduced the idea that the Master Sword must be used to deliver the final blow, an idea that has mostly stuck since.
- The first two games are Ambiguously Christian rather than subscribing to the Fantasy Pantheon of the three goddesses. Link has a cross on his shield, rather than any Hylian emblem; the Book of Magic in the first game is explicitly referred to as a Bible in the Japanese version; a cross is a dungeon item in the second; and headstones in the cemeteries of these two games are adorned with crosses. This suggests that the original plan was to have Christianity as the religion of Hyrule, but starting with the third game they decided to create an original mythology instead. Interestingly, even though Link to the Past was the first installment that explicitly broke from Christian themes, in the booklet, there's art of Link praying to what's very clearly a crucifix, Jesus and everything
◊. Miyamoto stated in an interview later that he's interested in world religions and uses them as inspiration for his games, but presumably didn't want to upset anyone with any unintentional inaccuracies as the series continued and religion became more important to the setting and plot. - The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was the first game in the series to feature a Chain of Deals quest, which is now a Zelda staple. But unlike all later ones, which were entirely optional, you're required to reach certain points in this quest to progress the plot.
- Earlier games allowed players the option to upgrade Link's offensive power either through finding new swords or powering up his standard one. This stopped after Wind Waker for a while, but returned in Breath of the Wild.
The Legend of Zelda (1986)
- The very first installment in the series had enough examples to warrant its own page. Some of these examples are also applicable to the second and third games as detailed in the rest of the page.
- Rupees in the first game came in two denominations: Yellow (1) and Blue (5). Starting in A Link to the Past, 1 Rupee has always been represented by Green, while the Yellow Rupee would reappear in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, this time being worth 10 Rupees. The nomenclature of Rupees was also a bit more inconsistent in the first game and its spin-offs, variably going by 'Rupy', 'Rupies' or 'Rubies'note . A Link to the Past stuck with 'Rupee', going for consistency with the real-world name for various South Asian currencies.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link remains the only mainline game not to include The Legend of Zelda in its English title, suggesting that in early planning, the official name of the series could have just been Zelda, with the names of individual games going by The X of Y instead. As a curious side note, the first two Zelda CD-i games, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, follow the naming convention set out by The Adventure of Link.
- The Adventure of Link would use many more standard RPG elements than later games, such as experience points, as well as Link actually learning spells from elderly wizards and casting them directly from his magic meter: later games would rarely have Link use magic without some sort of item tied to the magical effect, such as the Fire Rod.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- This is the only game to refer to the Seven Sages as the "Seven Wise Men" and the Hylians as "Hylia". These terms were updated when the game was re-released for the Game Boy Advance.
- The game and the official Nintendo Power Strategy Guide make a distinction between the ancient Hylia people and the modern-day Hyruleans, the Hylia having magical prowess while the Hyruleans are mundane folk. Later games drop this distinction, as well as any strong associations between the Hylian people as a whole and magical powers.
- Monsters like Moblins and Hinox are actually Hyruleans under a Dark World curse due to their evil nature, rather than being natural pre-existing creatures.
- This is the only Zelda game to have each bottle share an inventory spot. Later games in the series tend to have them as separate items (including the GBA release, being given an entire row in the inventory with their old slot filled by the shovel.) In addition, they are called "Magic Bottles" in this game (while future games simply called them "bottles").
- Unlike later games in the series, Link doesn't automatically heal when he takes a full Heart Container after defeating the boss (except for the Heart Container received at the Sanctuary). Instead, he heals after obtaining the relevant Plot Coupon. Also of note, the Plot Coupon won't appear until after collecting the Heart Container, while in games after Link's Awakening, both appear at the same time and the Heart Container can be skipped.
- This is the first Zelda game to feature the Sacred Realm, but due to Nintendo's censorship policies at the time, the translation refers to it as the "Golden Land", which carries over to the GBA port apart from one early mention of it as a "sacred realm". Later games and A Link Between Worlds use the proper translation.
- The three Pendants of Virtue needed to draw the Master Sword were the first of the recurring sets of green, blue, and red Plot Coupons symbolizing courage, wisdom, and power. However, the Pendant of Wisdom is red and the Pendant of Power is blue, whereas nowadays the reverse is standard. A Link Between Worlds reverses the colors to fit the current standard.
- The Big Key opens the Big Chest containing the dungeon's item. It's also used to open Big Key Doors, which saw more varied placement than in later games; not all them led to the boss room and some dungeons had more than one or even none.
- The Master Sword's first appearance in this game features a red and gold hilt instead of the purple hilt with an embedded gold gem that became standard with Ocarina of Time. In addition, the Master Sword in A Link to the Past is not portrayed as the ultimate sword; it can be upgraded two more times, which change its appearance quite significantly. If a later game lets you upgrade the Master Sword, it is done via an enchantment that does not make any physical alterations to it (except in A Link Between Worlds, which also lets you upgrade twice via blacksmithing).
- The game features two dwarven swordsmiths, who you need to upgrade the Master Sword, who are fairly classic fantasy dwarves in most respects. No dwarves of any sort appear in any later game, with their role being largely filled by the Gorons, and with the exception of two yetis who appear in Twilight Princess, the series has since stuck to inventing original fictional races or at least giving new names to old ones, such as goblin -> bokoblin or elf -> hylian.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- The inventory, quest status and equipment menu screens all lack a description for the items, gear and pickups gathered over the course of the adventure. All games from Majora's Mask onward would add tjis feature, as would the Nintendo 3DS remake of Ocarina itself.
- This is the only 3D Zelda game where Hyrule Castle can be explored without it having been destroyed or corrupted by Ganon's influence, albeit only as a child and during the daytime.
- Ocarina of Time carries the 2D holdover of having a limited number of areas in which you could spawn on reloading your game — Link's house as a child, the Temple of Time as an adult, or a dungeon's entrance if you saved while inside it (and since neither Epona nor the warp songs are available until the adult era, this can make navigation less optimal). Majora's Mask also features this limitation, spawning you in South Clock Town unless you made a temporary save at an Owl Statue, though it's masked by the in-game clock system wherein Link starts each new cycle in the same place (and the earlier availability of the warp points further streamlines the navigation). The Wind Waker was the first 3D game in which Link would always spawn in the last area in which the game was saved, for narrative reasons as well as ease of gameplay.
- Ganondorf himself was clean-shaven in his first appearance. The Wind Waker gave him a beard, which every incarnation of him since has had. In his debuting appearance, he also has a noticeably less refined way of speaking in this game compared to later installments; often referring to Link as a "kid", having a more simplistic vocabulary and acting much more belligerent and temperamental than his more reserved and calculated incarnations later on.
- A major plot point is that Link is supposedly too young to draw the Master Sword as a child, necessitating that he be sealed in a seven-year sleep before he’s old enough to wield it. The ramifications of this have scarcely been brought up in subsequent games.
- In The Wind Waker, Link is able to draw the sword easily despite being around the same age as the Hero of Time. He does wince briefly, as though in pain, when the sword’s power is awakened in the Earth and Wind Temples, but nothing is made of his ability to wield it beyond that.
- Breath of the Wild revisits this idea by requiring a certain number of Heart Containers to draw the Master Sword, but it’s still not the same rules established in Ocarina of Time, where Link had to be aged into an adult regardless of how many hearts he had collected.
- On your introduction to Bomb Flowers in Ocarina of Time, a nearby Goron explains that they grow best in well-shaded areas and are rarely found outside of them. This was carried over into Majora's Mask, wherein they appeared in the dimly lit boss room of Woodfall Temple and as sparse obstacles along the well-lit Goron racetrack, before later games like The Wind Waker and Skyward Sword ditched it by showing them growing in all manner of locales. It took until Tears of the Kingdom to reverse this and have them be exclusive to dark areas again.
- Ocarina of Time is the only 3D game to make use of 2D Matte Paintings as the scenery for certain areas, mostly small indoor areas such as shops and houses, with Castle Town also being created with this method. In this method, the 2D image was overlaid over rudimentary 3D geometry, allowing character models to stand and move around the area. This technique is never seen again; even the other N64 game Majora's Mask upgrades to having 3D spaces for all areas.
- Finally, even the otherwise iconic soundtrack has presented unusual traits that, in hindsight, make it stand out. The classic tune of the franchise is absent, though a reprise of it is later added as part of the remake's credits medley. The first two dungeons lack an exclusive background music, as the theme for the Great Deku Tree would be played recurringly in the underground caves, while the theme of Dodongo's Cavern is reused for Royal Family's Tomb, Death Mountain, Thieves' Hideout and Gerudo's Training Grounds. Yet another dungeon, the Shadow Temple, doesn't even have a debuting theme, as it instead borrows that from the Bottom of the Well. Finally, with very rare exceptions outside cutscenes (such as Navi), there are no voice clips for the supporting characters; many of them remain audibly silent at all times. From Majora's Mask onwards. you can hear a gesture from their voices upon starting to talk with them.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
- The Master Sword is given a very different design here than the one it sports in later games, with an ornate hilt and pommel that are both colored blue. Twilight Princess introduced a different, simpler design and purple color, which went on to be used in Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.
- The Wind Waker also introduces the concept of sages who are responsible for imbuing the Master Sword with its power to repel evil. It’s established that the sages reside in two of Hyrule’s temples, and that the sword will lose its power if their prayers to the gods are interrupted, as in the case of their deaths. The presence and role of these sages go unmentioned in later games, even ones where other sages play important parts. Skyward Sword instead shows the sword’s power came from being tempered in three sacred flames, two of which give the same attributes (the blade’s sharp edge and sacred luster) that the sages’ blessings did in this game.
