Just in case that isn't disturbing enough, wait until you hear the sound it makes.note
Sometimes...the King of Evil and his minions decided to really scare us. But even if Ganondorf doesn’t show up, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be free of terrifying things.
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
- The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
- The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
- The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
- Hyrule Warriors
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
- Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
General
- Wallmasters, Floormasters, and any offshoots they have are largely regarded as some of the most disturbing things in the series. They are disembodied hands that crawl around on their fingers. The Floormasters swipe at you with their finger-hands or turn invulnerable and fly at you, and when you kill them, they split into three small ones that do more damage and grow into big ones. The Wallmasters hang on the ceiling, invisible, until you walk under them. An ominous Leitmotif plays, the room grows darker, a shadow appears on the floor, and you have a second and a half to jump out of the way before they fall down, grab you, and carry you to the start of the dungeon. It's a good thing they don't appear in the Water Temple.
- In Spirit Tracks, Keymasters appear. They're basically cel-shaded glove-like hands with an eye on the palm. As the name suggests, they will chase you down and steal the Big Key from you. In Twilight Princess, Zant's Hands do the same thing with Sols.
- In Tears of the Kingdom, there is the Gloom Spawn, an eldritch entity consisting of five dark Floormasters surrounded by blood-red malice. The hands will grab you and reduce your maximum HP, giving the impression that the Gloom Spawn is effectively eating your soul. Try to slay the Floormasters, and they will eventually respawn after some time (with less HP) and they each have a ton of HP to boot. If you do somehow manage to destroy the Gloom Spawn, then Phantom Ganon appears in its place.
- Like-Likes, the 3D games and Majora's Mask at night in the Great Bay especially: Their appearance, the way they move, the sounds they make, there isn't a thing about this creature that doesn't ooze eerieness.
- Worse: In Ocarina there's one early in the Spirit Temple in a room with a climbable wall that will actually fall ON TOP of you.
- And they make such a horrible noise that you can't get away from it no matter where in the Great Bay you go.
- Worse STILL: In Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks and A Link Between Worlds, they disguise themselves as innocent objects (pots in Phantom and Spirit, Rupees in ALBW) to lure you into getting close. Then they Jump Scare you and try and swallow you whole.
- The hidden holes and caves are usually very creepy, especially when live NPCs reside in them!
- Or, in the case of the two N64 Zeldas, a live cow!
- In Ocarina of Time: Master Quest, there are cows in Jabu-Jabu's Belly! Some are partially submerged in the walls, but can still be shot for slingshot ammo/used as switches/exploited for milk (no plausible way to get milk from jutting cow heads exists), and one is completely submerged under water (or whatever that green colored stuff is in the giant fish's stomach). And they're all alive and eager to give you milk.
- Or, in the case of the two N64 Zeldas, a live cow!
- For arachnophobes, the Skulltullas are by nature pure hell. Twilight Princess was probably the worst they got, but they were still plenty creepy in other 3D games like Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, where they fall on top of you out of nowhere much more often than they do in Twilight Princess. And there's also those gold Skulltulas with super-creepy sounds and movements.
The Legend of Zelda (Original)
- Yuu Mishouzaki's Zelda manga
is notable for its many interesting changes to the source material; one of those changes is the manner in which Ganon is depicted◊. Originally, he was a giant blue pig; here, he's a razor-fanged, bloodshot-eyed, practically-unstoppable abomination unto nature. That image in the link? That's taken from him looming over the first Princess Zelda right before he kills her, and he utterly dwarfs her. And the demons that he leads? They all share those characteristics. All of them. - The dungeon BGM.
- Worse, the final dungeon BGM.
- Worse, the final dungeon BGM
- The Lost Woods. It's easy to think you're stuck in there forever if you don't know what you're doing. Ditto with the Lost Hills.
- The graveyard area, with its ghosts that appear if you touch the tombstones and its eerie color palette. Worse, a sword upgrade there requires pushing a tombstone and going into the staircase beneath it, and in the Second Quest, that's how you enter Level-6.
- You can hear the bosses roaring one room away from them, and some continue to roar as you fight them. Due to the Famicom Disk System's superior sound hardwarenote , they sound even worse in the Japanese version. Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin covers the audio differences here.
- It may not only seem odd that this game has no towns, but straight up horrifying if you think about it: All of the NPCs are hiding in caves, some of which have been camoflauged, or in dungeons. In spite of Hyrule being officially a kingdom, it's a very, very barren one, with most intelligent life in it consisting of monsters. Was Ganon's invasion of Hyrule that thorough? And given the complete lack of infrastructure other than dungeons, caves, a few tunnels, and a graveyard, just how long has he had the land under his rule? Yeah, this turned out to only be a small neck of the land as shown in the sequel, but if you were playing this game in 1986 without that retcon in place, you'd think that you were exploring the site of a long-gone civilization.
- In the first quest, NPCs can do annoying things like take your money for breaking into their houses ("Pay me for the door repair."), trick you into paying a lot of money for nothing ("Pay me and I'll talk." "Boy, you're rich!") or run shady gambling schemes ("Let's play money making game."), but never harm you in direct ways unless you provoke them by hitting them. In the Second Quest, however, there are outright malicious NPCs in dungeons who lock the door behind you and threaten "Leave your life or money." Got 50 Rupees? You're fine. No? Assuming you don't just reload your file, you lose a heart container for the rest of the game.
- Ganon turns invisible during the last phase of his fight, making even finding where he is almost impossible.
- And when he's defeated, Ganon turns into a pile of ash, or based on the reddish color, is it blood?
The cartoon
- Ganon's voice would sometimes switch from a high-pitched voice to a low-pitched guttural one that sounded pretty scary.
- In one episode, Link's body is zapped into Ganon's Evil Jar while his spirit is left behind to wander as a ghost.
- The Tektites in the cartoon look pretty creepy, and they're savvy enough to tie Zelda up and rob Link of his sword before pouncing on him, followed by Zelda nearly getting her head crushed by a sinking underworld door.
- The Evil Twin of Zelda that Ganon creates, who nearly steals the Triforce of Wisdom.
- One episode had a group of fairies attacking Link and Zelda with water homonculi.
