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YMMV / The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games

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King Harkinian: Zelda, Duke Onkled is under attack by the YMMV tropes of Ganon! I'm going to Gamelon to aid him.
Zelda: But father, what if something happens to you?
King Harkinian: I'll take the Triforce of Tropes to protect me! If you don't hear from me in a month, send Red Link!
  • Accidental Innuendo:
    • The bad guys are fond of these.
      Militron: You must be hardened with fire!
      Hektan: YES, Master...
    • Mostly thanks to YouTube Poop:
      Zelda: Luckily, my magic pouch can carry as much as you want.
    • Link gives us this gem:
      Link: Great, I'll grab my stuff!
    • Alora's "You're not afraid of dragons, are you?" Given that the quest she gives involves slaying a dragon to retrieve her stolen necklace, the line was meant to be taken literally. Out of context, the tone of her voice and swagger in her walk make it appear as though she's referring to herself as the "dragon".
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • It's not clear if Harlequin's power is invisibility or teleportation, so players tend to form their own opinion.
    • Did Duke Onkled betray the King out of corruption or was he threatened into doing so? After all, this is Ganon we're talking about here. Judging by his threat to Link in Faces of Evil, he does not take people turning down his offers for them to join him lying down. In addition, Duke Onkled's pleas that Zelda and the King go easy on him can as easily be interpreted as regretting his actions and hoping they won't punish him too harshly as it is a desperate move of saving his own skin.
  • Angst? What Angst?:
    • During Wand of Gamelon (although justified as the Triforce of Wisdom promises The King will safely return):
      Impa: Oh, my! Your father has been captured!
      Zelda: ...What about Link?
    • Lord Kiro's reaction to being captured isn't quite as emotional as you'd expect.
      Ganon: You are my prisoner!
      Lord Kiro: Hey!
    • Alora doesn't seem too unhappy about her husband's transformation into an Abominom, and is much more concerned with Link getting her necklace back from the dragon Gleeok.
  • Anti-Climax Boss: Every boss in Wand of Gamelon (and a few in Faces of Evil) is killed in one hit from the weapon they are specifically weakest against. This includes Ganon, the final boss, who gets sealed in a book in The Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon. Even though the weapon he's weak against is only a book in the former.
  • Ass Pull:
    • It is written: Only Link can defeat Ganon. The prophecy is unbelievably absurd in its excessive simplicity and exact specification as well as the casual way it gets said by Gwonam. Not to mention that the quote is directly contradicted by Wand of Gamelon, where Zelda easily defeats Ganon using the same method Link does.
    • The line "Duke Onkled betrayed the king!" comes out of nowhere, yet Zelda says she knew even though this is the first time it's brought up. It feels like there was a scene of Zelda learning about the betrayal elsewhere beforehand that was cut.
    • At the end of Wand of Gamelon, Link turns out to have been trapped in Alma's mirror with no explanation whatsoever.
  • Awesome Art: Contrasting with the animation quality, Rob Dunlavey and Thom Curry's hand-painted backgrounds (besides in the intro and endings) are beautiful.
  • Awesome Music:
    • Say what you will of the rest of the games, but a lot of the music in Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil is very cool and catchy, if a bit inconsistent with the Zelda series. Check it out here and here.
    • The MIDI track that was submitted as the Overworld theme for Zelda's Adventure which actually isn't that (there isn't one, actually), which was remixed by a different composer for The Angry Video Game Nerd II: ASSimilation.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In Zelda's Adventure, one of the forests has a freaky-looking mushroom character (like a Goomba with a dopey human face) that appears seemingly just to warn Zelda about Moblins... an enemy that Zelda has already encountered numerous times already. Meaning this character is completely pointless, and doesn't become important at any other point in the game.
  • Character Perception Evolution: While King Harkinian has always been popular as a Fountain of Memes, plenty of people nowadays also appreciate him for his personality, namely how he values peace and personally steps in to help Duke Onkled.
  • Common Knowledge:
    • Thanks to how infamously easy Ganon is in both Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, it's commonly said that every boss in the games is able to be one-hit killed. This is true for Wand of Gamelon, but every boss in Faces of Evil can stand multiple hits from their weakness aside from Glutko and Ganon, though they still aren't very challenging compared to their dungeons.
    • Almost everyone believes that Lord Kiro is one of the king's soldiers when, in reality, he's a nobleman from Gamelon. It's not helped by the fact that barely anyone knows that his name is Lord Kiro (he's called "Fari" in YouTube Poops) and the fact that he acts loyal to the king the same way you'd expect an underling to be.
    • It's widely believed that the last cutscene of Wand of Gamelon takes place in Hyrule, since the background is similar to the intro which does take place in there. In reality, the fact that the cutscene plays right after Zelda defeats Ganon and saves the king means that the characters are still in Ganon's lair, in Gamelon.
  • Critical Backlash: Some of the people who have actually played the games contend that that they aren't as bad as they're made out to be. They say that the poorly-animated cutscenes distract from the OK gameplay, and that they're actually some of the better titles for the CD-i. Considering the average quality of CD-i games, though, that may not be saying much.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: When Zelda kills Hektan:
    Hektan: YOU'VE KILLED ME!
    Zelda: Good.
  • Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Sort of. It's more or less universally agreed upon the only thing remotely enjoyable about the games (or just the first two games), is the So Bad, It's Good cutscenes, which achieved a practically legendary memetic status. The actual gameplay is considered forgettable at best, or unplayably bad if using the original intended control scheme.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Fan Nickname:
    • The games themselves are collectively known as "The Unholy Triforce."
    • Lord Kiro is mostly known as "Fari", which originated from the YTP "Zelda has a Boyfriend". Also "The Spaniard", because of his looks.
    • Harbanno the baker is known as "George".
    • Ushrom for the Wand of Gamelon shopkeep who don't have a canon name.
    • Gwonam is sometimes referred to as "Squadallah Guy" or also "Skwalala" among French people.
  • Fanon:
    • A strange example that crosses over with another CD-i game and only occurs in YTPs, but it's basically a staple of the genre to use Ludwig's Castle Hotel as the King's castle, since there are no shots of the actual thing that could be used instead (usually the sign claiming it as Ludwig's Castle Hotel isn't even changed). The King in particular is the subject of a lot of fanon, including his ownership of a 'dinner blaster' (a gun that fires burgers) and his own brand of cereal, Munf Munf.
    • Lord Kiro is almost always named Fari in videos, stemming from a YTP which named him that so they could reverse Gwonam's "We're off!" line to form the word without needing sentence mixing. Many character names weren't commonly known in the early days of YTP, so it easily caught on. Due to his name not being known, he also usually got depicted as a retainer to the King, rather than a nobleman.
  • Fanon Welding: A ton of YouTube Poops cross this game over with Hotel Mario and I. M. Meen due to all three games sharing an animation studio, and therefore meme potential. There’s also a ton of people who incorrectly assume I.M. Meen is from the Zelda CD-i games.
  • Fountain of Memes: Absolutely everyone. Nearly every line is quotable for good reason. King Harkinian, Gwonam and Morshu are the most famous.
  • Goddamned Bats: The awful layout and responsiveness of the CD-i Controller will make many of the enemies in the game into highly stressful annoyances to deal with such as the ones that fly (Arpagos, Jawbees, Keeses) and the ones which are difficult to hit even when you're crouching (Bots, Lowders). Even worse is that some of them respawn indefinitely, forcing you to constantly stay on guard for them.
  • Ham and Cheese: Mark Berry's gloriously hammy performances of King Harkinian and Ganon definitely made the mediocre cutscenes easier to sit through.
    Ganon: YOU DARE BRING LIGHT TO MY LAIR?! YOU MUST DIE!!
  • Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: To a ridiculous degree in Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon. Levels have many cheap traps, platforms that are hard to be seen, darkness that forces the players to use the lantern and enemies coming from everywhere to ram you. Bosses are no tougher than normal enemies and some of them die in a single hit.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay: A BDSM relationship is frequently seen as existing between the King and Duke Onkled. Poopers jump on this quite often with videos such as The King's Secret. Although, to be fair, in that vid everybody is gay.
    Duke Onkled: Please, Your Omnipotence, have mercy!
  • Iconic Character, Forgotten Title: The game starring Link is actually titled Link: The Faces of Evil not The Legend of Zelda: The Faces of Evil.
  • Inferred Holocaust: The cutscenes establish that most of the enemies the player fights are civilians brainwashed and transformed by Ganon's minions. But that doesn't stop Link and Zelda from killing every enemy on their path and the game never points out that you are killing brainwashed innocent people.
  • It Was His Sled: When poopers still went to Quebec Gamers to obtain material to edit, the only scenes most knew about were the beginning and end. It wasn't until later when the rest of the games went memetic. As a result, everybody knows that Duke Onkled is a traitor and has been secretly working together with Ganon as opposed to being attacked by him. In fact, this is probably the one thing most people know about him.
  • Karmic Overkill: Despite being a ruthless follower of Ganon and a Bad Boss to his men, Hektan can elicit some sympathy from viewers thanks to his rather graphic death, which is only bolstered by Zelda's flippant reaction.
  • Mainstream Obscurity: Mostly known for YouTube Poops. Very few have actually played the CD-i games, though this is mostly because they were originally released for an unpopular system that few owned and sees little in terms of emulation efforts, meaning one has to go out of their way to play them (and even if one were willing to play them on original hardware, it would be expensive to do so).
  • Memetic Badass:
    • Some YouTube Poops depict King Harkinian as a powerful fighter. One particular YouTube Poop popularized the idea that he has a big gun called the "Dinner Blaster" which is a futuristic-looking cannon (whose general design depends on the artist) that either shoots food or laser beams. There are also people who say half-seriously, half-jokingly that King Harkinian is objectively the best King of Hyrule in the whole Zelda franchise, and try to prove it by listing all of his qualities.
    • Morshu's two lines are popular among YTPMV community, and have been sentence-mixed into covers of several rap songs (including this cover of Rap God). The impressive sentence-mixing combined with the sometimes insane speeds he raps in has resulted in commenters seeing Morshu as the greatest rapper of all time, with whom even the biggest names in the industry couldn't possibly compete. He's even listed as a "musical artist" on Google, as well as having his line used in a text-to-speech app that has him read the entirety of the holy bible.
    • There exists a small sub-category of YouTube Poops called "YTP RPGs", which are animations of fake RPG-battles that often involve the CD-i characters fighting each other with powerful flashy attacks that they don't have in their source material. The characters' skills are often based on already existing memes about them.
  • Memetic Loser: Wand of Gamelon/Faces of Evil Ganon.note  Whereas the other characters are interpreted as varying levels of Memetic Badass, Ganon is stuck being known as the supposed dark lord that's killed in one hit by a book. Along with his ridiculous acting and pitiful attempts at being intimidating, he comes of as a far cry from the embodiment of evil seen in the canon games.
  • Memetic Molester:
    • Thanks to one of his lines in Wand of Gamelon made very questionable via mishearing ("Keep the cuntnote  in chains!"), this incarnation of Ganon is seen as one. Not to mention there's the scene where he kidnaps a sleeping Zelda in The Faces of Evil...
    • Ushrom's rather creepy mannerisms as well as 50% of his dialogue in his only appearance of the CD-i games (as well as the entire Zelda franchise) being misinterpreted as something much worse has earned him this status as well.
    • With YouTube Poop, anyone can be turned into this.
  • Memetic Mutation: This has happened to all of the content from the cutscenes thanks to YouTube Poop.
    • MAH BOI! Explanation
      • "This peace is what all true warriors strive for." Explanation
    • "I wonder what's for dinner?" Explanation
    • "After you've scrubbed all the floors in Hyrule, then we can talk about mercy!" Explanation
    • King Harkinian and Zelda's laugh Explanation
    • "Squadala! We're off!" Explanation
    • "Lamp oil? Rope? Bombs? You want it? It's yours, my friend, as long as you have enough rubies." Explanation
      • "Sorry, Link. I can't give credit. Come back when you're a little... MMMMM... richer!" Explanation
      • "[Person] explaining why [they did some humorous and/or offensive thing]"Explanation
    • "You DARE bring light to my lair?! YOU MUST DIE!" Explanation
    • "Join me, Link, and I will make your face the GREATEST in Koridai! Or else you will DIE."Explanation
    • "NO! Not into the pit! IT BUUUUUURNNSSS!!" Explanation
    • "I can't wait to bomb some Dodongos!" Explanation
    • "Gee, it sure is boring around here." Explanation
    • "This is illegal, you know!" Explanation
    • ♫Looks like you've got a baby penis...♫Explanation
    • "[Insert rapper here] has nothing on Morshu" Explanation
      • "He's only got two lines in the entire game!" Explanation
      • Google actually lists Morshu as a musical artist.
      • Morshu Reads The Entire Bible! Explanation
    • It is written: "Only Link can defeat Ganon".Explanation
      • No, what's written is "Nothing at all, fish, nothing at all".Explanation
  • Memetic Personality Change: Memes and YouTube Poop (The King's Epic Adventure and Adventures in Hyrule for example) tend to give different personalities to almost every character:
  • Memetic Psychopath:
    • The Faces of Evil/Wand of Gamelon Link gets this treatment, mostly due to his infamous "bomb some Dodongos" quote.
    • The Zelda from these games is given it as well. A good chunk of it has to do with the "You've killed me..." "Good!" exchange, complete with Zelda's Psychotic Smirk.
  • Mis-blamed: A lot of people don't realize that many of the game's flaws came from the fact that it had No Budget, rushed development, and was on a system with severe technical limitations (it only had two buttons, for starters, thus explaining why the buttons for talking and using the sword were the same.)
  • Moe: Downplayed. Link and Zelda could be seen as this, however, the art-style makes them look Ugly Cute at best. Fanartists tend to use a different art-style, so they end up looking a lot cuter.
    • In spite of the wonky art style, the fairies that help Link and Zelda manage to be this.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: Morshu's glorious "MMMMMM!!!!" Especially when remixed into YTPMVs.
  • Narm Charm:
    • In all fairness, Ganon's "You dare bring light into my lair? YOU MUST DIE!!" is pretty damn bombastic.
    • "After you've scrubbed all the floors in Hyrule, then we can talk about mercy!" Keep in mind that Hyrule doesn't just have homes, offices, and stores, it also has dungeons full of killer monsters. It would be safe to assume that the King wants those floors scrubbed too. Suddenly, that punishment doesn't seem so laughably minor...
  • Never Live It Down:
    • King Harkinian mentions DINNER once in the opening to Wand of Gamelon. It's the one thing he's most known for, to the point that most fans see him as a Big Eater (a characterization which is actually given to Link in the games). Also, the reason why he says "I wonder what's for dinner" is because he hears the dinner bell ring; the sound of the bell is so faint (especially in the original low-quality video clips) that most people don't hear it and assume he just started talking about food out of the blue.
    • Similarly, Morshu mentions selling bombs when you talk to him. Though he only says it once, YouTube Poopers often depict him as a Mad Bomber because of this. Since he only has two lines, this makes it even more noticeable.
  • Nightmare Retardant: Ironically, many of the bosses in the game fall victim to this. It's hard to be scared of the villains when all of them have Narmful designs, bombastic acting and just plain weird methods of terrorizing people. Hilariously, the ordinary citizens are often truly frightening thanks to odd expressions and movements and their habit of moving in closer and invading your personal space.
  • Older Than They Think: Zelda's Adventure was the first game in the franchise that defined the value of Yellow Rupees to be worth 10 Rupees, which predates The Wind Waker by eight years.
  • Once Original, Now Common: From a technical standpoint, the games were actually rather impressive for the time they were released, being one of the first games in 1993 on a console to feature animated cutscenes with voice acting. However, most of these technical achievements were lost on players due to the fact that most people weren't aware of their existence until the mid-2000s, which by that point, people were already used to more professional cutscenes in games, causing the cutscenes here to be judged as ridiculous.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Many of the minor characters are very popular despite their small roles and few dialogues. One of the most popular ones, if not the most popular is Morshu, who's just a shopkeeper with two lines.
  • Popularity Polynomial: The Zelda CD-i games were very popular as YouTube Poop sources on the early days of YouTube, and the majority of content on this page derives from those interpretations. However, with the increasing diversification of the "meme" side of YouTube as well as the decline of the classic Walrusguy and Waxonator-style YTPs, the use of the series as a meme became less and less common, usually only being referenced as a way to harken back to the original YTPs. But since 2020, Morshu (who was already a meme previously) once again rose to viral popularity due to memes such as the Morshu Beatbox and Morshu - RTX On, to the point that the former popularity of Zelda CD-i memes has essentially returned.
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: They're not inherently awful ideas, a side-scrolling Zelda action game are actually a fine idea that the franchise isn't unfamiliar with, and a game where you play as Princess Zelda herself for once is another idea that many fans can get on board with. Unfortunately, the games' general lack of polish doomed these otherwise great ideas to mediocrity.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Mark Berry, who voiced the King and Ganon, continued acting after voicing in the games, and he can be found in TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Grey's Anatomy.
  • Ships That Pass in the Night: Some people ship Gwonam and Impa, due to both being old and wise and a source of exposition, despite not even appearing in the same game.
  • So Bad, It Was Better: Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon are more well-known today than Zelda's Adventure, no doubt due to their freakish animations. Adventure went for live-action cutscenes, and though by no means stellar, they weren't bad enough to provide good riffing material. That, combined with the gameplay still not being good enough to make up the difference, means that Zelda's Adventure is generally considered the weakest of the three.
  • So Bad, It's Good: It's very hard to sit through Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon's cutscenes without laughing.
  • So Okay, It's Average:
    • The gameplay of Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon is considered more solid than the cutscenes, but not so much as to make the games must-play titles nowadays. What's more, accurate CD-i emulation is notoriously difficult, and CD-i consoles & physical copies of the games themselves can go for up to a few hundred bucks on auction sites, meaning even Zelda fans who would otherwise be willing to give the CD-i games a chance consider them more trouble than they're worth to actually track down and play. You better have a proper gaming-oriented controller with the console itself, because as the Game Grumps will attest (their playthrough of Wand of Gamelon makes the game's various gameplay flaws in the sidescrolling games rather apparent), the regular "remote" controller for the CD-i makes Link: The Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon (at least) damn near unplayable.
    • Compared to Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon, Zelda's Adventure is much less popular, especially in the context of parody. Its cutscenes are live-action and fairly competent, which means they aren't nearly as easy to riff on. Since the gameplay isn't good enough to make up for the missing So Bad, It's Good factor (with the biggest issue being Loads and Loads of Loading between every screen, which is frustrating since its gameplay is much closer to the traditional top-down Zelda games than the side-scrollers), it doesn't have nearly as many fans as the other two.
  • Special Effect Failure: In order to keep disc space used by the animations down, they had the characters and backgrounds load as different layers. Unfortunately, the system's slow CD drive means that this quite often results in the backgrounds loading a split-second after the characters, which ends up being pretty distracting.
  • Spiritual Adaptation: The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon can be seen as a crossover between Zelda series and Below the Root (often called one of the best Commodore 64 games ever). Same lead developer, similar gameplay style.
  • Squick: The big-lipped blonde woman in Faces of Evil, who seems to be hitting on Link to get him to recover her stolen necklace and briefly feels herself up when he does.
  • That One Boss:
    • Militron in Faces of Evil. He is a proper boss fight, having to be struck in close range and a weak point while shooting fireballs.
    • Ganon in Zelda's Adventure doesn't die in one hit, and he keeps spamming teleport and very damaging disks. With a hitbox that allows him cheap hits if you are close, he is a hard foe to put down.
  • That One Level:
    • Firestone Lake in Faces of Evil, short as it may be. It opens with Octoroks, the most aggressive enemy in the game since they can move and shoot. All the rest are fire-type, meaning they can only be harmed with snowballs. The platforming is tricky, with a precarious boat ride and falling rocks in the first area, then darkness and flying enemies in the second. Worst of all is that you need three spare snowballs to defeat the enemy guarding the exit, so if you exhaust your supply then you're screwed.
    • Washubi Swamp in ''Wand of Gamelon'. Also short, but you're supposed to platform along the trees to get across, leaving you only half a screen's worth of space to work with. Arpagos are everywhere, and at this point in the game you have very few tools to defend yourself.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • Both Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil have Plot Twists that would have been surprisingly effective had the writing actually worked:
      • Wand of Gamelon has Duke Onkled's betrayal of King Harkinian. As explained in this video, it's botched in its delivery: it's never shown how he betrayed King Harkinian, why he did it (a simple explanation like Greed or Lust for power would have sufficed), or how Zelda knew about it before Lord Kiro's revelation.
      • Faces of Evil has the inexplicable ability of Ganon's henchmen to rise from the dead to rematch Link, which the game never bothers to explain even as a Hand Wave. This could have been used to establish Ganon as a credible threat to the player, that no matter how many times they strike down his henchmen, that he could simply resurrect them as though nothing had happened. The first rematch, against Goronu, is even set up as a Wham Shot!
  • Viewer Name Confusion: Plenty of characters have their names revealed in an obscure Dutch magazine. While a few of their names are heard in the games themselves, the correct spelling is ambiguous if you don't read the magazine. As such, it's not uncommon to see YouTube Poopers or YouTube Poop fans write Hektan's name as "Hectan" or Cravendish's name as "Kravindish".
  • Vindicated by History: Zig-zagged. These games were usually held up as the worst games ever made - being some of the most requested games for angry reviewers like the Angry Video Game Nerd. Nowadays, people are a little more understanding that the system they were made on was just not made for action games and appreciate that there was at least an honest effort made. That said, most people play it for the memes anyway.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Woolseyism: In the Dutch version of Faces of Evil, Morshu speaks with a very overt Bavarian accent, which fits his outfit quite well.

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