The Legend of Zelda: An RPG series or not?

If there is one game series that Nintendo has that seems to egregiously overrated by fans, I'm talking NOT about Pokemon, NOT about Mario, but Zelda. This series is loved so much by avid gamers, and I'll admit I like the series, but not to abnormal levels. Every time I get bored and look on GameFAQs to see whatever competition is going on, I look at the final results eventually, and hey look Link won the character battle, oh wait is that Majora's Mask winning the best game of all time award? Yeah, I don't get the extreme hype the Zelda series gets. That's really not the overall gist of this blog post though. I want to discuss whether or not Zelda is an RPG series.

The short answer is no, as it is more of action-adventure. The long answer is that every game that isn't Zelda II is action-adventure.

See action-adventure can easily be determined by looking at the first game in the series. It's top-down, you have enemies roaming a screen, can kill them at will, they leave stuff behind when they die, and you have several tools of the trade to do all sorts of things. Also a health bar which is easy to figure out, don't touch enemies or attacks to avoid them, get powerups to get things in ship-shape. And the overall puzzle aspect of things tends to take precedence a lot.

Now an action-RPG, which is what I consider Zelda II to be, has some action-adventure aspects, especially the puzzle kind. But more importantly, it utilizes RPG-like stats, gains, experience, and the gameplay isn't turn-based or something you would usually see in a typical JRPG. Zelda II ends up having a level system, so you kill enemies in your spare time and eventually you level up. That's when you can decide a stat gain, for attack power, magic, or life points. Heck, this predates the Mario RPGs on how you want to tweak your stats upon level up. Now Zelda II has a much different perspective than the other Zelda games pre-3D era, but the bottom line is, it did the action-RPG pretty well. Other games also do this formula quite well, the Soul Blazer series, Threads of Fate, Brave Fencer Musashi, even Hydlide, all of which have action-oriented gameplay but allowed for level or stat gains. The other Zelda games, or The Guardian Legend, or Startropics, are action-adventure, in that the overall gains come from pickups and there's no real level-up system.

Does this make me like Zelda II any more than the other games? No, because it is quite challenging and can not be fun at times, as opposed to other games in the series. But I'm not gonna deny the fact that when I look for RPGs, Zelda II qualifies as one.