Also the original black sheep of the franchise, Adventures of Link.

Although personally I think it was a good idea that suffered from bad implementation, I've found very few people willing to admit they actually liked it. Notwithstanding it being decades old at this point.

> I've found very few people willing to admit they actually liked it

I did! The combat was fun, the music was great, and down-thrust is one of my favorite platforming abilities, ever.

More rare, is finding folks that can honestly admit to having beaten it. I picked up the "game and watch" recently, and I can't remember crap about how to make progress in that game. It is really really hard to remember where to go next.

Granted, the first game is bad at that, too. Especially on the second play through. Really difficult to have the same map be different in that way. Still have fun playing it, years later. :D

> More rare, is finding folks that can honestly admit to having beaten it.

I did that as well, although I was a kid at the time. Not sure if I could now.

Personally I thought that Spirit Tracks was much worse than Phantom Hourglass. The whole train mechanic and being restricted on how you could move in the overworld really wasn't fun. Between that and the re-implementation of the recurring temple so that you could only temporarily disable the guards, the whole game felt like a semi-stealth mission where you either timed the enemy movement right to slip past them or died instantly.

Yeah I thought of adding this caveat, but I don’t consider it a mainline Zelda game and basically no one has played it.