#I spent twenty minutes manually making conditional formatting rules for the fun gradient on the table on the right

[the-starlight-papers]

This started out as a meme but I ended up going kind of overkill with the spreadsheet and so:

A comprehensive chart showing which items are present across all mainline Zelda games.

With bonus section showing the percentage of games that have each item, which is also broken down by percentage of 2D and 3D games.

Bonus observations below the cut:

Bombs were the most ubiquitous item, with all the games except Adventure of Link (Zelda 2) having them. Bow and arrow were the next most common, being in all games except the Oracle games, then followed by the boomerang which was in all but 3.

Some items are very common in 3D games, but not at all common in 2D games. The Master Sword is far more common in 3D games (15% 2D, 86% 3D), which makes sense because the 3D games tend to be more lore-heavy. Fire/ice arrows (0% 2D, 71% 3D) are in most 3D games as well, but are in absolutely no 2D games. This is likely because fire/ice rods made more sense in top-down 2D games than fire/ice arrows.

Some items are very common in 2D games but not common in 3D games. The main example for this is strength items (69% 2D, 29% 3D). This makes sense as small rocks in 2D games are often used as barriers Link has to push or pick up, requiring a strength item. This doesn’t work as well in 3D, so rocks are typically just bomb-able, no strength item required (except OoT).

The Oracle games and BotW/TotK are both sort of overpowered with their influence in on the results. Each set of games has similar item pools, and not having an item in both games will affect the results by about 10%. I definitely think the Oracle games should be counted separately, because they have fairly different item pools due to their different play styles. BotW/TotK are almost identical, but they are separate games that came out six years apart, so I will be counting them separately as well.

And finally, because it made me laugh, the Hero of Legend picks up two separate Cane of Somarias, one in ALttP and one in OoA.

If anyone sees any mistakes or has an item they think I should add please let me know. I tried to get every item that showed up at least twice. I have only played about half of these games though, so I would not be surprised if there was a few mistakes.