Super Mario vs The Legend of Zelda: 16 Rankings, One Argument

Nintendo's two flagship franchises came from the same team thirteen months apart and share almost every greatest-ever list. Sixteen rankings, sixteen different questions.

By YPB Team · Published July 28, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/super-mario-vs-legend-of-zelda

Nintendo is rebuilding The Legend of Zelda's most decorated entry, Ocarina of Time, for Switch 2 this year, twenty-eight years after the Nintendo 64 original, while Super Mario has spent the spring in cinemas.¹

Guinness World Records certifies the Mario series at 893,464,669 units sold, the largest total any run of games has reached.² Hyrule has never sold at that scale, and Nintendo has never asked it to.

The 16 rankings below sort the two of them by units, by review scores, by console generation, by soundtrack and by box office.

Mario is the franchise Nintendo counts. Zelda is the franchise Nintendo gets judged on.

Super Mario vs Pokémon: 64 franchises, one sales record

Sixty-four franchises are on this ranking, and Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda are two of the four or five names anyone expects to find on it.

Mario's case is arithmetic. Guinness also has him as the best-selling videogame character, credited with more than 250 games and 807,620,000 units by the end of 2024.³

The nearest series on that Guinness record is Tetris, around 520 million.² Zelda is nowhere near either of them.

Zelda's case is narrower and harder to argue against: single games that reviewers treat as the best-designed work of their generation.

Pokémon, Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty are on the ranking too, which is why the sales question never stays a two-horse race for long.

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Ocarina of Time vs Super Mario Bros.: one entry each

Ask instead for the single best game ever made and each side gets one representative: Super Mario Bros. and Ocarina of Time.

Ocarina of Time is where Zelda's case is strongest. Metacritic's all-time table still puts it first on 99, and nothing released since 1998 has matched it.⁴

Super Mario Bros. went on sale in Japan on 13 September 1985 and makes a different claim.⁵ It dragged home consoles out of the 1983 crash and settled what a platformer was for the next decade.

Thirty other candidates crowd in behind them, Tetris and Chrono Trigger and Half-Life 2 among them. Any of those three can carry a list like this, which is how a Soviet puzzle game ends up standing between Mario and Link.

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Metroid Prime spoils the Nintendo shortlist

Restrict the field to Nintendo's own catalogue and twelve games compete: Super Mario Galaxy, Bros. 3 and World on the Mario side, Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild on Zelda's.

Super Metroid, Metroid Prime and Pokémon Red & Blue take the next slots. Metroid Prime is the game Nintendo obsessives name to show that the company's best work carries neither famous badge.

Metacritic makes the shortlist more awkward still. Super Mario Galaxy 2 sits on 98, one point under Ocarina of Time and above every other Zelda game.⁴

Twelve options leave nowhere for a weak entry to hide, and "best Nintendo game" turns out to be a different question from "best Mario or Zelda game".

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Mario vs Link: a face against a role

Take the software away and the pairing is Mario against Link. Mario started out as Jumpman in the 1981 Donkey Kong cabinet; Link has been reincarnated in a new Hyrule roughly once a generation since 1986.³

Mario has carried the same face, name and cap through more than 250 games. Link is closer to a job description: silent in almost every entry, redrawn for each era, named by whoever is holding the controller.

Pikachu, Lara Croft, Master Chief, Solid Snake and Kratos share the ranking, and so do Princess Zelda and Bowser, which puts both franchises on it twice over.

Link's counter-argument is the silence itself. A character built to be inhabited rather than watched has a harder route to recognition, and he took it anyway.

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Shigeru Miyamoto designed both, months apart

Shigeru Miyamoto designed Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda in the same Kyoto building, months apart, under the same hardware limits. It is the closest thing in this article to a fair fight.

Most of the sixteen entries here carry one of the two names: Super Mario Bros., World, Bros. 3, Odyssey, Galaxy and 64 on one side; the 1986 original, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask on the other.

Donkey Kong, Pikmin and Star Fox take the remaining slots, and they matter, because Miyamoto's reputation does not rest on two inventions.

The split shows a division of labour. He tested movement in Mario and curiosity in Zelda.

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Koji Kondo wrote both signature themes

Koji Kondo composed for both series: the Super Mario Bros. overworld loop in 1985, Zelda's overture the year after. The two scores then went in opposite directions.

Mario's music stayed short, bright and loopable, written for a screen where you die and restart within seconds.

Zelda's grew into full orchestral work. Breath of the Wild dropped melody almost entirely in favour of sparse piano that arrives only when you stop moving.

Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger and Halo share this ranking with Ocarina of Time. Mario's four bars get quoted in adverts and concert halls. Hyrule's music is the reason people started calling game scores cinematic.

youpick.best/ranking/the-15-greatest-video-game-soundtracks-of-all-time

The Nintendo 64 asked both series the same question

The Nintendo 64 handed Mario and Zelda the same problem inside the same short window. How does a 2D series work in three dimensions?

Super Mario 64 launched with the console in 1996 and answered first. It set the camera and analogue-stick language that 3D platformers still use.

Ocarina of Time answered in 1998 with Z-targeting. Majora's Mask followed in 2000 with a three-day clock and a falling moon — the strangest game Nintendo has released under its own name.

Twenty-two games fill this ranking, GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64 and Paper Mario included. This is the generation where the two series stopped being alternatives and became templates.

youpick.best/ranking/the-22-best-nintendo-64-games-of-all-time

Super Mario World vs A Link to the Past

The Super Nintendo gave Mario and Zelda the entry their fans defend hardest.

Super Mario World arrived with the console in 1990, introduced Yoshi and still sets the reference point for 2D level design.

A Link to the Past followed in 1991 and fixed the Zelda template so firmly that the series spent two decades iterating on it instead of replacing it.

Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI and EarthBound fill out the ranking. On no other console did Nintendo's own franchises meet this much competition from outside studios.

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The GameCube gave Zelda two games and Mario a water jetpack

The GameCube is the one generation where Mario and Zelda were not on level terms.

Super Mario Sunshine arrived in 2002 with a water jetpack called FLUDD and a tropical setting. Mario's own fans still fight over it harder than over any other 3D entry.

Zelda got two games on the same machine: The Wind Waker in 2002, cel-shaded and mocked on announcement, then Twilight Princess in 2006, with the darker tone the mockers had asked for.

Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4 and Super Smash Bros. Melee compete on the same ranking. For Mario this generation is the soft spot in an otherwise unbroken 3D run, and Zelda supporters reach for it first.

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Link's Awakening vs Super Mario Land: four shades of green

Shrink Mario and Zelda to a monochrome handheld and the pecking order shifts.

Super Mario Land launched with the Game Boy in 1989, made outside Miyamoto's team. It is set in Sarasaland, with a different princess and enemies Mario never met again.

Link's Awakening arrived in 1993 with a full-sized Zelda adventure on the same hardware, set on the dreamlike Koholint Island, and reviewers still name it the finest game on the system.

Tetris, Pokémon Red and Metroid II share the ranking. Nintendo took the small screen seriously for Link years before it did for Mario.

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Super Mario 3D All-Stars: on sale six months, then withdrawn

Every long-running series eventually sells you its own back catalogue, and this is the ranking where both Nintendo franchises look worst.

Super Mario 3D All-Stars put Super Mario 64, Sunshine and Galaxy on Switch in September 2020 with barely a change to any of them, then left the eShop at the end of March 2021 — a deadline on a preservation product, aimed at the people most likely to buy it.⁶

Skyward Sword HD followed on 16 July 2021 and tidied up the most divisive 3D Zelda without answering a single complaint about it.⁷

The same ranking holds remasters that did the job properly, the Resident Evil and Shadow of the Colossus rebuilds among them. Neither Nintendo series has an answer here, which is presumably why Ocarina of Time is being rebuilt rather than upscaled.

youpick.best/ranking/top-15-video-game-remasters-of-all-time

Mario Kart World: the spin-off Hyrule never had

Mario Kart marks the clearest structural difference between the two franchises. Mario spun off into karts, parties, tennis and RPGs; Zelda never produced a spin-off that stuck.

Ten Mario Kart games fill this ranking, from the 1992 original that invented the genre to Mario Kart World, which arrived with Switch 2 on 5 June 2025.⁸ It had sold 14.70 million copies by 31 March 2026, more than any other game on the console.⁹

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is further ahead again on the original Switch at 71.08 million, more than twice the lifetime total of Breath of the Wild.¹⁰

Hyrule has nothing comparable, and Zelda's counter-argument is that the series never diluted itself. This ranking is what dilution looks like when it works.

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The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made a billion; Zelda's film has not opened

This ranking separates Mario and Zelda by release calendar rather than by quality.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie opened on 1 April 2026 and has taken $1.01 billion worldwide, which puts Mario on a ranking of animated films beside Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Soul, Encanto and The Boy and the Heron.¹¹

The Legend of Zelda is absent because its film has not opened. Wes Ball is directing a live-action adaptation that Nintendo is financing to more than half its cost, with worldwide distribution by Sony Pictures.¹² The release calendars have it in the spring of 2027.¹³

Both series are film franchises now. Only one of them has a film.

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The open-world ranking with no Mario on it

This is the ranking where Zelda competes against Rockstar and Bethesda instead of against Mario.

Breath of the Wild in 2017 and Tears of the Kingdom in 2023 moved Zelda into a category it had not competed in since 1986. Nintendo's own figures put them at 33.84 million and 22.56 million copies on Switch,¹⁰ and Tears of the Kingdom passed 10 million in its first three days on sale.¹⁴

Breath of the Wild has outsold every Mario platformer on the same console.

Mario has nothing to enter. Super Mario Odyssey is a set of self-contained sandboxes rather than one continuous world, and mastering a small space is what a Mario game asks of you.

Twenty games fill the ranking, Red Dead Redemption 2, Skyrim, The Witcher 3 and Elden Ring among them. Zelda is the only Nintendo series in that company.

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Mario against Mario

Take Zelda out of the room and Super Mario still cannot agree with itself.

Eleven mainline entries fill this ranking, from the 1985 original through Bros. 3, World, 64, Sunshine, both Galaxy games, 3D World, Odyssey and the Super Mario RPG detour. Each generation nominates whichever one it met first.

Bros. 3 is the entry that survives every cull, Galaxy 2 the connoisseurs' pick, Odyssey the modern answer at 30.50 million copies on Switch.¹⁰

Sunshine is on the ranking as well, which is the honest thing to do with a catalogue this long. The internal fight is as unresolved as the one with Hyrule.

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Hyrule splits in two at 2017

This ranking puts Zelda games only against each other, and the split is sharper than anything in Mario's catalogue.

Fourteen entries run from the 1986 original through A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Everything before 2017 is a sequence of dungeons in a fixed order. Everything after is a landscape you are turned loose in.

Ocarina of Time holds the reviews, Breath of the Wild holds the sales, and A Link to the Past holds the players who think the series peaked in two dimensions. Mario has no equivalent schism — nobody claims Super Mario changed species halfway through.

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Forty years, two scoreboards

Each of the sixteen rankings rewards something else: raw units, Metascores, hardware timing, box office, the width of the spin-off shelf.

That is why Nintendo runs the two of them as separate businesses. The karts, the parties and the film sequels come out of the Mushroom Kingdom, and Hyrule is where the company proves it can still design.

Name the question first, then let it be settled one head-to-head at a time. A seventeenth question is missing from the sixteen above: Bowser against Ganon, forty years of losing to the same two heroes. Somebody should build it.

More rankings, more angles

• 35 Years of Sonic the Hedgehog, Ranked 16 Ways — the mascot Sega built to outrun Mario
• Resident Evil: One Franchise, 14 Different Verdicts — survival horror at 200 million copies
• Final Fantasy Is a Different Genre on Every List — fifteen numbered epics, one moving target
• Grand Theft Auto Is on Every List. Never in the Same Place — eight games, three cities, one long wait