Across the thirty-five years of the franchise's existence, The Legend of Zelda has pioneered industry-defining item design in each of its games. Most of these tools prove to be exceedingly useful in solving the games' many puzzles, such as Skyward Sword's Double Clawshot or the Swift Sail from Wind Waker.
A handful of items, however, have proven in retrospect to be downright perplexing both in terms of utility and design, owing in part to developer Nintendo's one-of-a-kind brand of humor. Though unusual and occasionally alienating, all of these tools are memorable for their uniqueness, contributing to The Legend of Zelda's irreplicable aesthetic.
Blast Mask (Majora's Mask)
There's no shortage of unusual elements in Majora's Mask, one of the strangest Legend of Zelda games in the series, but one of the oddest items of them all is the Blast Mask. Obtained by recovering the Old Lady's stolen Big Bomb Bags, this mask allows Link to detonate his face with a bomb-like blast. Like any explosive in the game, it also hurts Link unless his shield is raised, and unlike bombs, the mask can only be used once every fifteen seconds.
Its only genuine use cases are for when players run out of bombs -- fairly plentiful consumables found around Termina -- and for collecting all of the game's twenty-three standard masks to unlock the highly powerful Fierce Deity Mask. Otherwise, the Blast Mask is simply a perplexing addition to an already odd entry into The Legend of Zelda franchise.
Ooccoo (Twilight Princess)
Though technically both a character and an item, Twilight Princess's Ooccoo has one of the strangest appearances in the Zelda franchise. This bird-human hybrid features a jarring design of a long ungulate neck atop which is perched a humanoid head with blank pink eyes that give this creature an unsettlingly dead stare.
Her son, Ooccoo Jr., takes this creepy factor a step further by being a sentient disembodied head with puppy-like ears that function as wings. They're a hodgepodge of nightmare fuel design that lives squarely in the uncanny valley, and though Ooccoo is useful as a tool for warping in and out of dungeons, she is most memorable for her unsettlingly unusual aesthetic.
Eyeball Frog (Ocarina of Time)
This peculiar item is encountered through Ocarina of Time's trading quest, which eventually gives Link the Biggoron Sword, one of the most useful items in the Zelda franchise. Along the way, players trade a host of unusual items with the denizens of Hyrule, but none is stranger than the Eyeball Frog.
Despite its name, this frog's eyeballs don't appear particularly noteworthy. It is given to Link by King Zora with the instructions to deliver it to the scientist at Lake Hylia while it is still cold. This suggests that, despite the frog's lively look, it is actually dead. Further emphasizing this is the Scientist's subsequent action of turning this frog into eye drops -- a strange end to an even stranger item.
Kamaro's Mask (Majora's Mask)
Another entry from Majora's Mask, Kamaro's Mask can be retrieved from Kamaro, who appears north of Clock Town late at night. The spirit of a legendary dancer, Kamaro bequeaths his mask to Link in the hopes of passing his dance onto a new generation of students. The Legend of Zelda series has never shied away from the arts and culturally rich subject matter, but this particular case is quite unusual due to the physical appearance of the mask. It causes all of Link's facial features to be erased and features a tiny Kamaro head that appears to have been rather gruesomely stapled onto the mask's crown.
Master Cycle Zero (Breath of the Wild)
2017's Breath of the Wild saw a staggering expansion of The Legend of Zelda games' typical dimensions, with a true open-world exponentially larger than any conception of Hyrule that had come before. Though there are numerous methods of navigating this vast terrain, the DLC The Champion's Ballad introduced a new mode of transport into the franchise in the form of a "mechanical horse." Couched in backstory as a magical divine beast, the Master Cycle Zero is plainly a motorcycle, and it marks one of the strangest anachronisms to appear in this time-traveling series.
Though its ancient artificers had developed their magic enough to perfect internal combustion, they had not solved the problem of fuel efficiency, resulting in this divine motorbike needing to be constantly refueled with consumable materials. Make no mistake, the Master Cycle Zero is eminently useful for trekking across the vast plains of Breath of the Wild, but its presence is so bizarre in the context of the game's other elements that it is more memorable for its strangeness than its utility.
Tingle Tuner (Wind Waker)
Since the 1990s, Nintendo has been known for creating dynamic peripheral accessories to its gaming systems like the Switch and Game Boy. 2002's Wind Waker featured one such real-world integration, which allowed players to connect their Game Boy Advance to their Gamecube via a proprietary cable. This permitted players to use the in-game Tingle Tuner -- a cel-shaded GameBoy Advance with an antenna that inexplicably exists in the otherwise electronics-free world of Hyrule.
This item allowed players to occasionally control the character Tingle and gain pay-per-perk advantages like bombs, temporary invincibility, and even a healing beverage that pokes fun at the powdered drink Tang, popular in the 1960s before many of Wind Waker's players were even born. Breath of the Wild used a similar design tact in the Sheikah Slate but addressed within minutes of starting the game that it was powered by ancient magical technology. Wind Waker offers no such explanation for how this utterly anachronistic device exists or came to be in Tingle's possession, making it one of the strangest items in the series.
Mirror Shield (Majora's Mask)
While the Mirror Shield itself is far from an unusual concept in the Zelda franchise, the design in Majora's Mask is puzzling. It marks a stark departure from the oblong reflective design found in Ocarina of Time's Spirit Temple -- one of the most underrated dungeons in the Zelda series -- and features a mostly round shape that does not look as protective as its lesser incarnations.
Most notably in Majora's Mask, there appears to be an agonized face -- perhaps that of a Goron -- trapped within the shield. This face is never directly addressed, though it appears to resemble a mask hanging on the Happy Mask Salesman's pack of masks over his right shoulder.
Spirit Train (Spirit Tracks)
One of the most polarizing additions to 2009's Spirit Tracks was the inclusion of a freight train as a central gameplay mechanic and method of travel. While The Legend of Zelda series has used the catch-all explanation of "magic" to explain an assortment of items across the years, the presence of a steam engine in this title proved a bridge too far for many franchise fans.
There are numerous variations of this locomotive in Spirit Tracks, including an electrically-powered version with an industrial drill at its engine car and a train made entirely of pastries and desserts. One dragon-themed train even features the creatively bereft in-game description, "It's hard to tell which part of the dragon this [train car] comes from. The chest?" There's simply nothing like the Spirit Train across the entire series, easily ranking it among the series' strangest items.
Nintendo Switch Shirt (Breath of the Wild)
Like other out-of-place items on this list, the Nintendo Switch Shirt is unusual for its utter lack of in-game connection. It would have been simple to stylize the Switch logo to be in keeping with Breath of the Wild's dynamic aesthetic or to even imbue it with the most basic of defensive properties.
The Nintendo Switch Shirt possesses none of these traits and is likely only to be worn in the first stages of the game before any genuinely protective clothing is found. In this, the true utility of the Switch Shirt is revealed -- an advertisement for Nintendo in an implementation like no other in the franchise.