2016 and Eternal are still in my backlog, but I remember discussions about Eternal showing the hallucination of a bunny, and it was a hint that it was in fact the same doomguy: OG ends with the reveal that doomguy’s pet bunny on Earth was murdered and beheaded during the invasion by the demons (that ending screen with a bunny’s head on a spike). It’s the whole reason doomguy is mad at the demons, and he’s still pissed in 2016 and Eternal.
It might be mostly player deduction and there’s no official lore about it, but the bunny is definitely a hint or at least an easter egg. The wiki says the pet bunny was called Daisy.
I’ve been playing the series since LttP. Twilight Princess is my top, for presentation and storytelling.
I feel like Skyward Sword tried to repeat that, but the dungeons and style / atmosphere of the world of TP still come out on top (even though I’m not very much into gothic style and furries). I think SS is way too cartoonish and happy-go-lucky for a world where the surface has been abandoned to the demons and yet everyone who lives there is cool (gorons, kiwis, moles, proto-Zora), that’s a massive tonal dissonance between the narration and the actual environment and it just takes me out.
The next ones on my top list are Minish Cap and Link Between Worlds.
I know what you mean, but Nintendo is a pretty bad example to illustrate that sentiment. I mean, they totally do corporate crap to benefit them and not the players obviously, but the Zelda series is literally built around the gimmicks of the console. They start thinking about a gimmick, either on the console and / or how to turn that into a gameplay gimmick, and then they make a Zelda game around that. OoT had the rumble pack and then tried to do Ura Zelda that was supposed to be the system seller for the DD64 - but that blew up and was salvaged between Master Mode and Majora’s Mask. The GameCube had Four Swords with the connection to the GBA and the multiplayer. The Wii had Skyward Sword with the motion thing, the Wii U had the separate tablet. The DS then the 3DS weren’t too relevant for Zelda but they tried, and other games did rely on it.
I’m not saying it’s a fact for the whole series, but Nintendo is particularly famous for developing a gimmick console and then building games around that, so yes, the physical console is actually relevant to the game you want to play it on, you’d be hard pressed to port that elsewhere and emulators are always weird and have a lot of work to adapt into something that makes sense on a single screen with a basic gamepad.