The Legend of Zelda, is hands-down one of the most influential and well known video game titles in the video game industry. It is widely recognized as an RPG series that almost defines almost all the expectations for modern role playing games. These games are much less of a text based adventure than RPGs of the past. Instead of traveling across the world via key commands or text based console input, the user of the game controls a graphical representation of the character, and moves through the world and interacts with it in that manner.
Something that makes the Zelda series stand out is the fact that battles are handled in a very action-adventure style, as opposed to the norm of turn-based combat in most RPGs.
Some of the most influential titles on this series are the first game for the NES Zelda I, Link to the Past for the Snes, Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64, and at the time of this writing, the newest version of the game named Twilight Princess for the Nintendo Wii.