If you want to get canonical, Skyward Sword will be the 14th game in the Legend of Zelda series. But it's not the 14th Zelda game ever made. Not when you count these spin-off games!

For a long time - and excluding the CD-i titles that were more bootleg than spin-off - Nintendo was perfectly happy releasing Zelda games as, well, Zelda games. Big adventures, starring Link and Zelda, full of exploration, combat and puzzle-solving.

Then, in 2002, that changed.

Capcom felt the need to spice things up a little. As many of you know, the company behind games like Resident Evil and Street Fighter also worked on a number of Zelda games, releasing titles on the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance while Nintendo was busy with console games like Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Wind Waker.

What would follow would be a number of Zelda games that, while sometimes using the worlds, sometimes using the characters and sometimes even using the storyline of "proper" Zelda games, had little in common with the primary adventures of Link, Princess Zelda and the evil Ganon, especially in terms of structure and game design.

In other words, they're what we'd call spin-offs.

Scroll through the gallery above to see what came next!