The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild reinvented a 30-year-old series in a way we rarely see. After Skyward Sword offered a slightly more linear, story-driven campaign than most fans were used to, Breath of the Wild readjusted dramatically in the opposite direction. Suddenly you could go anywhere and climb anything in any order you wanted, and goodness gracious was there a whole lot to choose from.
There are plenty of fair criticisms to throw at Breath of the Wild, with common ones being its lack of traditional Zelda dungeons and items. But what’s truly impressive is how much it maintained the heart of a Zelda game even as it altered nearly every system around it. To a certain extent, Zelda has always been about exploration and choice, and Breath of the Wild simply leaned into and enabled those aspects of itself above all else, now making the world a place that would react to those choices as well. There’s just so much to see, so many people to meet and secrets to find hidden throughout this long-since devastated version of Hyrule.
