Spending a year and a half slowly navigating the empty framework of botw world has been, an experience to say the least. Tens upon hundreds of hours spent scaling every nook and crany of a cyclical world where each element builds upon itself into a world that feels boundless yet is also, limited in its constituents. The first few hours are agony because the game is designed to let you loose into a world where you don't really know what's going on. It brings a sense of adventure like none other but also takes away the safe feeling of pop up tutorials that tell you "hey dont do this! hey dont do that!" so your hero's path looks like if sisyphus decided to hop onto the game and fight Boroklins with a twig and kept doing that for 2 hours straight hoping that something would change. (another reason why the game was so difficult to navigate was because I didn't set my emulator up properly so it was essentially running at 10 fps for the first 18 hours 😭) It's a wonder that I never dropped this game and kept coming back to it from time to time, week after week or month after month like a moth to a flame. Eventually I realise that everything I ever needed to know was already told to me from the beginning. After that realization struck, the journey became a lot more bearable until it eventually became so that I couldn't stop thinking about it for hours, even days on end. The quiet soundtrack, the sorrowful tales of hyrule, the interactions with all its colourful and eccentric habitants. The emptiness itself became my home, something I never wanted to sever myself from.

The game works. It just works. There's no lengthy essay than can properly state how homogeneous every tiny aspect of the world is. How each individual element can be extrapolated and experimented on. Complete with a set of wonderfully realised score and a timeless story that deals with loss, grief, tragedy and heroism in a world of inspired mythology. It wears its influence on its sleeves. Just take on look at the Koroks or Ganon's second form. It's basically a Princess Mononoke open world game and if that doesn't sound like the best thing ever then I don't know what to tell you. The detractors confound me, claiming that the game loses its sheen after the first few hours or that they don't understand why the game is so celebrated. But botw simply offers creative freedom unlike any other and it only becomes more evident to the player the more they spend time on it. It's just a creative firework and every game that has copied it since is all the better for it. For those who argue that the only reason BOTW is popular is because of the Zelda tag, I present to you: Genshin Impact. Exact same game down to the minutest details but without the Zelda tag and it won best mobile game.

Is it flawless? No. But that's a redundant question to begin with. Is it the best an open world formula has ever been implemented? That entirely depends on you. For me however, Breath of the Wild stands head and shoulder above its peers. There's nothing quite like it. It offered a liberating escape from the shackles of my mundane life and I'm eternally grateful for it.

Let's see if Tears of the Kingdom can shift my opinion.

10/10