Zelda Forgot All Its Rules and Made the Best Game Ever

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild launched alongside the Nintendo Switch on March 3, 2017, and gently dismantled thirty years of open-world game design by doing something radical: it trusted the player. There were no quest markers nagging you across the map. No level gates. No tutorials that lasted an hour. Nintendo dropped you on a plateau, gave you a paraglider, and said "figure it out." You could fight the final boss immediately. You could spend 200 hours cooking fictional meals. You could set grass on fire to create updrafts, shield-surf down mountains, or stack magnetically controlled metal boxes into a bridge because the physics engine didn't care about your dignity. It was the rare game that made grown adults feel like children again — not through nostalgia, but through genuine wonder.