I still have warm memories of being a kid watching Family Matters on a Friday night and seeing this commercial: https://youtu.be/EQ3clCcwHFc

At that  moment all was right with the world. 

For me, it was this commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l5KN7x6rS0

I was obsessed with dinosaurs at that age, and the phrase "you've never needed help from a dinosaur before" really stuck with me. It instantly solidified Mario as "cool" in my tiny kid mind. I immediately knew I needed that game. Cut me some slack, I was like, five. I had most certainly not conquered every Mario game at that point, pretty much had only played a few levels of 1 and 3, but Mario had a dinosaur now and I needed it.

I feel like there's something people are overlooking with BOTW; it was the first time that a complex, HD/AAA open world game was playable on a handheld. That in itself is a pretty significant breakthrough for gaming.

That's groundbreaking for handhelds. Groundbreaking for gaming is figuring out how to map FPS controls to a gamepad, creating the platformer genre, or adapting 2D to 3D.

Handhelds are a part of gaming. Bringing a new type of game to them for the first time is significant.

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Bringing an established genre to a new platform with no significant change to how it has to function isn't groundbreaking.

It wasn't an established genre in the handheld realm, and BOTW did bring significant change.

So now it is a separate part of gaming, like I'd just said? BotW was a fantastic game and in my top ten, but to say it brought significant change is a stretch. It simply reintroduced the concept of total freedom.

PC was "separate" from console yet bringing FPS games to console properly was significant. By the same token, so is bringing massive open world experiences to mobile.

And no other open world game functions in the way that BOTW does.