And BotW doesn't let you build functional caluclators. Games have played enough with physics that cooking apples or creating updrafts isn't a new and groundbreaking thing. It's just another physics engine.

It's not the individual elements. It's the way they're woven together into an organic, cohesive and intuitive whole that offers countless ways to approach the core gameplay. Other games have physics, sure, but they're not intertwined as naturally.

Again, that's not new, it's just well done.

No game released before BOTW really does this though. Sure, plenty of its forebears have physics, some even quite complex and awesome, but none of them wove both physics and chemistry together in a way that's truly organic and intuitive. Take the example I detailed above, in what older game would that happen?

Okami. Fire burns trees and ice, as well as lights torches. Water extinguishes fire and fills containers. Wind moves round objects, blows out fire, moves fans, and affects enemies. Then there are slashing maneuvers, bombs, sprouting trees, time dilation, changing the time of day by moving the position of the sun/moon or swapping them out... And these are all physics that can be used at any point in the games limited open world.

No, it isn't as organic as BotW, but it's also, what, ten years older? 

Gameplay mechanics and physics are not the same thing. Okami doesn't have much of a physics engine.

I haven't really played Just Cause (only played about an hour of JC 3) or Red Faction 3/4 but they're open world games that appear to be physics heavy.
Also, whenever I describe Dragon's Dogma to potential Switch owners as "BotW without horses".

Like many I see BotW as one of the greatest games of all time. There sense of freedom is unmatched compared to games I've played. It really feels more like a world that a game. Fantastic launch title...that you didn't need new hardware to play.

And that's what keeps it from being in the top spot. When you have a game like Mario 64 that offered an experience than couldn't compare to anything else and it was ONLY on N64, that pushes it to the next level for me.

I guess it's all opinions and it depends on what you're looking for in "The greatest launch title of all time". A game that does things other games have done INCREDIBLY WELL or a game that entirely breaks new ground and changes the industry (and is still a great game 20+ years later!).

Lots of consoles launched with that "Killer app". Not many have had the impact that Mario has, even today.

Okami is a great game, but as Chrkeller points out, most of those are canned gameplay mechanics, not dynamic physics/chemistry as such.

Setting grass on fire to create an updraft is just as much a canned gameplay mechanic as  having to use wind to blow an orb into a goal. At some point you're just going to have to come to terms with the fact that the physics and "chemistry" of BotW, while very well put together, isn't anything that hasn't been attempted before and is in no way groundbreaking on the same level as Mario 64.

I did, because they're similar. One just has the advantage of being ten years newer. I wasn't comparing them as a way to say Okami is on BotW's level, only that similar physics have been explored in the past (and hell, it happened in a very Zelda-esque game, too).