Breath of the Wild made me feel like a kid again, getting SNES or Super Mario Bros 3, or showing me the potential of RPGs with the first time I played FF4 (Final Fantasy II) - which I had enormous trouble getting it on the first time because it was my first import title.
My imagination ran wild with what “Zelda 64) was going to be - and it was Breath of the Wild that finally raised the series up to that level that my wild imagination expected. I didn’t hate Ocarina of Time, but I couldn’t stare off into the distance and see vast landscapes, and lands that would take me a long time to reach; and dozens of adventures to have along the way. The emergent gameplay, the secrets, the exploration; I never thought Zelda would take it this far. It broke what, to me, felt like 2 decades of formulaic stagnation. I haven’t had this amount of fun and satisfaction with any game outside of Xenogears - which incidentally had s me of the same people working on it (Makoto Shimamoto has been alongside Takahashi since 1995, worked on Chrono Trigger, Radical Dreamers, Xenogears, Xenosaga 1-3, Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and X, and was a Designer on Breath of the Wild.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
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