Okay, you keep telling yourself BotW did something revolutionary, then. I guess some people just can't accept that maybe a game can be good without being groundbreaking. I guess creating updrafts was the greatest thing since 3D platforming was perfected.

Of course games can be good but not groundbreaking, there are countless examples of that, BOTW just isn't one of them.

You can literally create wind or alter the time of day whenever you want. You can manipulate water or fire when available. Trees can be sprouted to move or block objects anytime good soil is nearby. Lily pads can be spawned on the water and then directed with gusts of wind. And it's semantics, but literally none of those can be activated with a single button push as they require brush strokes (except trees, they sprout from dots).

Except it is, but I'm clearly not going to convince someone who is just dead-set on insisting that an apple rolling through fire and becoming a cooked apple is revolutionary organic gameplay physics.

If you're unwilling to have an intellectually honest conversation, you may as well not bother. 

I'd argue that BotW does compete here though. It's the best selling Zelda game by a country mile, tracking to outsell every version of OoT combined with just the Switch version. At launch, it had OVER a 100% attach rate, due to people preordering the game despite not having a Switch yet. That's a pretty good fucking launch game, I'd say, just in terms of doing the job of launching a console. Doesn't hurt that it's also an excellent game that represented the start of a new era for Nintendo. I'd place it as the solid second on that logic, actually, with Mario Bros., 64, and World all gunning for a close third alongside Halo.

A good launch game literally launches the console into sales success, and also does more than most games in its library to shape the console's identity. Really good ones define eras, either for the company or the industry as a whole, and can win cultural victories as well as sales ones. Wii Sports excels in every category here. Functionally launching the console, defining the console, defining the trends of the 7th generation for the industry and for Nintendo as a company, achieving unprecedented sales success for a single release of a single game, propelling the Wii to victory, and winning Nintendo a cultural victory in the form of extremely mainstream, extremely widespread coverage by news and popular media. Its cultural penetration was unprecedented since Super Mario Bros. practically singlehandedly revived the industry. It's not even remotely close to my favorite game, not even in my top 100, probably not in my top 500, but I do admit it's a lot of fun, and it's extremely difficult to argue with its results.

You may as well just stop responding to him. He'll keep this going for literal months if you let him, mostly just repeating himself over and over.

Takes two to tango, man. Last I checked you kept going for literal months because I let you, mostly just repeating yourself.

Super Mario 64. It's the only one of the bunch that has that feel of "why do I NEED another game?" Until Zelda and Smash and Goldeneye came along, you really could be okay with just Mario 64.

Ocarina and GoldenEye were also games that made me feel that way.

But yes, Mario 64 definitely definitely had that feeling.