I agree with this 100% - it also brings the pacing back down to what it was for the original four Zelda games with their shorter dungeon lengths, except on a much larger scale because there's WAAAAY more stuff in Breath of the Wild.

One thing I really disliked about other 3D Zeldas was how the majority of time in the dungeons was spent finding a needle in a haystack. There might be a key hidden in one little part of the dungeon, but you've been around that room already, and so you search the entirety of the rest of the dungeon before either: A. Doing it all over again, searching through the dungeon, or B. Looking the answer up on Gamefaqs. Some people really like that, but it's not for me.

Another thing I really liked about Breath of the Wild was that the parts I couldn't complete could be skipped! It was very liberating the first time I decided "I'm done with this s***!" and exited the shrine to go look somewhere else to progress or find stuff to do =D

Every open world game needs quite a few of those hidden mini dungeons/caves or whatever - problem with shrines is they all feel, at least to me, completely out of place and tacked on to main game, and as I said, all looking the same and giving same boring reward. There were few environmental ones that I liked, but that's about it from all those 100+ shrines.

Hope you enjoyed the video. I know that whenever open world is brought these days into conversation, people automatically think of modern mass market open world games - but there are indeed games that do it quite differently, Gothic 1/2 is very good example, being cult classic with open world C/W/RPG fans...well at least, a bit older one. In my opinion, classic 3D Zelda (or something like Dark Souls for that matter) would work perfectly with that type of open world design, and not with something that is more akin to Elder Scrolls.

Agreed, nothing slams the brakes on the fun like getting stalled on an obtuse puzzle or retreading every inch of a huge dungeon for a key. I never had that problem in BOTW cos besides being more condensed, the dungeons were also more logical and intuitive.

Don't get me wrong, prior Zelda games had some awesome dungeons, (Forest and Fire Temples in Ocarina, Snowpeak Ruins in TP, Ancient Cistern, Sandship, and the final dungeon in Skyward Sword) but BOTW's bite-sized shrines were more to my taste, it keep the pace flowing with small digestible chunks.

I couldn't have said it better.  I wish their were more games that were as ambitious as Breath of the Wild.

I totally agree.  

The funny thing is that I normally don't really care for big puzzle dungeons (and I didn't really care for the 4 big ones in BotW either.)  But the shrines just feel perfect.  To me BotW is an exploration game first and foremost, but when I find something interesting I want to be able to fool with it for a little while.  The shrines did that for me perfectly.  Find a shrine.  Take a few minutes to solve it.  Get reward.  Boom, I'm back exploring.  That is the way to do it.  The big dungeons take me away from exploring for too long.

Good. I never thought Ocarina of Time would be topped. Every Zelda after OoT was just a little lazier, and a little less fleshed out. Majora's Mask had only four dungeons. Windwaker should have included the Whale's dungeon. Twilight Princess was great, but was a tad linear. Skyward Sword dropped almost all elements of exploration. BotW was a 180 for the series, and truly modernized it.

Nice! Very well deserved.

the new king and milestone in the series!