This may blow your mind, but I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild since March 3rd. Just beat it. This also may shock you, but I am crying and sniffly and my brain is full of love and sadness. This is also why I've been gone from IRC because I've just been dedicating every moment to playing it.
I don't know how to review this game, since I'm overtly blinded by fangirlism to an extreme degree. This might be the closest thing to a 'perfect' game I've played. Can't think of any flaws other than it's kind of annoying when your shield is near breaking and the game tells you it a little more often than would be desired. This feels like the perfection of the "open-world" game. The environment and world isn't an obstacle or just something to travel past, it's an integral part of the game.
I almost had to rethink and relearn how to play a video game, because most of the things you'd take for granted in other games as "this won't happen because game design" don't apply anymore. If something should happen when you do something, it more than likely will. If you're in a thunderstorm, you better not have any metal weapons or apparel on you. If someone's pelting you with lightning arrows, stay out of puddles. Fire creates an updraft, use it to your advantage. Physics does not wait for you nor will it be kind to you. Similarly, it won't be kind to enemies, so use it to your advantage. Don't use bomb arrows in a volcano (they'll burst into flame and explode). If you throw something at an enemy, you've just given them a weapon. Don't go into an arctic region lightly-dressed.
Not to mention all the ways you can solve puzzles are limited mostly by your imagination. Literally four other coworkers and I were discussing a particularly annoying one...only to find out every single one of us completed it in entirely different manners. We started asking each other about other puzzles (while being careful of spoilers) and, again, a large number of them we pulled off in completely different ways. There was one puzzle I was stuck on where I had to use metal objects in the room (metal crates, metal spheres) to conduct electricity to complete several circuits. I was having trouble with it and threw one of my halberds at a crate out of anger and—to my shock (haha)—the metal parts of the halberd conducted electricity. I proceeded to use the several metal weapons I had to cheese the puzzle and complete it. This isn't at all what you were supposed to do (my friend gave me the correct solution the next day), but it worked. Again, I didn't even consider it because that's something that virtually any other game would've just ignored.
I've had countless "holy shit" moments like that in this game. Every single time I thought I was done being surprised, there were more surprises waiting. You get a few simple powers, but you can use them together in an absurd amount of ways. My favourite is the "freeze time" rune you can use on objects. You freeze an object in place, but it stores all the kinetic energy gathered while it's frozen and uses it all at once when it unfreezes. Sounds almost useless in a game like this, but I've solved more puzzles and general issues than I can count with it, and you can combine it with other powers (magnetism and bombs, mainly) to accomplish ridiculous things.
There are an absurd amount of things to do in this game—the world is packed, but none of it feels like a Ubisoft collectathon, mainly because every reward is tangible. With the closest to a "collectable" there is, you do these things and you're rewarded in-game, but the game never pushes you toward them or really encourages you beyond "hey, there are things out there," and each of them requires a little puzzle-solving so it's not just climbing somewhere and touching a thing. Beyond that, there are tons of quests, all given by characters with motivations and personality, so (if you're like me and get attached to video game characters) you actually feel like helping them. The environment design is fucking fantastic; not only is it utterly beautiful, but the terrain is purely creative for an open-world game. The use of verticality inside of villages and out is a breath of (the wild) fresh air, scaling mountains feels more like actually scaling mountains than any other game I've played, the world feels like an actual world rather than some random bumps and hills tossed into a blender and distributed about so you can walk over them... I honestly believe this is the peak of open-world games.
And hey speaking of characters, can't say I'm shocked at all since Zelda is great at characters, but it's fantastic to be able to play an open-world adventure RPG where the characters aren't a bunch of interchangeable information-and-quest-distributing kiosks. While you'll run into people that only have one or two things to say, they're unique. Villages and towns are full of people with distinct personalities and designs, so much that I could remember people just after a couple visits to their town.
Combat is fantastic as well, clearly influenced by games that center around it like—most notably—Dark Souls. That's probably the most apt comparison, really, because this game is hard. I honestly haven't seen this many game over screens in a Zelda game in the entirety of my life, and I don't think I've ever died 20 minutes into a Zelda game before. It's not unforgiving, though, which is the best part. If you're patient, perceptive, and prudent, combat can be a breeze. There's little more satisfying than nailing down an enemy's attack patterns, their little tells, and suddenly taking down a formerly-difficult beast without a single scratch because they weren't able to lay a finger on you. And that's not even mention the fucking plethora of ways to defeat any given enemy. I was completely out of weapons and ended up literally beating a giant hinox (cyclops) to death with a metal box because I had no other option. I've started wildfires to smoke out foes and lead them right to me while they were too busy putting the fire on themselves out to fight back. I've knocked lanterns into explosives to light up a room, hammered boulders off mountains to disperse a crowd, led enemies into the paths of larger ones to cause collateral damage, froze enemies and used them as literal weapons against others...I could go on and on and on and on, but my point is that I've had far too many unique encounters to even dream of keeping track.
On top of all that, the soundtrack is the best Zelda soundtrack we've had since Wind Waker. Little anecdote, I was wandering around one of the game's villages, wondering why I was feeling so nostalgic and emotional (well, moreso than the rest of the game), when a few notes struck and I realized the theme is a gorgeous, slowed and rearranged rendition of the Dragon Roost Island theme, not only one of my absolute favourite Zelda songs, but one of my favourite pieces of music, period (which goes for a few other Zelda songs as well). My eyes got all misty and I just stood a few minutes, gazing out of the city and really taking in the music--already my favourite piece in this game--and revisiting memories both old and new. This is the perfect fusion of pushing gaming forward while fondly and tastefully looking back on where it's been. There are a few throwback songs (and they're all great), but the majority are completely original while feeling like they completely belong in the Zelda series.
I don't think I've ever felt so satisfied with a game before. I don't feel like I want to convince anyone it's amazing, I don't feel like debating with anyone who thinks it isn't, I just feel happy that I played it and that I get to experience such a wonder. The best part is that, even though I've beaten the main story and been playing for at least 70+ hours, I'm not even close to being done with this. Once I complete every quest, collect everything I can, and upgrade everything, I still don't think I'll be finished, just because combat and general gameplay is so fun that I don't need a pointed objective to want to keep playing. This game is magical.