The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is evocative, exhilarating, and a masterclass in open-world design.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is Nintendo's most ambitious and impressive game to date.

Switch's debut and Wii U's demise are marked by a radical reinvention of The Legend of Zelda that will go down as an all-time great.

I guess, in the end, it's not just that Breath of the Wild signals that Zelda has finally evolved and moved beyond the structure it's leaned on for so long. It's that the evolution in question has required Nintendo to finally treat its audience like intelligent people. That newfound respect has led to something big, and different, and exciting. But in an open world full of big changes, Breath of the Wild also almost always feels like a Zelda game — and establishes itself as the first current, vital-feeling Zelda in almost 20 years.

The most freeform Zelda yet, without sacrificing the charm, fun or quality you expect from the series. Nintendo’s finest work since Super Mario Galaxy.

Breath of the Wild is a feat of design and polish. Hyrule feels like a real place, and the journey Link and Zelda undertake to defeat Ganon is compelling

The Nintendo Switch launch title takes the Zelda franchise to a whole new level, producing something even greater than the sum of its finely honed parts

What Nintendo has created is an all-encompassing mind-body possession in which you find yourself inside something unusually, hauntingly engrossing.

There is no other way to put this: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is brilliant. It is magnificent. It is marvelous, amazing, fantastic, and every other synonym for the word wonderful that can be found in the thesaurus. If The Legend of Zelda was the flint that ignited the passion I have for video gaming, Breath of the Wild is the 500lb bag of charcoal that will keep that fire burning for decades to come.

Triumphant. Groundbreaking. The pinnacle of Zelda.