I played through this game for the third time over the past couple weeks. The Switch makes it look gorgeous, and the fresh coat of paint really made it feel new. Beat every Divine Beast, found about half of the shrines, finished the Champion's Ballad DLC.

I think Breath of the Wild is a game of many parts:
- Dynamic, emergent challenges
- Meditative appreciation of the environment
- Puzzle solving and discovery of a world
- RPG-style character building and quest progression

The extrinsically rewarding nature of the RPG elements is in tension with the aspects of the game's combat and traversal that ask you to slow down, smell the roses, and experiment. (This particular tension is even more pronounced in TOTK.)

Additionally, the narrative luster of the quest progression is diminished by the inherent un-replayablity of the game's emphasis on discovering its world. This creates a tension where highly dynamic replayable challenges are divided by sections of navigating environments you've already spent dozens (if not hundreds) of hours puzzling together and appreciating.

I've gone back and forth on whether a roguelike version of BOTW and TOTK would be cool. I'm not sure that's exactly the right direction, but I realize now what I've really been asking for: the ability to engage with these games' mechanics without getting bogged down by progression systems and distracted by checklists of mandatory static gates. Discovering this world's geography and lore on my first playthrough was magical, but it was a type of magic that needn't be married to the magic of dynamic gameplay—just look at Elden Ring.

BOTW's component parts are entangled enough for it to be difficult to imagine exorcising some subset of them and improving the game as a whole. It does everything it can to evoke a very specific feeling of adventure in the player, and it completely nails that. In doing so, it may have also articulated the shape of another game, a much smaller dungeon crawler that might be even more interesting.

My ideal Zelda game would be a blend of:
- The roguelike emergence and high stakes of Trial of the Sword
- The arcade openness, difficulty, and precision of the NES original
- The game-spanning routing puzzle of the Temple of the Ocean King

Give me a dense world with eight huge dungeons that I can do in any order with Mario Kart World levels of interweaving paths navigable based on your item loadout and skill as a player, all fueled by a TOTK-tier chemistry engine.