Gotta be Breath of the Wild, for me. Taken together with Tears of the Kingdom, the series’ storytelling and immersion has never been better, I think, and as a game, Breath of the Wild was the tighter, more-satisfying experience, overall.
Wind Waker is a veeerrrrrrry close second. I think it’s the most-polished entry in the whole series, in both categories. I’m really not sure what I would change, if given the chance.
I can’t decide if Kojima is putting the acid industry out of business, because his games are enough of a trip already, or singlehandedly propping the industry up because he’s obviously consuming it all himself.
The SteamLink experience within the Shield has only gotten worse over the years, and a LOT worse recently. Examples include:
The app often fails to launch big picture mode, or launches it, but without focus, requiring me to go walk to my desk in the other room to fix it.
Connecting to a PC with a game already-in-progress no longer puts the game in focus immediately, again requiring me to walk over to the desk and fix it.
The app is prone to having the video completely freeze within any of the Steam UI, requiring a disconnect and reconnect. Like VERY prone. Like, it’ll take 5 tries at connecting and reconnecting to actually make it into a game.
Some games that used to be able to play well remotely now have an unplayable amount of input lag.
The app will occasionally get drop to si gle-digit framerates within a game, for which the only fix seems to be to completely reboot the Shield.
As a media player, I’m still overall happy with the Shield, and I know there’s a rather large community of custom OS enthusiasts for it, but with the degradation of Steam’s performance, and the slow addition of ad gabrage in the home UI over the years, the Shield is NOT sensible for a new purchase.
The only thing I can think of not aging well by today’s standards is the level grinding. I recall having to do quite a bit of it my first time playing it, just to keep up with the difficulty curve, and it’s not like I was skipping all the sidequests. That was a fairly common aspect for RPGs of the era, I think.
It’s also possible I wasn’t very good at the game, I was like 11 or 12 at the time.
The majority if the reason it’s significant is that Nintendo MADE it significant, by releasing that “official” timeline tying all the gamrs together. Then, the made BotW with a whole bunch of direct and indirect references to this timeline, and events in previous games. Then TotK threw pretty much all of that in the garbage.