The Nintendo Switch is celebrating its third birthday this week, which means it's also the third anniversary of the system's marquee launch game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild--an exquisite open-world adventure that remains, arguably, the best title in the console's library. Much of the Switch's early success can be attributed to Breath of the Wild, as it gave the unorthodox system an enticing must-have experience from the outset, but perhaps even more importantly, the game breathed new life into the beloved-but-aging Zelda series.
Before Breath of the Wild arrived, the Zelda franchise was in something of a rut. The series had spent the past two decades struggling to step out of the monolithic shadow cast by Ocarina of Time, which is still widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made. Ocarina's influence on the medium cannot be overstated. In the burgeoning days of 3D gaming, when many developers were struggling to bring their franchises into the third dimension, Ocarina was a landmark title--a sprawling adventure that seamlessly reimagined the world of Hyrule and set the standard for all action-adventure games that would follow.
Since then, the specter of Ocarina of Time has loomed inescapably over the Zelda series. Producer Eiji Aonuma often expressed an Ahab-like fixation on surpassing the game. "[The goal of] every title I have worked on...is to go beyond Ocarina of Time and create something greater than that," he said back in 2010. Two years prior, he told Nintendo Power:
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