I've never played a Zelda game in the past. Not Ocarina of Time, not Majora's Mask, and certainly not the older 2D Zelda games. This is all to say that Breath of the Wild is my first Zelda game and nostalgia was not doing it any favors to "boost" my perception of the game. I went into the game with no real high expectations. But after putting in around 95 hours so far, this game has far surpassed my expectations in ways that I didn't even imagine before and I am just so excited for the rumored 35th anniversary collection along with Breath of the Wild sequel.

Why do I like this game so much? The graphics is one of the primary reasons.

The graphics in Breath of the Wild, in case you have not seen any footage from the gameplay before, is very different from modern open world games - GTA V, Skyrim, Cyberpunk 2077, to name a few - because while modern open world games have graphics that try to mimic the real world, Breath of the Wild does not. Breath of the Wild uses something called cel shading, which makes the game look like, well, a video game, instead of a poor copy of the real world copied to the TV screen. And the amazing thing is that this works in favor of Breath of the Wild.

The reason why the graphics of Breath of the Wild works in its favor is because it takes away the distraction that comes with "realistic" graphics. The purpose of the photorealistic graphics in modern open world games is to even further immerse the players in the world that has been built. However, because the graphics are never quite realistic enough to feel like it is a real world, it actually has the opposite effect and removes the players from that world because they know it to be inauthentic. When you see that the NPCs have weird faces when they talk, grass moving in ways that is not natural, or the way water flows unnaturally, the illusion is broken and the promise of immersion is no longer kept. And this removes the player from the world that they are supposed to be immersed in. But Breath of the Wild never made this promise of realistic graphics. So even when you see NPCs that don't try to look like real people or grass that looks and behaves differently than its real world counterpart, the illusion of this world is not broken - because there was no illusion in the first place. This is not to say that Breath of the Wild has bad graphics - Breath of the Wild looks incredible. But because Breath of the Wild never tried to create a world that looks similar to the real world, if something looks different from the real world, it is okay and does not take away from the experience. One comparison that I would make is CGI in movies/TV shows versus animated movies/TV shows (think of anime, movies like Pixar's Soul and so on). When there is bad CGI in movies/TV, it sticks out like a soar thumb and takes away from the immersion of the movie or the TV show because now you're thinking, "wow, that CGI lip on Superman looked really bad". However, in animated movies and TV shows, because it is not set in the real, physical world, someone's lip, mustached or not, looks like a real lip in the animated world.