8 Video Game Franchises That Reclaimed Their Throne
4. Breath Of The Wild Reinvents Zelda For A New Generation
As a franchise, Zelda was suffering from a lack of innovation before 2017.
Skyward Sword's motion controls were admirable but flawed, while the core of the title was still rooted in the past. It felt like the same Zelda game we had been playing since 1998's Ocarina of Time, but the winds of change were apparent when Nintendo revealed Breath of the Wild at E3 2014.
Producer Eiji Aonuma spent a long time before the game's release talking about how Breath of the Wild would change Zelda for the better, by abandoning long-held tropes that had defined the series. Borrowing elements from contemporaries like Dark Souls and The Elder Scrolls, Breath of the Wild tapped the heart of Zedla's core tenets of discovery.
Hyrule was now a wide-open, fully-explorable world. Expanding on what made the original game so special, Breath of the Wild dropped you into a hostile land of beasts and tasked you with uncovering its myriad of secrets. The freeform, open-ended nature of combat and creativity, along with Nintendo's trademark polish, skyrocketed Breath of the Wild into one of the most highly-rated video games of all time.
It changed Zelda forever, all while planting the franchise firmly back on top of the 3D adventure game genre where it belongs.