I did a full playthrough of BotW (with "infinite" durability, infinite stamina, an online map, and using a save editor to place markers over 100 Korok Seeds at a time, along with maxing out all my raw resources - thereby removing the most egregious design mistakes/idiocy to the best of my ability), and...yeah, ugh.
Yeah... you just made the game worse by doing that. I get the complaints that weapon breakage is "annoying" but that is not my problem with the game at all, and if you make it infinite, you just remove the only thing making the game simulate the feeling of having to move from place to place because
you need to. That's the reason behind making breakable equipment, the entire world is designed for it, so that the player is incentivized to break off the path they think they want to take when they suddenly get too underpowered and have to divert, thus discovering something they otherwise wouldn't. For all that the game does wrong in my book that design choice is not it. It's not the best execution but it serves a purpose.
What to me did NOT serve its purpose were the Shrines and how old they get really fast. It gets worse when you realize there are 20 exclusively dedicated to copy-pasted "Combat Trials" all of which are uninspired and suck but let's be honest, almost every Zelda game barring A Link to the Past or just the 2D games in general, have had moments outside of their brilliance where they faltered. What bothered me is that you're incentivized to explore this world
so that you can encounter these puzzle-shrines, and they treat the dungeons themselves as a reward. In Skyward Sword, in Ocarina of Time, in Twilight Princess, in ALttP and so on, the dungeons
were not a reward in and of themselves. Neither were the exploration but I don't mind it if exploration is itself the attraction. What bothered me is that the
reason why the environment is "attractive" in the end is so you can bump into these prefab-ridden Shrines, all starting the same way, ending the same way, having a "level-editor" map inside them ranging from good to very dubious in design, and they all "reward" you with a generic stackable item and a common item in the form of a weapon. In odd Shrines you suddenly get a rare piece of armor, and this can also just be purchased, but at least that's something unique and
NEW to everything else you've seen. But it's just armor. It's not a Hookshot, it's not a Candle that can put things on fire at will, and it's not an Ocarina that can play songs and unlock secrets in areas you previously visited. No,
nothing that you
discover in BotW awards you with something relevatory. There is
nothing revelatory or progressive anywhere in Breath of the Wild. There's story beats but they're not very good, and there's NPCs and they somewhat remedy the game's blandness, and the world has great atmosphere... but that's just ambiance. The real MEAT of BotW is the Divine Beasts and the Shrines, and they're just not that rewarding to complete because they're not that memorable to go through, and that leaves you
just with an open-world environment where the primary fun is the traversal itself, and if you ask me the game is not actually that entertaining in that regard.
I totally get the claims that it's "revolutionary design" or "a new plateau for how video games should be made" yea, the climbing everything is a true novelty that breaks the conventions of all open world games... but this doesn't mean BotW as a self-fulfilling experience is good just because it's novel. Cuz to me it just ain't. I did not feel very excited at any point through this game. The most was the Divine Beasts, and some odd self-imposed challenges, but ultimately I was faced with a feeling that there is no reward anywhere in the game, and you have to be "okay with your own imaginary award" for completing something that challenged yourself. People IMHO vastly overestimate how much quality comes from that lone trait and most importantly to me, it just isn't why I used to play Zelda. I played the previous games starting with ALttP especially to get that true, fulfilling, experience of being on a heroic adventure in a video-game format, where the ending is the big culmination of a series of well-executed setpieces of exploration, level design and combat (typically from bosses), and the sense that it was a
perfectly composed video game. A game where every piece was designed in tandem with the others to give me a
real experience, as if I'm the hero of that Lord of the Rings style movie story, and that entails going into dangerous places with environmental traps, evil creatures, a giant demonic boss lurking, and ultimately a really evil entity in the world that has to be defeated so my characters' loved ones and the world's people can be safe.
And to me, Breath of the WIld is
the first Zelda game ever, which did not create that feeling. Instead it felt like Nintendo got excited by Minecraft and Far Cry, and said "Yeah, uh, THAT." A complete
nothing-experience to me, where everything it boils down to was "did you enjoy sandboxing around?" and I've played enough Crysis Level Editor in 2008 to know that I don't get off on random physics simulations anymore. I don't care how the graphics look or how immersive the dynamics are, unless you put a finely crafted experience in front of me. And all BotW was, was "a giant land realized in 3D... with nothing special to do in it." Of any acclaimed "masterpiece" in games, it's the only game I came out of saying "Why do they praise this so much?"
EDIT: So I was about to test a mod for ME1 when I realized I had been unbanned from GBATemp today, and I ended up writing this to the Vigil Theme, which is why I got so pretentious and high flung with it.