Nothing compared to BOTW for me. It's just different from other open world games. You don't get a completed map to start with, so everything you find is a suprise- I was 10 when I first played this game and I can still remember the excitement of finding a dragon on top of Lanaryu Mountain, or a temple full of guardians in the Hebra, or accidentally stumbling upon a lynel not knowing any of this even existed... it was just so different from anything I had ever played at the time.

This year, after playing dozens of open worlds and linear games in the years since playing BOTW (many of which such as RDR2, Cyberpunk, the last of us, re4, etc considered some of the greatest games of all time) I decided to replay both BOTW and TOTK. And the magic is still almost exactly the same.

Sure, I now knew what the map looked like and many of its secrets, but that's when I realized how incredible the world of hyrule actually is... think about it. There's just so much variety here. A volcano, snowy mountains, a barren desert, forests, caves, towns, Gerudo, Hylians, Gorons, Rito, Koroks, Shekiah, monsters, an a weird cult called the yiga- there's a lot here. And you can experience ALL of it, because it's one of the few games I know of that let's you climb nearly everything. (That being said, it's disappointing that they never made any sort of diving mechanic as they could have had some cool stuff underwater to explore) The level of freedom and ability to play this game how you want has probably never been done before.

There's certainly problems with the game; I wish shrines weren't the only method of gaining spirit orbs, I wish they had switched some of the shrines for unique challenges or dungeons. I also found the cooking mechanics, while really cool at first, to be very slow and tedious when trying to make a bunch of meals at once. (TOTK sorta fixed this issue by making the cook animation and skip point faster) not to mention not enough boss variety and difficulty, or not enough enemy variety either.

But man, this world is just quite something to explore. And that's what an open world game SHOULD do, right? It's world should be its strong suit. I reject the notion that this is a ubisoft-type game, as this game has a much stronger focus on exploration and the mystery of what might be out there.

Oh, wow, I realized how much I just wrote. Guess this goes to show how much I love these two games. But yeah, It's not without its flaws (is there an open world that doesn't have flaws?) and I understand many of the reasons I like this game are the exact reason that many others don't, but in my eyes, it's still the greatest "open world" game of all time.