A lot of people who know me know that I don’t especially like 3d Zelda games before Breath of the Wild, but explaining why, and who is responsible for those design decisions is a long long story.

The Arcade Roots of Zelda

The Legend of Zelda (hereafter, Zelda 1) was an Open World Action game. In retrospect, it’s been called an action-adventure game, but understanding it as an open world action game is probably more fitting to the context in which it originally arrived. It was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who was inspired by childhood adventures, where he would travel on foot across the countryside and try to map out the places he’d been to. He also was attempting to distinguish it from Super Mario Bros by making it nonlinear, top-down, and a number of other ideas.

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