Jessica used to come for tea on Tuesdays, and all she wanted to do was cut grass. Because she was a couple of years younger than me, she couldn't encounter a ChuChu or a Bokoblin without dying, so instead she'd spend hours slicing at virtual greenery. At the time, I found it a little annoying. In hindsight, I understand that Jessica was simply following in the footsteps of our ancestors. Grass-cutting has been a mainstay of video games for decades.

When people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: "What, the one with all the sailing?" To many, that's all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a "swift sail", allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. The seafaring was the point. It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it's time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong.

The release of a new Zelda game is always a major event worldwide. Ever since 1986, when famed Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto first attempted to capture in code some of the wonder he experienced exploring the Kyoto countryside as a child, Zelda games have been pushing the boundaries of what's possible in virtual worlds. Look at any best-games-of-all-time list and you'll see Zelda in the Top 10, often more than once. But 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was particularly special. Launching alongside the Nintendo Switch console, which has since sold more than 125m units, it was perhaps the best realisation yet of the promise of boundless freedom and adventure that video games have been dangling in front of players' noses for decades.

The 3DS's multiplayer Zelda game wasn't so much bad (unless you tried to play it by yourself, laboriously switching between all three characters) as eminently forgettable. Its weird, camp send-up of Hyrule and three-player puzzles have slipped almost entirely from my mind in the years since I played it, and what I do remember mostly involved shouting impotently at the screen as some online playmate entirely failed to see the solution to a puzzle that was staring them in the face. I maintain that hardly anyone has actually finished this needlessly opaque side-scrolling follow-up to 1986's The Legend of Zelda, because: a) it's incredibly hard to figure out what the game wants you to do; and b) the final dungeon has TWO bosses, and if you can't finish it then you're turfed out to attempt the whole thing again. Long considered the worst game in the Zelda series, it hasn't improved with age. The touch controls were cool, but what everyone remembers about Phantom Hourglass is being sent back to the same dungeon again and again every time you threatened to make some small amount of progress.

For years, it gave the impression that it was content to live in its own little corner of the gaming world, making well-received updates to its own franchises, without really caring about what the wider industry was doing. Now we know that for all that time, it was watching and learning. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the result of that examination: a game that marries the best bits of the franchise's long history with the best bits of the rest of the gaming world, and produces something even greater than the sum of its parts. At its heart, Breath of the Wild is an open-world exploration game, in the vein of titles such as Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and FarCry 4. After completing the small starting area (and these things are, of course, relative: that area feels about as large as the entire Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time), Link is thrown into a world scattered with quests to complete, people to meet and monsters to defeat. He can find and climb towers to mark new areas on the map and travel at speed between them.

Ocarina of Time set up a play style that the subsequent Zelda games have rarely deviated from. New moves were added, controls were tightened, but it all felt like iterations on the same model. Yes, you can still lock onto enemies, parry attacks with your shield, dodge and slash with your sword, but there's a wide variety of different weapons at your disposal now. You can pick up a broken tree branch and use it to attack for starters, beat down a few goblins, steal their clubs, grab a wood-cutting ax and more. It's easy to swap between weapons, which is good, because there's a new durability system at play here.