The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an open-world action-adventure game developed by Nintendo EPD and published by Nintendo, released on March 3, 2017, for the Wii U and the Nintendo Switch — a launch title for the latter — and later made available on Nintendo Switch 2. In it, Link wakes from a hundred-year slumber to find Hyrule in ruins, its settlements scattered and its wilderness grown over the wreckage of a fallen kingdom. Free climbing, paragliding, cooking, and a physics-driven world where nearly anything can be tried are the tools he is given, and the four Divine Beasts and the shrines beneath the earth are what he must face with them.

It is the main entry in The Legend of Zelda series and is celebrated for discarding the conventions the series had long carried. Its open-ended exploration, its stamina-and-weather survival systems, and the sheer number of ways a single problem can be solved redefined what players came to expect from the franchise, and its influence spread far beyond it. The freedom it gives is the point: the ruin is vast, the road is yours, and Hyrule is still waiting.