It's a franchise-defining game, no question. I've played every (non-spinoff) Zelda release in its original time, beginning with the gold NES cartridge as a kid (one of my first games ever), and I went into BOTW skeptical but quickly found it to be the game that finally gets open-world right. The exploration is beautiful, full of subtleties. I adored every minute of it, easily among the handful of best gaming experiences of my lifetime.
Re: Breaking Weapons
This topic has been rehashed so many times, but just to clarify my view again: the breaking weapons are one of the best decisions of the game. Why? Precisely because I loathe the collect-a-thon open world games where you just pick up endless weapons that don't matter anyway, because once you get a couple of really strong ones you keep using those. In BOTW, instead of trying to get the perfect weapon load-out, you're encouraged to have fun with weapons--pick something up, use it creatively, switch to something else, discard, improvise, etc. Weapons are just part of the rhythm of the game, rather than some loot-a-thon where you're trying to tick the boxes of collecting all 50 blades or whatever. Nothing could be more boring than that paradigm, and I'm glad Zelda said: screw that.