Still playing through and enjoying Zelda BotW, so I thought I'd give a few additional impressions. To give you some sense of where I am, I've got about a dozen hearts, an extra wheel and a half of stamina, and two of the great beasties taken care of. I'm still scared of Lynels, but I can handle most of the other things that killed me in the early game.
I just started riding a horse for the first time. I never bothered with horses in RPGs before. I've always preferred walking to dealing with the fiddly aspects of most RPG horses (terrain issues, difficulty with combat, can't pick stuff up, random weird behavior, etc.). But in BotW, I just let the horse auto-pilot down a trail while I relax and check out the scenery.
I wish there was a way to know where you've been before. The exploration is one of the game's best features, but there is so much territory, I can't remember where I've been before. I've given myself the goal of traversing all the roads/trails in the game. To keep track of which ones I've travelled already, I'm marking them with a symbol on the map. Not a very elegant solution, but oh well.
It's a good game, for sure. I remember back when it released, I got annoyed with all the Zelda fans that were putting down Horizon Zero Dawn, which released at the same time. I guess that created a rivalry for some people, Zelda vs. Horizon. That's how it seemed at the time, anyhow. I loved Horizon (see avatar), and it bummed me a little to hear Nintendo fans constantly shitting on it. And Zelda got the spotlight and all the awards that year, leaving Horizon in its dust.
I get it now, though. I can see why so many people praised Zelda as a masterpiece and why they thought Horizon was crap in comparison. I don't share the latter half of that opinion (I still prefer Horizon's story, character, environments, visuals, and combat), but I get it. Zelda definitely does a lot of things better than Horizon did (world variety, exploration, discovery, puzzles, sheer expansiveness, inventiveness in game mechanics, etc.).
Please don't take this as an invitation to tell me why Zelda is so much better than Horizon. I've heard that plenty, thank you, lol. I'm just saying, I recognize now why Nintendo fans upheld Zelda as a masterpiece and sneered down their noses at Horizon. I don't agree with the sneers, but I get where they're coming from.