Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don't forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don't get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it's okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame...like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won't get Dutch because it's a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I'm now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can't understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I'm really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion 😂
I would also choose Zelda: BOTW and RDR2.
Zelda: BOTW is a soulless Ubisoft game clone shamelessly inhabiting the dead shell of the Legend of Zelda franchise. It contains little to nothing that makes the Legend of Zelda games what they are. Gone are fascinating cities and towns, no colorful cast of characters, no real dungeons or temples, no progression system so the entire game is just 50 hours of the game exact same copy-pasted things over and over and over with no change in difficulty or approach. It’s like the first Zelda game in history without a memorable score, in fact there’s hardly any music in it at all. Theres no plot to speak of. It introduced some novel systems, and they deserve credit for that, but it’s just not a Legend of Zelda game at all.
RDR2 is a bland on-rails march from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with an incredibly lifelike and immersive world that… doesn’t really give you anything to do. And what it does give you, there’s no reason to do. The game revolves around your camp and allies but the camp hardly serves any purpose. You can’t customize it in any significant way, keeping everyone happy and supplied does very little besides reduce the amount of audible complaining. And the game shoves so much money in your hands from the word go, that you never have a reason to do any money making activities, and it upends the plot of the whole game “We just need a bit more money” Dutch says as I have $10,000 stashed in my saddlebags. Everyone seems to love Arthur as a character but he’s just such a bland, indecisive milquetoast guy who doesn’t hold his own opinion on anything. He doesn’t have any personality to speak of until the last third of the game, and then they expect you to have an emotional reaction to him by the end. John was hands down a better protagonist and it’s not close.
And that's why I love it, just like Majora's
Absolutely nothing like Majora’s lol. Majora’s Mask took everything expected about a Zelda game and put a put a twist on it. It switched up the formula while staying true to its legacy. It was a fresh new experience but everything you could want as a Zelda fan was there.
BOTW just abandoned everything good about the franchise and replaced it with insultingly generic Ubisoft inspired busywork. Whatever Zelda DNA that was left is just window dressing.
I WISH we could one day get a spiritual successor to MM, but I guess we have to wait for Nintendo to kick its Ubisoft / Fortnite phase.