The latest entry in the Zelda franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, arrived after several years in development last month, on March 4, 2017. The game, which coincided with the Switch’s launch but is also available on the Wii U, is being hailed as one of the best games of all time.

And I have to agree. It’s simply the best game I’ve ever played.

Breath of the Wild is a game that’s managed to breathe some life (pun intended, sorry) into this storied franchise. While I am inclined to disagree with the idea that Zelda “needed” this change, it’s certainly welcome. Zelda games have long followed a certain pattern – venture into a specific dungeon, get a new item or equipment piece, and use that piece to venture into the next dungeon. Rinse and repeat until Ganon is defeated. A recent handheld title in the series, A Link Between Worlds, kind of put a twist on that by letting players rent items in order to finish the eight dungeons in any order they liked. But even A Link Between Worlds wasn’t what I would call a true open-world adventure.

In Breath of the Wild, Link begins the game waking up from a century-long slumber in the Shrine of Resurrection. Suffering from amnesia, he is guided by the voice of Zelda herself to get going. Soon, the basic story is explained: Link was defeated when Calamity Ganon returned to Hyrule. The four chosen Champions of Hyrule’s main tribes were also killed, and their Divine Beasts (huge mechanical weapons designed to defeat Ganon) were taken over by the Calamity’s malice. It’s up to Link to hopefully regain his memories, regain control of the Divine Beasts, and destroy Ganon to end the Calamity.

And then, really, you can kind of just… go wherever you want. If you want to make a naked mad dash straight to Hyrule Castle to try and off Ganon right away, you can do that (and a lot of people are – it’s making for some wildly entertaining speedruns on Twitch). If you want to spend 100 hours solving puzzle shrines to try and beef up all of your stats and armor and such before even taking on the first Divine Beast, you can do that too. Nintendo has truly given gamers a massive world to just kind of do whatever they want in.

But the game is not without its challenges. I found a number of the puzzle shrines to be difficult, even with the small hints provided at their entrances. The combat is also challenging, especially at the beginning of the game when you don’t have any decent equipment yet and even the simplest enemies can wail on you for half your health. But as you slowly figure out new strategies, get better equipment, and so on, things get better. And Breath of the Wild is just pure fun to play even with how punishing it can be in the early stages of the game.

I finished the main story of the game by destroying Ganon after putting roughly 90 hours into the game. I have to admit, a lot of that time was spent just talking to people. I love the amount of care that was put into the dialogue and into crafting some incredibly rich lore for this game. And while Link still doesn’t have much of a personality on his own, the way that other characters react to him give him more of one than I think he’s had before.

Everything about this game is good. The gameplay is good, the story is good, the characters are good, the music is good, it’s all good. It’s so good. I can’t be effusive enough in my praise for this game. The only thing less than perfect about Breath of the Wild is that sometimes the framerate drops in high-density areas (Korok Forest proved to be kind of a chunky area in that regard).

I’m the kind of lunatic who went out and purchased a Nintendo Switch day one so that I could play the new Zelda on the new system. And I’m the kind of lunatic who bought the special edition of the game, so I ended up spending roughly $450 or so for the sake of playing one game as soon as I could.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

-Carrie Wood