[filleduchaos]

Most of those things have been fairly common elements of games for decades? For example "puzzle dungeons" is just a staple of Zelda as a franchise, there's a whole genre of games designed around being able to rush the final boss as quickly as possible even though there's plenty of other content to explore (Metroidvanias), and I can't even think of anything particularly remarkable about BotW's death/checkpoint system other than that it's fairly generous with the autosaves.

[d23]

My point is these are new for a Zelda game, and they've put them together in a complete package in a way that's not been done before. If the bar is "something no game has ever done before," it's rare that anything in life is ever going to reach that bar.

Even if you take a completely different profession, like music, revolutionary artists still have their influences and build on instruments and techniques that are 99.9% the same. It's not like they are suddenly playing flutes made out of loaves of bread. And even if they were, most of the time those sorts of things just come across as gimmicks to me.

[djur]

I'm surprised to see "Metroidvania" described as a genre where you can rush the boss quickly. Neither of the two defining games that name the genre, (Super) Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, allow you to reach the final boss without having explored a substantial amount of the world map and collected the majority of available upgrades. Both games do have low% and any% speedruns that skip a lot of stuff, but those require the use of glitches. Do you have an example of a game you're thinking of?

[filleduchaos]

Neither low% nor any% speedruns of Super Metroid or Castlevania: SotN require the use of glitches. From personal experience, Super Metroid is beatable with less than 20% completion without using any glitches at all. Sequence breaking is not a glitch (which is an actual bug).

But also Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary and Axiom Verge are some pre-BotW games that I've personally played where you can rush the credits without experiencing a significant portion of the game once you've gotten out of the early game.

shout out to Chrono Trigger and Super Mario World which, while not metroidvanias, have the same "rush the final objective once you can with minimum exploration" vibe that many of them have.

[djur]

I see what you mean, but in order to win Super Metroid you still have to beat all the bosses to open Tourian, and the same with the five bosses you need to beat to get to Dracula in SOTN. In BOTW, once you're off the Plateau, you can literally walk directly to Ganon. And, like you mention, being able to skip a substantial chunk of the game to get to the final boss is as present (if not more so) in other genres; it's been in Mario since the NES!