You could argue it’s more like Sekiro but Zelda. Or like Candy Crush but Zelda.

Mythology is not a monolith. We’re talking 3000+ years of cultural evolution across multiple cities that united and separated multiple times, each having their own local cult that rose to prominence or got supplanted by a different one.

When some of them got together and overlapped, they might have taken different facets of “death”: Osiris is not strictly a god of death itself but a judge of your soul, and grants eternal life in death, while Anubis was a god of funerary rites and graves, so the physical aspect of handling dead bodies.

When a city took prevalence over another, either because the pharaoh set up shop there or because a temple in that city became more famous and gained influence, that city’s major cult could overshadow other gods worshiped in other cities and take over their duties.

Then there were bigger gods that got cults that split into different aspects, like how Hathor and Sekhmet come from the same goddess but Sekhmet specialized in bloody war and the sun burning in the desert (an aspect she took from her father, a more general sun god) while Hathor specialized in motherhood.

Other aspects are passed around in the same way, starting with the role of sun, there are countless aspects of the sun that were embodied in different gods. Even the scarab is an aspect of the sun - because it emerges fully matured from the dungball of its parent the same way the sun comes out from the underworld in the morning, so there was a god for that. Death is a major aspect that remained a big constant in Egyptian religion, that’s why those two are seen the most often.

If you look at which city becomes the center of Egypt’s rule as time goes on through the different kingdoms and intermediate periods, and check which major temple is in that city, you see which cult takes over more duties.

Cancer-causing radiations don’t cause wolves to develop cancer resistance, they cause wolves to develop cancer. Those that were more resistant survived, those that weren’t didn’t, now we have wolves that are different from those that we had before. They are mutant wolves, but the radiations didn’t make them mutants. The mutation happened before in some wolves, and their descendants survived better than those that didn’t have it. Evolution has always been like that.

That’s what natural selection is. We focus on those that survived because they developed resistance to something, but it has always meant that everybody else died and the species as a whole has moved forward.

Twilight Princess.

I’m not that much into the gothic designs and the slightly edgy, or any of the wolf stuff, but the storytelling and the presentation felt like an actual epic. Lots of scenes like the first horseback field chase, the chariot defense, the bridge horseback fight, are so infuriating to actually play (especially the first time each), but they’re all so cinematic and fast while taking a big leap forward in the story, you get stakes, satisfaction, and awe, as you realize after the fact what just changed. And then the compilation of each combat types for the final boss for the final cherry on the cake, now that you can actually play it better, you’re right there in the movie for its climax.

And the boss fights like the fire temple and the argorok are very simple but really cool.

It’s basically Ocarina, and Ocarina was great, but everything in TP is enhanced, you take every aspect of it and you improve everything. Except Ocarina goes harder on the fairytale feel, while TP is a straight medieval epic.

In 2D, maybe Minish Cap, but LBW is to LttP what TP is to OoT, like, take a great classic and improve on every aspect of it.

BotW/TotK don’t make the top for me because I’m more into the immediate story, and those two are the type to hit harder the more you think about various aspects of it, rather than while you’re in it, it’s more of a melancholic slow burn for me.