For me, "as a kid" was Zelda 1 and Zelda 2. I played some of the intervening Zelda games, and I liked them well enough, but they were fine. Which isn't a knock on Zelda in particular, 99.9% of games I thought were, well, "fine".

And then I played BotW. Since the late 90s there were only 2 other games that I put in more playtime than it and those were Ultima Online and WoW. And this was a single player game. It was the most amazing experience for me.