This last clip exemplifies one of the ways this game achieves the feeling of freedom and adventure I love.
A recurrent joke-complaint amongst Breath of the Wild players is how infuriating rain is in the game. To those players, rain rhymes with struggle and an annoyingly painful time. It's an obstacle that prevents them from getting to where they want to go, by depriving them almost entirely of the most important ability of the game: climbing.
Personally, I love what rain does in this game, and especially, what it makes me do. How do you overcome struggle in a game? Struggle in videogames usually means putting an obstacle on your way and giving you a mean, sometimes several, to get around it. An icy zone where you are always slipping, impeding your progression? Here are these special boots, that allow you not to slip anymore. A fiery cave that sets you ablaze everytime you step in it? Here's this outfit, that grants you immunity to the cave's extreme temperatures.
What I eventually realized playing videogames is that how the game lays out those means for you is consequential in your appreciation of the struggle. Are they given to you as soon as you stumble upon the obstacle? Do you have to find them in a form of an item in a box somewhere? Do some enemies drop them? All of these examples are classical applications of a formula that you will find in most adventure games, and in most Zelda games in particular. This formula specifies that when a developer creates an obstacle he wants you to overcome, he will naturally designs a mean for you to get so as to allow you to get around it.
It works quite differently in Breath of the Wild. That's where the cybernetic aspect of the game intervenes. Breath of the Wild's gameplay works as a system. Amongst its parts are the items, as well as the actions you can do. Because it is a system, means aren't packaged to be the answer to an obstacle. They're not defined to help you overcome a particular obstacle. Their existence is independent from the obstacle and its resolution. In fact, they're not even means in their first state; they're ressources, facts of the world, rules, items, elements of the system that you, the player, combine together to make a mean that will help you overcome the obstacle you're facing. The player becomes the creative force that put together items and actionss as to propose a solution to a problem.
When some BotW players complain about rain, one of the criticisms that you may encounter is the fact that there is no gear allowing you to climb despite it. I also thought there would be one when I first got a piece of climbing gear, because it made sense to me that since there was a recurrent obstacle in rain, a specifically designed mean to overcome it would be given to us.
But this game doesn't work like that, because it doesn't need it. The system it puts in place allows for the player to combine all the elements of the world to create our own means.
So, instead of looking for a rain proof climbing gear, I cut some wood, find a way to lit it, search for a shelter to make a firecamp under, allowing me to make time pass until rain stops. I could also find another path that will get me to the same destination. Another way to overcome rain would be to learn how to time my jumps and create a climbing pattern that would get me to progress, though with great costs of stamina. Alternatively, I could also find ingredients with stamina inducing properties and cook a lot of endurance meals to be able to climb even wet surfaces. There are many other ways.
Note: [Each step of the means I just described consists in multiple calls to other elements of the system. For example, does the landscape provides shelter? How do I make fire? Fire arrows? Chuchu jelly that have been turned red? Flint? Do I have metal to use the flint? Etc]
Although how they would interact with rain might have been an afterthought in the process that brought them to be how they are, all of these means I end up creating were not specifically designed as solutions to the rain-obstacle. They are the products of several independent but interacting items/facts of the world, just laying around at the disposal of my creativity. And this process of creativity is extremely rewarding. It feels good, and a lot of it is due to how much control you have over the whole ordeal, and what type of intelligence it requires you to muster.
This difference between pre-packaged solutions and independent items giving the opportunity for the player to combine them however he wants, is one of the key of how this game frees the player and gives him the feeling of an adventure he has control over.