Every installment sees them struggle with decisions and mature (in ways big and small) over the course of the game’s story—they’re stuck in a perpetual, precarious state of “growing up.” They navigate spaces that over time have become more difficult to traverse and more populated, just as the real world expands as one ages. And so, it’s dawned on me: With its young characters, its longevity, its accessibility, and the evolution of its gameplay, The Legend of Zelda is hands-down the best franchise about the joys and frustrations of leaving youth and facing the challenges of adulthood.

This year’s Breath of the Wild features Link and Zelda grappling with their respective roles as knight and princess, much in the way teenagers must take on new, or more demanding, obligations. It’s a daunting task, especially for Zelda, who bears more responsibility because of her royal blood, and constantly expresses doubts about both her assigned path and her competence. She has trouble using the powers that are her birthright and resents the fact that a knight has been assigned to protect her. Still, Zelda lets her guard down with Link, asking whether he believes people would choose the same future for themselves if they were born into different roles. These characters are meant to be saving the world, but the games still take the time to touch on these human concerns.

Breath of the Wild also marks the first time the series has treated the pains of growing up with the same weight as the characters’ larger mission. Earlier games had thrust Link and Zelda into new situations (for instance, 2002’s The Wind Waker sees Zelda essentially lose her memory and become a pirate, while Link must worry after his grandmother and little sister as he travels the vast ocean) rather than allowing them to seek those experiences on their own.

In the years since The Legend of Zelda debuted in 1986, the franchise has enabled increasingly complex gameplay. The earliest installments were relatively linear: The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link (1987), A Link to the Past (1991), and Link’s Awakening (1993) were 2D adventures that sent you (as Link) off on a grid. It was all fairly methodical, and you completed certain steps in order to progress to the next. Ocarina of Time, released in 1998 and the franchise’s first foray into 3D, marked a significant departure from this on-the-rails approach. You could take side quests, helping other characters in their day-to-day lives or looking for items you didn’t necessarily need to finish the game. Still, with the main storyline, things had to be completed in a particular order—a helpful constraint on my own burgeoning freedom that allowed me to experiment without straying too far from my main objective.

The franchise’s move toward greater autonomy culminated in this year’s Breath of the Wild, the first Zelda game to offer a true “open-world” environment, allowing players to go anywhere and do whatever they like, whenever they like. (As The Atlantic’s David Sims has written, this open-world trend in gaming has had plenty of downsides, including lazier storytelling.) In Breath of the Wild, you can go straight to confronting the big bad, travel through the world, or tame horses; the series’ creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, spent his first time playing the game simply climbing trees.

There are still dungeons and bosses to defeat. But the choices, once confined to a single path, are now limitless—paralleling the somewhat dizzying experience of having many of the rules of childhood fall away. I think of how I went from being allowed to only play video games for half an hour at a time when I was younger, to eventually being trusted to manage my time on my own. In Zelda, this freedom is both exhilarating and intimidating: Some players will appreciate their newfound independence, while for others it might come with a sense of dread or aimlessness. I didn’t find such a realistic reflection of growth in any of the other games I grew up with. Final Fantasy presents a similar adventure, but its story feels less intimate since each installment comes with new characters; Mario boasts countless versions, including side-scrollers and racing titles and party games, but they’re all less unified.