So... every Zelda aside from the first one have broken mechanics...
...yeah this is dumb.
Using those standards, almost every game that originated from the 8-bit Nintendo era is "broken", because almost every single game has been fundamentally changed, experimented with, or evolved in some way.
It seems pretty foolish to take such an incredibly narrow, reductionist view, but it... it's a common point of view among hardcore gamers.
Here's how you "break" the fundamental concept of a series:
Street Fighter V: The World Murderer is a first person shooter in which Guile gets tired of being a family man and goes to Iran to clean house, and there's nary a fighting game mechanic in any point of the game.
But Zelda through every iteration has been an action adventure game centered around progressing between dungeons that are mazelike and require some combination of combat and puzzle solving to clear.
Almost every single Zelda game of note fits this description perfectly. Most, epitomize it.
The exact expression of the formula has changed and morphed over the years, going back and forth, up and down, and sometimes sideways. But it has stayed remarkably true to its roots, where a lot of games have not.
A lot of the criticisms of Zelda end up sounding like the claims that 3D Mario is absolutely nothing whatsoever like 2D Mario because grabbing a star at the end of a level is in no way like touching a flagpole. With such critics digging their heels in doggedly and insisting that every successive 3D Mario game which is more and more EXACTLY like 2D Mario is somehow still nothing at all like 2D Mario. In any way at all.
It just comes off as disingenuous after a certain point. A "I don't like this thing but have to be
right about not liking it."
