The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

You play Link, a boy raised in a forest, pulled into a quest across a kingdom that drifts between childhood and a ruined adulthood. Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda in three dimensions, and it solved problems nobody had solved yet: how to lock onto an enemy, how to make a sword fight legible in open space, how to let a player feel a field is large without getting lost in it. The structure became the template almost every action-adventure copied for the next decade. Underneath the puzzles is a story about losing seven years and coming back to a world that moved on without you.