I say new to exclude the remakes, because those do kick ass.
The three new Zelda games on switch are Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and Echoes of Wisdom.
BotW and TotK should have been a new franchise. They’re way too different mechanically from everything in the series beforehand. Innovating on the gameplay makes sense, but this was doable within the established formula (see Link between Worlds for how to do this well.)
Now for quality. BotW is a fantastic game in most facets, and most of my complaints I can recognize as me problems (I dont love the fact that just getting to a shrine makes it teleportable, it feels too easy to just cut the exploration by running to all the shrines in an area. However, this is a preference, not an objective flaw.) I think it would have done very well on its own, and didn’t need an existing IP to support it.
TotK is where my complaints overlap. It should’ve been in the separate franchise, and I think it’s a TERRIBLE sequel, and far more mediocre game. The tutorial is worse and way too long, they didn’t add enough to the world to justify reusing the entire map, the underground area is largely barren, the zonai shrines existing at all is contrived bs, and the zonai building mechanic, while cool, feels incredibly unbalanced and strange. Its like it just got bolted on without any of the other devs being told.
Echoes of Wisdom is a crying shame. After two complete deviations from the games the Zelda series had become known for, I was excited by the trailer! But then the echoes system poked it’s ugly head in. I hate, with a burning passion, games where puzzles have “free form solutions.” The old zeldas were full of tightly crafted puzzles, and they’re by far my favorite part (and, notably, the meat of the games.) So being handed a world where the main mechanic is “use these basic tools however you want!” by another game is just infuriating. I love immersive sims, but these are not a replacement for actual puzzle design (this sentiment also applies to the zonai building in TotK)
TL;DR: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom should’ve been an original franchise, and TotK and Echoes of Wisdom have lazy game design unbefitting of the Zelda series.
If, from your perspective, a Zelda game distinguishes itself primarily by how good of a puzzle delivery platform it is, then sure, larger scale puzzles beyond the scope of a single shrine are sort of absent from the “of the Wild” era games. I suspect this was a conscious design decision, because once a player has to hold significant state in their head, any interruption (this is a mobile console after all) will lead to a number of players being stumped and not completing the game. The same idea applies to tasks with multiple solutions, funneling players by only allowing one solution, one path through the game will mostly just lead to gatekeeping and exclusion. You can see that kind of thinking exemplified in the design of the TotK dungeons, each of which are basically half a dozen independent puzzles leading up to some unrelated boss fight.
Personally, to me puzzles are a fun diversion and not very important at all. What the original Zelda was amazing for was its hardcore exploration. After being more and more limited and railroaded in LttP, then LA, OoT went too far for me. It never clicked for me, even after trying several times, and I left the franchise basically until BotW, with exploration once again being front and center of the Zelda experience.
I agree that everything after LA and before BotW could have been its own franchise. But BotW is more “Zelda” than basically every other Zelda before it, and I’m happy it has returned the franchise to its original, “proper” form.
I’m not sure I agree, but that’s a real interesting take: Zelda 1, 2, BotW (and TotK) being one series, and all the others being something different? I can definitely see the argument.
OP, have you played the original two? They’re far more similar to BotW than most of the others.
The development process for BotW supposedly started with people playing around with the original Zelda gameplay implemented in a modern codebase. They experimented with what sorts of emergent gameplay they could make by adding new features that could all interact with each other.