I've spent the past month playing mostly Breath of the Wild. Pretty close to my arbitrary cut-off point, I think. I've cleared all 120 base game shrines, cheesed the Trial of the Sword, collected nearly all the armor in the game (Ancient alone is left, I think). All that's left are the 12 Champion shrines and Hyrule Castle, and for gear my cutoff point will be fully upgrading the classic Link 'of the Wild' set the game gives you for clearing all the shrines.
Trial of the Sword was... interesting. :)
I beat the Beginning trials quickly enough but was not particularly interested in grinding away at the remaining ones. So I did a quick search and found that you can skip to the end, and relatively easily too! Allot of design coincidences had to come together for it to work, but it does.
So first things first, you can leave the game map in BotW, and it's actually really easy. You grab a magnetic box, pull it close (but not flush) to a flat wall, hit the box with Stasis and then hit it with a weapon a bunch more times in the direction of the wall. Position yourself between the box and the wall while pushing up against the box and boom! The momentum tosses you threw the wall.
Once outside the map though, apparently all the rooms of the Trial are actually smaller chambers in one gigantic map separate from the rest of the game, except for the room at the very end where you claim your powered up master sword. Once you're outside, you just have to run to the boss room, clear that one, and step inside the ring to teleport you to the master sword room. But it's even easier than that: The game doesn't check that you've beaten the boss for that set of trials, only that you've beaten a boss room, meaning that you can just run over to the first Hinox room from the Beginning set and you're golden.
Getting back into the map is a little tricky - You need to raise an ice block almost pixel-perfectly by an edge of the Hinox room so that you can clip back in, but that's the hardest part about it because even with no/crap weapons the Hinox is easy. The game leaves a metal box for you in his chamber which you can use to stunlock him by repeatedly smashing it into his groin.
