I think your post reflects several misunderstands or false assumptions about the patent system.
First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.
Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
In the past there was perhaps more benefit from this exchange: manufacturers disclosed special knowledge of their products in patents and the world at large gained knowledge that would otherwise remain secret. But this theoretical exchange breaks down if the secret is easily reverse engineered or otherwise unlikely to remain secret. Reverse engineering all manner of products is much easier now than it was 100 years ago but the duration of patents has remained fixed at 20 years. I doubt that it would take more than a year to reverse engineer these patented Zelda features (or how to make a new small molecule drug, for that matter) in the absence of disclosure through patents.
There's still an argument for patents to incentivize investment in R&D. We still want people to invest the time and effort in developing and proving new small molecule drugs even though modern instrumentation and synthesis planning makes it easy to copy a drug. But the "disclosure is better than secrets" argument in favor of patents has been weakening every year as secret-keeping becomes harder.
First, you misstate the purpose of disclosure. It isn't to become a record of historical inventions, it's to encourage inventors to disclose their innovations, as inventors otherwise would not disclose their inventions. Inventors and their businesses would instead be incentivized to wrap their inventions up in trade secret and never disclose anything at all.
Second, patents don't use convoluted language to hide an obvious process. That's (a) merely facial and a waste of time, (b) contrary to the actual legal goal of patents which is to encompass as much in your patent as possible, while still maintaining its ability to grant. Patentees must actually disclose their invention, in a way that's cognizable to someone skilled in the art, or they simply do not have any benefit from the patent at all.