@crey I agree with most of your points save for a few exceptions. I really hated the art style, writing, and world of this game. It made everything feel cheap. Like, did we really need a Zelda game with a cliche high school love triangle BEFORE Zelda gets kidnapped, in 2011? No, no we did not.
The so-called 'handholding' doesn't bug me as the FFXV-style jarring cuts do. I mean seriously, we get three dream / premonition sequences before Link even wakes up. That's just doubting your audience and over-explaining at that point. I really liked the slow start in Twilight Princess because it had some sick story moments, some classic village puzzles, and it set the scale for the game, starting modestly only to mount and mount. It's kind of hard to do that when you start on a floating island. And I know it sounds like I have nothing but bad things to say about this game.
That's because I do.
I did nothing ever in my life to deserve Ghirahim and Groose. And don't try and take that out of context — I mean it in the negative sense. They are both such utter bad character designs, I cannot comprehend who approved them. Ghirahim is like an artist took Zant and the Twilight's weird floating rectangles and said 'his clothes are white and they're diamonds now.'
And one final point about the world, I think there were fetch quests than in any other 3D Zelda game. They didn't have a real water area and the 'water' area they did have was covered in the same ugly beige as most of the sky. No one comments on the giant cloud dome until you can go there despite it being in plain sight for the entire duration of the game. The areas were constructed in a hurry and all feel and look cheap, with odd polygons that weren't even in the Gamecube games.
And that forest temple is a joke. There, I'm done.
