Man, I've just past the third dungeon and so far I have mixed feelings. The third dungeon was awesome with some really clever puzzles, the controls work pretty well for the most part and the story and characters are great.
My main gripes with the game are those that have been prevalent in past games in the series, but have reached the boiling point as far as I'm concerned. Things like the intrusive hand holding, such as:"you have collected X" for the 40th time can really break the flow of the game and are just an insult to the intelligence of an average human being. Even when my friend, who plays a game once a year or two, noted these annoyances had casually asked:"Why are they always stating the obvious?"
Another problem for me was the abundance of fetch quests(Search for 3 of these, then go find 5 of those, and don't forget to collect the 12 tears etc). I wouldn't mind them if they were engaging or presented new locales(a la Metroid), but they generally involve you running from one end of an area you have already visited to the other, with no clever puzzles or some sort of a twist.
It seems to me that now more than ever Zelda is kind of stuck in the past in many regards.
At its core(dungeons, soundtrack, story etc) it's a brilliant game, but it's incredibly rough around the edges that it's hard for me, as a hardcore Zelda fan, to enjoy it as much.
Nintendo needs to shake things up because I feel the series as of late has become too predictable and with the same old trappings that make the games look archaic in some regards when compared to their contemporaries.
