I disliked Twilight Princess, greatly. And I have only one reason for this: For the only time (that I can recall) the Zelda team wanted their game to be something.
Now, allow me to explain. They made Twilight Princess to accomplish one goal: to make a game more epic than Ocarina of Time. With this, a lot of things seemed forced. For me, the story was the one that seemed the most forced. While the story may be epic when you dig deeper into it, Ocarina of Time's story was fantastic no matter what angle you looked at. If you looked at it as a casual gamer and didn't look into why anyone did anything, it was still great. If you dug deep into the characters, tried to see the world from their perspective, it was practically flawless.
Twilight Princess, however, seemed to try and use nostalgia instead of story to make the game great, throwing Ganon in there just for kicks, giving you familiar faces and places to make you feel "right at home", so to speak. Twilight Princess didn't feel unique enough to me. Phantom Hourglass I loved, despite all the hatred from other gamers, because it was unique. The stylus controls were fun to play with, the new characters and places made me feel like I was getting to know a new world, new people in the game. That's probably why Majora's Mask was my favorite Zelda game. It was a new world with reused people, but given a different name and story, so they seem familiar, but you still have to get to know them again.
In addition, pardon me for just throwing out my opinion here, especially because it's partially irrellivant, but am I the only one that thinks that the story would have been much better had Ganon been introduced, with Zant seeming equal in power to Ganon, but as you slowly play through the game, slowly, you realize that Zant isn't anything more than a puppet for Ganon, but he doesn't realize this. Then the end of the game comes, he snaps his own neck WE ALL WIN.
Also, I played Twilight Princess on the Wii. They had motion controls. I'm no fan of motion controls. I feel motion controls distract from what you're actually doing. It focuses on the movement, rather than figuring out this puzzle. The reason why Phantom Hourglass was different was because the touch controls weren't trying to emulate that you were Link, rather that you were controlling him. Buttons. Goddammit, give me buttons. I should've bought the GameCube version. I would've liked it much better. The Motion controls also seemed very forced, as they built it for the GameCube, but ported it to the Wii, so it wasn't built for Motion Controls.
That's why I'm curious about Skyward Sword. I'm a button lover, but this was the first Zelda Wii game that was built with the motion controls, rather than added in. Will I still want my buttons, or will they execute it properly? I don't know, but I might not even buy the game. Zelda has made some mistakes recently, and I'm starting to enjoy their games less and less.
