I do sound critical with SS, but it isn't that i wanted WW or TP two, its just that i spent the whole of SS thinking 'is that it?' and 'Where is the rest of it'. The reason for this being is that I've played the Zelda series all my life and I expect every new game to build upon the last one and for the most part the games have done exactly that. MM may not have been longer than OoT but it was far more intricate to play, WW advanced item usage and scale and narrative etc and TP again built off of the other 3D games at the time by adding even more and being even bigger and this was on the Gamecube. People say the Wii was the weakest console on the market and that is true but surely it was more powerful than the Gamecube and it could handle TP because it was ported, given that, it just felt like Skyward Sword had stripped everything away, it didnt build or add anything as i believe a new installment to Zelda should and that is was bugged me. I like what is there it was just that with SS's gameplan of bringing back familiar elements from other games like WW i expected to do all i could there and more. It just doesnt feel right that so many things felt missing when less powerful games on less powerful consoles did much more without the 5 year production gap between the last home console installment, it makes me wonder what they were doing.
SS to me isnt a bad game its just not what i'd call a full game, i believe that the gameplay and location elements i mentioned in my previous post that i felt were missing could have been easily added but they weren't i just felt wholly short changed by Skyward Sword because so much felt missing and there was so much repetition.
Ok now we're having some actual discussion. I'll disagree with your assertions that WW ans TP advanced the series, to me it seems they were both (pretty good) iterations of stuff I have previously seen before.
I don't see any advancement with the item usage in WW, it's pretty much exactly like Oot. Scale? Ok you've got a point there, the Great Sea is huge, but I'd argue it's too big for its own good and needed to be trimmed down. When the world is so big that it takes me many minutes to go anywhere it stops being fun for me and instead becomes a chore. That's why I hated the Triforce hunting quest so much. Narrative? Aside from making me sympathize with Ganondorf and questioning the reasons why the goddesses flooded Hyrule in the first place, I can't really think of any story elements that had me stop and think about it, it's pretty much collect three items-plot twist-collect more items-stab bad guy in face that pretty much EVERY Zelda game (aside from MM) uses.
I don't think TP built off of the other 3D games so much as it aped off their success. TP to me feels bloated in a way, again, like it's too big for its own good. There's a lot more features there than in other Zelda games, to be sure, but you don't really get full usage out of them. So many items in the game were just one-time uses and weren't useful after that specific time. So many of the regions had only a few significant things to do in there; Ordon was just your home village and offered nothing of importance at all to the story, the Gerudo Desert doesn't offer much besides the Arbiter's Grounds and the home base of the moblins (which I'll admit is a nice touch), and Snowpeak is a literal straight shot to the mansion. Even the story structure felt too much based off of OoT for me, after the opening (admittedly different, but still too bloated for its own good), I felt like I was playing a retread of OoT. I WOULD say it was an advancement had Ganondorf never shown up in the story; Zant was much different than other villains, he had real presence, and all that was stripped from him the moment the game decided to let you bash it out with Ganondorf again. I think that if old Pig-Man had never shown up, and the last boss was a deranged frothing lunatic, THAT would have been cool.
What SS added to the series in terms of narrative was a long-due personal element. I was getting bored with just going out and saving the world, why should I care about anybody in it if I'm not close to anybody? WW was going the right route with having Aryl kidnapped, but then the personal drive petered out halfway through once she was rescued and I was just left with "go save the world because you're the hero and whatever". SS rectified this by carrying that personal drive throughout the entire story. Literally everything you do in the main quest is to get Zelda back, and the game does a good job of keeping that in the forefront of your mind (except for some reason the Faron song quest; I almost lost it when that ***** wanted me to go out catching ****ing tadpoles!!!)
SS's main addition to the series, though, was gameplay. Never before have I felt so connected to the protagonist of a game, I know there are many others here who disagree with me but I believe the motion controls used in SS are the most intuitive thing out there and really let me step into the shoes of the hero like no other. The pouches were also a really good advancement of the series; the limitations on how much we could carry forced players to think about their adventuring strategy more thoroughly, and the fact that drinking potions takes time in the real world and can be interrupted (instead of an automatic response) also changes up combat so that you are more careful with your health. While there are less items this time around, I feel they were used much better and more thoroughly throughout the game than other Zelda games (the whip notwithstanding); they weren't just throwaway items but rather integral to the quest at large.
Now you say that the things that weren't added make the game incomplete; I say that, by and large, the game feels better-rounded because of it. I have a lot of gripes about the sky as well, I'm not going to contest that, but everything else left out was done so for the better. I didn't care for the hidden skills, they made an already easy game insultingly easy; literally the only enemy that required them were the darknuts, everybody else could have been dispatched with like one or two swings of the sword. There weren't a superfluous amount of regions that were basically straight shots to the objective. The repetition of the regions that are there fleshes them out more and (at least, to me) makes them feel more alive instead of static fields which never experience change throughout the game.
I don't see why fighting bosses multiple times is a sin; in fact it's something I have been clamoring for since who knows when. They were fun and interesting to fight, why limit them to just one fight?
