Good game, I loved the dungeons, the story, the characters, etc. It probably is the worst 3D Zelda out of this, TP, WW, MM, OoT, and BotW, but that's only because I enjoyed the other ones so much.
It's major flaw is the amount of padding/filler. Some of the filler stuff was cool/fun to go through, so I didn't mind it much, but most of it was just so long and tedious and brought the game down quite a bit. Without so much filler this could've been 4.5 instead of 4, or if the filler was at least fun and maybe some was turned into side quests, which would remove it as required filler in the story, while still keeping that content in the game. There seemed to be a fetch quest or two before each dungeon, and I enjoyed only a few of them. It took 7:30 to get from the beginning of the tutorial to the end of the second dungeon, and 33 hours to go through the entire game. For reference that's about twice as long as the world record 100% run in BotW, just to beat the game. I know Twilight Princess is around the same amount of time, but I had a lot more fun going through it, and it seemed to have less filler and more fun content.
Something that's not really filler, but more a poor design choice that isn't really necessary, is how you have to go back to some central location after each dungeon, which to me interrupted the already bad pacing, having to stop what I'm doing, spend the time travelling, and then go to the next dungeon. I would've enjoyed having the next dungeon become available as soon as you finish one for the first 3 (can't have them all available from the start for story reasons), and then the next 3 being available to do in any order.
Now enough talk of filler and bad pacing, to the thing that I feel SS is most notorious for, the controls. The motion controls are pretty bad. They always need to be recalibrated and never do what you want. They're like a little kid that keeps wandering off and never listens to you, and no matter what you do you can't get them to behave. So I changed to button controls. It's like replacing the little brat with a robot kid that obeys your every command. The button controls feel a little weird at first, but you get used to them after a little while, and my god it's worth it. It does make the game a bit easy though, I only died once and it was at the very end of the final boss (I'll get to that), but it feels so much better. I thought it would be annoying having to press L to use the camera because the right stick is reserved for the controls, but it actually felt like second nature eventually and prevented drift from moving the camera in unwanted ways, and drift never seemed to mess with my attacks either, so it was fine having my sword on the right stick.
Now that my two biggest notes on this game are out of the way, I'd like to talk about the final boss. While my only death in the game was to him, he was insanely easy on my second attempt. The way that you kill him is a fatal blow, which you can set up after stunning and hitting him. My complaint here is that he gets up too quickly. If you get him right away the fight is easy, but if you aren't able to get him in the very small window given, you'll struggle a lot with this fight. This fight would've been much better if A: his attack patterns were better, and B: it was easier to land a fatal blow on him, but you had to get more, maybe 2-4 instead of the one. Another way to improve this would be to keep the one difficult fatal blow, but add more of a fight to get to it, like a longer second phase.
Overall, if this had less filler it could've been 4.5, it was barely even a 4, but that would've really improved my experience. If you don't like filler, fun or not, and you either insist on using motion controls or just can't get used to the button controls, this would probably be more like a 3 for you.
Also, this was all I did besides work and sleep for 5 days, so I'm gonna go take a little break from Zelda
It's major flaw is the amount of padding/filler. Some of the filler stuff was cool/fun to go through, so I didn't mind it much, but most of it was just so long and tedious and brought the game down quite a bit. Without so much filler this could've been 4.5 instead of 4, or if the filler was at least fun and maybe some was turned into side quests, which would remove it as required filler in the story, while still keeping that content in the game. There seemed to be a fetch quest or two before each dungeon, and I enjoyed only a few of them. It took 7:30 to get from the beginning of the tutorial to the end of the second dungeon, and 33 hours to go through the entire game. For reference that's about twice as long as the world record 100% run in BotW, just to beat the game. I know Twilight Princess is around the same amount of time, but I had a lot more fun going through it, and it seemed to have less filler and more fun content.
Something that's not really filler, but more a poor design choice that isn't really necessary, is how you have to go back to some central location after each dungeon, which to me interrupted the already bad pacing, having to stop what I'm doing, spend the time travelling, and then go to the next dungeon. I would've enjoyed having the next dungeon become available as soon as you finish one for the first 3 (can't have them all available from the start for story reasons), and then the next 3 being available to do in any order.
Now enough talk of filler and bad pacing, to the thing that I feel SS is most notorious for, the controls. The motion controls are pretty bad. They always need to be recalibrated and never do what you want. They're like a little kid that keeps wandering off and never listens to you, and no matter what you do you can't get them to behave. So I changed to button controls. It's like replacing the little brat with a robot kid that obeys your every command. The button controls feel a little weird at first, but you get used to them after a little while, and my god it's worth it. It does make the game a bit easy though, I only died once and it was at the very end of the final boss (I'll get to that), but it feels so much better. I thought it would be annoying having to press L to use the camera because the right stick is reserved for the controls, but it actually felt like second nature eventually and prevented drift from moving the camera in unwanted ways, and drift never seemed to mess with my attacks either, so it was fine having my sword on the right stick.
Now that my two biggest notes on this game are out of the way, I'd like to talk about the final boss. While my only death in the game was to him, he was insanely easy on my second attempt. The way that you kill him is a fatal blow, which you can set up after stunning and hitting him. My complaint here is that he gets up too quickly. If you get him right away the fight is easy, but if you aren't able to get him in the very small window given, you'll struggle a lot with this fight. This fight would've been much better if A: his attack patterns were better, and B: it was easier to land a fatal blow on him, but you had to get more, maybe 2-4 instead of the one. Another way to improve this would be to keep the one difficult fatal blow, but add more of a fight to get to it, like a longer second phase.
Overall, if this had less filler it could've been 4.5, it was barely even a 4, but that would've really improved my experience. If you don't like filler, fun or not, and you either insist on using motion controls or just can't get used to the button controls, this would probably be more like a 3 for you.
Also, this was all I did besides work and sleep for 5 days, so I'm gonna go take a little break from Zelda