This game had some really good ideas going for it. The open world, traversal of the world, and the importance of height, as well as the physics engine are all cool. The atmosphere is captivating too.

Unfortunately, none of the 120 shrines offer any particularly deep puzzles, compared to games like portal, or puzzle based games like the witness. The combat is very shallow, the inventory management and weapon breaking mechanic feels more punishing than incentivising you to explore to get better/more loot as Skyrim successfully did, and the lack of a good story or a proper lore again compared to other fantasy games like elder scrolls or souls (due to being a zelda game and having to conform to it), makes this whole game a demonstration of wasted potential.

This game is nearly perfect, and probably the epitome of the point and click VN hybrid style game. It's a story about the interconnectedness of people, and how even small actions can have large influences on others, and it's represented excellently through the gameplay and narrative. Every character, idea, setting and plot point is used in this game and nothing feels wasted or undeveloped, and in this way feels very compact and complete. The only issue is the stealth section in the game which is painfully tedious.

The graphics and music are nice but the amount of backtracking isn't fun or satisfying, specially having to shoot random blocks to progress. The controls feel very janky compared to other 2d platformers, and is specially disappointing compared to games like Mario. Even though this game is praised for its world design, each individual level is shallow in terms of platforming or combat. The worst thing about this game are the boss fights, which feel more like a test of patience and refarming missiles while hitting a certain weak point more than skill. I can't imagine people still enjoying this game and touting it as one of the best, when the modern Metroid games and other games in this genre are unthinkably better. I imagine nostalgia and being aware of its reputation must help in that regard.

It's garbage. Whatever good ideas or plot points the game had is completely overshadowed by the huge amount of grind you're forced to do, to complete the pokedex enough (e.g. catching the same Pokémon multiple times, killing Pokémon with specific type moves, seeing Pokémon use certain moves...) to progress. The catching mechanic is way too basic and uninteresting for it to be so central to the game. It's worse than any other modern open world game in existence and it's testament to the low standard Pokémon fans have when they rate this game highly, or praise it as the best Pokémon game in the last decade.