Combat got dumbed down? Huh. I must be playing OoT wrong, since I can generally just beat half the enemies by alternating between shielding and attacking. The rest are killed by the Bow, or whatever item you get in the dungeon.
Skyward Sword has a lot of flaws, but really, no more than your standard Zelda game. Long intro? See how long it takes from leaving the Deku tree to arriving at Dodongo cavern. Personally, I hate those types even more since they give you a taste of what you'll be getting before forcing you into a novel. If you have to (which you shouldn't), get it done in one run instead of dangling a carrot in front of someone.No sprawling overworld? Majora's Mask. Poor controls? Yes, annoying. At least they try to come up with new stuff. I'm looking at you, COD. I mean, seriously, I remember watching one youtuber who says that because the motion controls occasionally had problems, they should've gone back to buttons. That would be like Mario 64 using 2-D sprites because polygons caused too many glitches.
Just gonna jump in on this...
Comparing Zelda to CoD is redundant, Zelda should be either compared to it's own franchise or other Zelda clones, also, I hate CoD as much as the next guy, but they DO come up with some new ideas here and there. Really, Nintendo is just as guilty of rehashing selling points in a franchise as Activision.
What I mean is every Zelda since OoT has tried too hard to be just like OoT and following the OoT formula. TP being the biggest culprit. The criticism for SS is fair, it truly is the worst 3D Zelda to date. A good game? Yes, but bad by Zelda standards, its an example of a series that has hit its end in regard to original ideas. As Chrono said above, Zelda and FF are both series that have stagnated and failed to inspire in modern times, and truly, the fans are largely to blame. It is because the fans clamor for repeats of old games that those series have gone the way they have. Dev's will make what sells, not what they are inspired to do, and when you do this, you begin to bottle creative ideas.
The Zelda series, at least with the last few entries has tried experimentation in the wrong areas and has been instead used as a flagship to promote a tired gimmick, motion controls. Can they work? Yes, but they don't belong in Zelda. They simplify the combat way too much and in a series that began as very action focused and slowly turned more puzzle focused this is bad. Zelda needs to go back to its roots, and a good example of combat done right is seen in WW and the GCN version of TP, so smooth, so flawless and Oh so satisfying.
A large and expansive overworld means nothing if it's not immersive. Sure the overworld in MM was smaller than the one in SS, but Termina felt like a living breathing world. Skyloft and the world in SS just felt like an empty shell full of uninteresting ventures.
On intros, the games before OoT did it right, and you could write essays on Cinematics in Games and Intuitive game design, how to get players to wanna play and learn the story without having to force them through long cutscenes, but for simplicity's sake I'll just point to Majora's Mask, you are thrown into an unexpected world and are handed a small task, meanwhile the world around you begins to unravel and throw you into an epic quest larger than what you expected. No cutscenes, no back story. All the lore and plot can easily be expressed through more creative means that immerse the player into the world rather than force them to endure a pretentious video about crap they don't care about. Compare the intro in MM to the intro in OoT for example. Which of the two sparked more curiosity in the player? OoT you are given a bunch of mundane fetch quests to do before you can get into the action and TP and SS are guilty of the same thing, and then when you finally DO get started on the quest you have to go through cutscene after cutscene explaining all the crap the you honestly don't give two ****s about. Now look at MM, the game brilliantly forces the player to take action and move forward. In the first 10 minutes of gameplay you already know more about Termina and the situation you find yourself in than what you learn in the first 5 hours of OoT. Just from the very first segment where you chase Skull Kid, you learn not only the mechanics of Deku Link, but are also motivated to try and recover your old form back and learn about the world around you. Honestly, I could write SO much more about this, but I don't wanna bore you and it's rather unplanned so... yeah.
Honestly, despite all the praise OoT gets, I still stand by the idea that it is hands down the MOST overrated Zelda game, and I honestly wish Nintendo would stop following that formula as it's precisely that that's killing the franchise.
