Gonna disregard the rest of the thread for a second (sorry guys) and just throw out my own opinions on Skyward Sword. It was a really good game, probably one of the better games this generation, but it was still a huge letdown. Every review I read before the game came out spoke about how amazing the story is and how challenging the game was. The story was good, not amazing and the gameplay was pretty far removed from challenging.
Nintendo improved on the gameplay in tons of ways. The sword play is awesome, the RPG-lite elements are really cool, and the bosses finally moved past the three strikes rule. However, the dungeon design is where it all falls apart. I was never stuck for more than five minutes at any point in the game. Most of the puzzles were predictable and the ones that weren't didn't take too long to figure out. It simply wasn't very hard, and I don't play Zelda for simplicity.
The story was also a let down, but that's more a fault of the design. When one looks at the past four major Zelda games (OoT, WW, TP, and MM), one thing the game excelled out was painting a picture of how the different species and cultures of Hyrule lived at worked. The only culture we're given an adequate picture of is Skyward Sword is the citizens of Skyloft and we don't even spend the majority of the game there. We don't really see anything resembling Mogma or Goron cities and only see the same three or four characters the whole game. This makes the player unable to truly see the gravity of the situation. Why should we care about the surface when the game doesn't even make an effort to show there's a substantial amount of creatures capable of sentient thought? Perhaps SS worked better on a character basis than most Zelda games, but Zelda has always excelled in amazing world building (even then, MM proves Nintendo is capable of both great character and world stories). SS absolutely fails at this, and the game suffered as a result.
SS is still an amazing game. However, it is still very deeply flawed.
@Spire: Perhaps a game explaining why Termina even exists is on the way? Afterall, we still don't know why Hyrule even has a parallel universe. Maybe Termina was split off for some reason.
EDIT: The best way I could describe it is that in the process of improving everything that needed improvement with the Zelda series, Nintendo forgot what made it good in the first place.