Spoilers for those who have not finished the game.
This is the most flawed great game I've ever played. It's an accumulation of some really great design, but it also tests new inner regions for experiencing pain that I never knew I had. I mean the totality of the bad decisions here is stunning. The pacing is truly horrible. Issun is now my most hated videogame character, as he has to make some dumbass comment every time there's a cutscene. I don't want to hear what he has to say since the dialog itself goes to often painful measures to point out the obvious. Between this and Metal Gear Solid, I wish that videogame developers would learn the tactful art of shutting the hell up.
Entire sections of the game also could have been cut. I have no idea what relevance the spaceship part contained. There was no gameplay that was particularly revelatory or new. The Spirit Gate portion is even worse, however, and no developer should actually retread a huge part of the game that the player has already visited. What a colossal error in judgment. They make you fight that same boss three times. What do I get out of it the second and third times that I don't get out of it the first? The game goes to great lengths to make you repeat many things.
Sometimes the controls just didn't work for me. There was a section toward the end of the game where you learn a new thunderbolt brush technique, and I must have done it twenty times before it worked. I drew a goddamned thunderbolt every time, and half the time it would interpret it as the fire technique, which was a figure eight. The game is filled with those moments. There were times where it just didn't get what I was doing. For instance, sometimes when I tried to circle a tree I got a sun in the sky instead. Other times I tried to do a slash on an enemy only to get an electric current between my sword and the enemy. This isn't so much of a problem early in the game when you don't know many techniques, but later on there's so much noise on screen that it can't figure out what you're trying to do.
But I think that the game has some stellar level design, and though I think that there is too much to do, I also loved the exploration aspect. There is also something really satisfying about the act of creating certain effects, and those are parlayed into some interesting puzzles. The weapon selection is something that I almost wish Zelda would borrow from. It works very well in offering a good selection for an adventure game without being too comprehensive. There's so much to like here, such comprehensively good design, that it's aggravating to see such obvious blunders that could have been avoided.