Beat the game last night:
+ The dungeon design and area design the first time through is strong in general.
+ Beginning is awesome plotwise
+ Good music, better than TP but not Mario Galaxy-level.
+ Liked the artstyle
+ Liked swordfighting and the motion+ controls in general
+ Glad that there's more than one way to do nearly all the fights in the game (bosses and otherwise). Very welcome change. Boss fights are generally good all around.
+ Upgrading items/potions was great
+ Desert area with the timestone mechanic was the best in the game. Highlight of the game each time you go there.
+ Game isn't a cakewalk!
+ Skyloft was cool, well-designed town with stuff to do.
+ I did like the stealth section on the Volcano after revisiting it
+ The ending was satisfying but I wanted to see what happened to some of the people on Skyloft (LTTP-style).
+ Liked the Impa twist and Ghirahim being Fi's counterpart
+ Really loved the new Zelda character and Groose. Ghirahim was a nice change of pace.
- Definitely agree that the game runs out of steam plotwise after the strong beginning. It's like "no you can't see Zelda" and then she's the Hylia reborn and doesn't really act like her old self and once she goes to sleep there's no sense of urgency anymore.
- "You got an Amber Relic!", wish I could turn these messages off after the first time
- Fi was annoying until the ending, especially with the chiming that my batteries in the Wii Remote are low.
- I would have liked to get another item after the 6th Temple... kinda boring not getting any new toys for the last several hours. Same thing with the enemies getting recycled.
- I don't like having to find 5 things to advance the story, although the Forest one was the only one that really dragged at the begininng. The Desert and Volcano areas were fine since they encouraged you to explore different areas of the map.
- Also didn't like having to do 4 Spirit Realm collectathons. Really hated the tadtones
- Really hard to do the forward thrust on a consistent basis.
- Fighting the Imprisoned 3x was one time too many.
- Having to constantly float up to the sky, fly across the sky, land (with load times if you're going to Skyloft), etc was annoying after being used to Xenoblade's instant warping anywhere.
- Disappointed that there was no day/night cycle outside of Skyloft and a couple islands.
- Absurd pricing for some things that aren't really worth it (i.e. 2000 for Beedle's piece of Heart). I'm glad that rubies aren't worthless but that was kinda ridiclous. There were also some mini-games that were hard enough that a quarter-piece of heart wasn't a satisfying reward.
In summary, it's a good game, but really needed to be streamlined to be the best Zelda.