So who has picked this up?
I played it for a bit yesterday. It's pretty fun, though I am not really sold on the stylus controls. For the most part they work well, but there are a lot of minor issues that add up. For one, Link's movement is somewhat floaty and imprecise. You just sort of drag him around, and particularly when you get near the top of the screen, he slows to a crawl because there is no where else for your stylus to go. Then to roll, you have to "draw circles near the edge of the screen"... yeah, that almost never works. I've been able to roll maybe 25% of the time I've tried. And sometimes I'll accidentally roll when I did not mean to. Rolling is not super important as far as I can tell - it's mainly to bump into trees. But it's still annoying. Then I also had some issues with the sword controls, particularly the spin attack. Normal controls seem to work ok, but as an example, one area has a rat running around holding a key that you have to catch. So I finally trap him and get ready to unleash a spin attack on him as he comes by. But the game doesn't register it and the friggin' rat hits me. Other times I'll try to slash pots and end up picking them up instead (very annoying during boss fights when you are trying to refill hearts).
Overall though the controls do have some nice things. I love being able to draw on the map and I think that's a feature I'd like to see in other games. Imagine a 2d Metroid where you could draw locations of powerups and other areas you can't reach to remind you to come back later once you have the appropriate item. The only sub-item I've gotten so far is the Boomerang, but that also works really well. You just tap the icon to activate it (or press L) and then draw a line to make it's path. Works really well.
The game itself has been pretty fun too. But it seems much more simple than previous games which is a bummer. I think they were marketing it more towards casual players. The game's key item, the Phantom Hourglass, isn't actually used that much. It's only used in one dungeon that you revisit over and over. Every boss you defeat adds time to it, and that time is how long you can explore that dungeon before you die. That's really all it does. Kind of a bummer. But the concept is still fun, just wish they had done more with the hourglass itself. Sailing is pretty fun too, it's not annoying like in Wind Waker. You just draw a line to where you want to go and you go there. You can also find parts to customize your ship. Not really sure what this does right now, though the game does say if you put matching parts on it "increases your ship's stamina" (which I assume means it's HP). Don't know if there are faster wheels or anything like that yet, I haven't gotten that far.
I'm also pretty impressed with the graphics. For DS, they are very good. They look pretty much exactly like Wind Waker, with the exception of a lower texture detail on pretty much everything. In particular the edges between the cel shading is very pixelated, and when the game zooms in for a cutscene you can see the walls on dungeons and such are not very detailed at all (actually reminded me of those old FPS games like Doom or Quake). This isn't a huge issue since it's Cel Shaded anyways, so it's not like these characters have a ton of detail. And when the game is zoomed out it's not really noticable. I guess it's just an issue with DS not being able to handle anything better. I suppose N64 was a bit like this as well, though I'd like to believe at least OoT had better wall textures. I'm guessing maybe the artists didn't put a lot of effort into them since most of the game is top-down and you don't notice? I dunno.
There is also a weird issue where every character has this dark halo around them.. I think it has something to do with the anti-aliasing potentially conflicting with the cel shading effect. Maybe it was added on purpose to make them look more like cartoons, I'm not sure. But there is at least one scene where it gets in the way - a character stands behind a glowing crystal ball but you can see her outline clear as day through the crystal ball. It looks very tacky. This line seems to show up clear as day despite any lighting or particle effects that are going on 😞
Other than that though, I am still impressed with the graphics. For DS, they did a damn good job mimicing Wind Waker.
IGN actually has a decent review here:
http://ds.ign.com/articles/822/822825p1.html
They cover a lot of the stuff I had issues with. I probably wouldn't have given this game a 9.0, but maybe an 8.5 would have been appropriate.