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I kicked Ganondorf's ass this evening. We now resume regular broadcasting.
I found the pacing of the second half of the game to be less compelling than the first half. The second half of my game, anyway. One of the interesting features of this latest installment is that there's a LOT of optional subquest stuff laying around, and I spent most of my second half dealing with those loose ends. Because of that, I felt like the game lost of a lot of momentum.
It's not that the subquests are boring; on the contrary, there's a nice amount of variety. But the final cleanup mostly involved following various treasure charts that I'd picked up, and the treasure found from those charts displayed extremely low variation. I got tired real quick after the fifth time I pulled up... 200 rupees! Especially since I was rapidly approaching my max rupee limit, and since there really isn't anything interesting to spend the money on. The main thing that kept me going with the charts was that some of them hid max health boosts.
Also, the fact that I took all that time to deal with loose ends meant that the trajectory of the plot arc was all distended. The emotional connection with some of the more interesting characters went completely stale. It's an interesting problem: how do you keep the story alive and at the same time keep the player from feeling like he or she is riding a rollercoaster? I would have liked to have had occassional random cameos from -- for example -- the pirates, to keep the sense of urgency in the game alive.
That being said, I thought the endgame was great. The final boss battle was appropriately satisfying, but didn't drive me completely insane, and there was pretty good story closure. In the end, I don't know that I'd still characterize this as the "best game ever," but it was a long and mostly deeply enjoyable gaming experience. Now on to the copy of the Ocarina of Time that came with it! 10:15:05 PM () 
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