This will be a short review as I am only partway through the game, but I'm far enough for all or most of the mechanics to have opened up. I am having a blast so far, I just came off a play session where I killed my 3DS from a full charge, right down to needing the charger, I have yet to do that with a 3DS game yet.
The presentation is absolutely great, the game looks really great with strong use of effects I didn't even know were possible on the 3DS hardware. The environments look great, they are full of life and colour. The animations are snappy and smooth, the character models are a little sparse on detail, but they fit the cartoony aesthetic and you'll spend most of your time looking at them with the camera up in the sky anyway so it doesn't matter too much.
The sound design definitely borrows heavily from A Link To The Past but in a good way. The tunes you know and love from the original are reworked to sound like they are being played on real instruments rather than samples as was the case with the SNES hardware. The sound effects of the monsters are higher quality too, they don't sound like they've been ripped straight from the original SNES classic, but rather redone to sound like they would've without technical limitations. The new tunes are even better, the Lorule overworld theme is absolutely fantastic and is one of my favourite pieces of music from a Zelda game, period.
Narratively, the game is a slightly self aware version of what we've come to expect from Zelda, IE 3 pendants, 7 sages blah blah blah you get the rest. The difference is here, the main villain for most of the game is Yuga, I can only describe him as an evil art hipster with the ability to turn people into paintings. Near the beginning of the game he tries to turn Link into a painting, but thanks to a bracelet you were given by a weird rabbit-man known as Ravio (who turns your house into an item shop of sorts), you are able to move around as a painting on a wall and come back into the real world at will. After telling princess Zelda of this man, she gives you a pendant known as the pendant of courage.
Once you get the other two from temples across the land, Yuga then slips into Lorule, a dark alternate universe which is accessed through cracks all over Hyrule. He has turned Zelda and the descendants of the sages into paintings and he plans to resurrect Ganon and recreate the world in his image. Your job is to save the sages and stop them. The self aware dialogue is great, it's pretty telling that the game doesn't really break immersion even though it breaks the fourth wall quite a lot.
It's a simple story but now we can start talking about the actual game. Being a sequel to A Link To The Past, it shares the same traditional Zelda top down view, only this time it's a little different. The game is basically a 3D game where you can't jump and where the camera is above you. You can drop onto lower platforms and launch yourself higher. The result is some of the most inventive Zelda dungeons ever. The dungeons are basically like any other 3D Zelda dungeon, but the camera angle allows for more complexity. The puzzles are challenging, satisfying and paced extremely well, so are the dungeons in general. They can be completed fairly quickly compared to most Zelda dungeons, but there is a lot to do in them. My only complaint would be that the bosses are fairly simple and don't really feel challenging for the most part. They just tend to be either really abstract or just generic. One of them for example is a giant floormaster. This boss is intense but it's not really imaginative.
There's a lot to do in this game in general. It feels like every inch of the overworld has something worth exploring, wandering off to see what you can find is extremely rewarding. Most of the time you wander, you're likely to find something great like a lot of rupees, a side quest or even just a handy new fairy fountain location. This coupled with the Lorule mechanic means that you have two overworlds to explore. To get certain items, you may need to slip between Lorule and Hyrule multiple times which gives a unique spin to puzzles and exploration.
The combat is just as simple as any other 3D Zelda game, if you've played A Link To The Past you'll be right at home here. The combat tends to hinge on your position compared to your enemy and it's hard to explain, but it's very simple and satisfying. Combat isn't the focus here and sure, hacking your way through enemies is a bit repetitive, but it is challenging enough to keep you on your toes. ESPECIALLY when you get to the Lorule portion of the game, where there is a big step up in difficulty that doesn't feel too jarring.
Rupees play a massive role unlike most Zelda games. You need them to rent your items like the hookshot from Ravio. Ravio sets up shop in your house and allows you to rent the items you need for dungeons. The only catch is, when you die, the rented items get taken off you and you have to rent them again. If you pay a much higher price, you can buy them which negates this death penalty of sorts. From about forty minutes of grinding rupees, I managed to buy all the items in the shop. I kinda dislike this mechanic as I feel like it takes away some of the joy of completing a dungeon. Normally completing a dungeon in a Zelda game gives you a new item you need to progress, but here you already have the items you need to progress.
This means that with the exception of one of the items you need, the dungeons can be completed in any order you choose. It feels incredibly freeing, but it gets rid of the careful pace that the Zelda games reveal themselves to you because everything is already open. This suits a portable game better and it's nice to have more freedom from a Zelda game, but I'm torn between wanting this and wanting it to be carefully paced. I guess that it's a matter of taste and no two philosophies are the right ones.
The last thing to talk about is fast travel. You save the game by finding weather vanes (which annoyingly nag you to take a break from playing) and once you have one, you can fast travel from one to the next by flying on a broom. It's a very handy system and allows you to get right where you want to, as to not interrupt the constant flow of discovery.
Overall, this is one of the better Zelda games, maybe one of the best Zelda games ever. The self aware almost self-parodying story and presentation is great, every element of it serves a meaningful purpose in the game and the dungeons are absolutely brilliant. The bosses are intense but unimaginitive, but the Overworld is one of the best Overworlds in any game at all. If you own a 3DS, you need to own this game.