Legend of Zelda: Phairly Hfun (silent H!)

Storyline: Zelda fanboys rejoice, critics say "it's OK"
___Traditional Zelda fare. It continues off of Wind Waker, and is ultimately pretty much a 'side quest' to a main storyline. I won't say how or why, that's for the gamer to figure out. Because of this, or perhaps simply the smallish size of the game, the world isn't fleshed out a whole lot. There's a story, some interesting bosses, and it all flows together pretty well... but I got no real connection to the characters, except Linebeck (your ship owner). Nobody else hung around long enough, nor had enough lines, to really become a true character, with the possible exception of your Navi-wannabe. This one isn't anywhere near as annoying, thankfully. Nintendo is learning... Your Navi-wannabe, named Ciela, does a surprising amount of developing actually, and does become a main character... but I never felt any connection, per se.
But maybe I'm just prejudiced against fairies that interrupt my gameplay.

Gameplay: Mmmm... Zelda... in a boat. In a smaller ocean. With islands.
___The overall feel of the game is quite polished in most situations. Link reacts swiftly to your every gesture on the touchscreen, and the upper screen usually contains a map, helping you to always know where you are. Combined with the ability to make notes on your maps, you should almost always know where you're going, what you should do / remember, and where you've been.
___The world is decently large for a hand-held game, and though it seems larger than other portable Zelda games, it really isn't much more so. Sure, the world takes a long time to travel across without the teleporting frogs; sure, there are a fair amount of islands (16), each with their own map, and many with dungeons. But overall, you explore each area less than in other games. Aside from the main island, you rarely visit any island more than once, except for very specific tasks later on (if even then). Drop by, do the thing, and leave; you've already explored it in its entirety. This is especially true for the later islands, where you have most of the items. There's just no reason to go back, except to try to nab something you missed last time through, and that becomes more of a chore than exploration. They might as well have just put it all on one island, and saved you the traveling time. At least then the complexity of the island would add a bit of difficulty, and trekking the same ground repeatedly could be filled with upgrading enemies to consistently increase their challenge. As it is, NOTHING offers you a challenge once you get the hammer. You should honestly never take a single point of damage from any enemy (except bosses) once you get it, if not earlier. What's the point in having a bunch of hearts if you never lose more than one?
___A note for people thinking I just dislike the traveling: I liked Wind Waker quite a bit, it's one of my favorite Zelda games. It was large enough that you could truly explore without needing to, and you visited the main areas at least twice for story-significant reasons. New items opened up large new areas of islands you'd already visited, so exploration was really exploration, usually even skipping the tedious portions of the location, not just "grab item X and leave". My only real beef with Wind Waker's travel portion is that the sailing is incorrect compared to real sailing (going with the wind is faster than across it, in Wind Waker), and that's just being picky. Once you got the traveling songs, movement to the main storyline locations was fairly efficient.
___That, and Tingle. *shudder* Worse than Navi.

Interface / Button & Stylus Interaction: Odd at first, but very efficient
___Initially, it's a bit odd, but if you play carefully it's surprisingly well designed. If you so desire, the entire game can be played without a single button press, as the buttons simply mimic (and speed up) actions that can be performed on-screen.
___That said, it's COMPLETELY impossible to progress even past the first line of dialog without touching the screen. The buttons do nothing productive, they're just shortcuts.
___The shortcuts make it so changing weapons and updating your map is fast and easy, and I do actually like it that way. Even better, the interface is entirely ambidextrous, so if you're left handed everything still works easily. But why oh why, WHY doesn't the 'A' button accept dialogs? Why doesn't the 'B' button cancel? Everything MUST be handled with the stylus. You can't even progress through dialog 'pages' without tapping the screen (though, thankfully, it doesn't matter where you tap).
___For more typical game interaction, the interface grew on me very quickly. In a short amount of time, you get used to using the stylus to attack, and the shoulder buttons to use your alternate item. Learn a bit more, and you get very fast at reacting to enemies, using your alternate item, and tweaking your map.
___In a bit longer, you can become a death-dealing machine, slaughtering everything in your path without taking a nick of damage.... which is horrendously boring.

Difficulty: Bone-jarring difference between easy and hard portions
___Disappointingly easy. I'm a fairly skilled gamer, so it's somewhat skewed, but this was the most shocking part of the game: it's EASY. Without hardly trying, I flew through all the dungeons, which progressively got easier and easier as you got more items. Bosses, while inventive and moderately difficult, were nothing that really threatened my life. The end boss, in all its forms, was possibly the easiest of them all, which was a huge let-down to me. I want the end boss to be WORTH the journey, not something I can simply squish on my way to another location. Probably the hardest things in the game that actually gave me a sense of satisfaction are the maze island, and finally nailing 2000 points on the archery game.
___On the flip side of all this are a few sore thumbs that are hair-wrenchingly frustrating. One guide I ran across (after completing the game, I never read guides before the first run-through) described one as "throw-your-DS-against-the-wall frustrating", and overall I'd have to agree. The main areas to point out are fishing and the archery game.
___Fishing just plain stinks. It follows a traditional format, complete with tension meter on the side, but you have to first hunt down the fish (they're only in a small, quickly moving location on your map), and then hope against all hope that it's not another Skippyjack or Toona. After catching 50 fish, I still never had a 4th kind of fish, and I nailed a Loovar as my 5th fish. Worse yet, the frickin' fish location disappears and moves every time you go fishing, so expect to spend a LOT of time if you really want those top two (*cough*THREE*cough*) fish. Reeling in the fish is pretty easy, especially once you figure out that you can release tension simply by holding the stylus at the bottom of the screen, so there's a huge disconnect between difficulty of each individual action and the difficulty in completing your fish list. To put the ease of reeling in fish into perspective, ANY fish can be reeled in fairly quickly without even entering the 'danger' zone. That just plain gets boring. After the above 50 fish, I did catch two of the rusty swordfish in a row, but that's a LOT of grinding for little payoff.
___As annoying as fishing can be, archery is easily the nastiest part of the game. Sure, you can pick up some decent stuff if you break 1700 or 2000 points... but breaking even the 1700 mark is freakishly difficult. If you really want to break that 2000 point border, you have to have literally flawless accuracy. Miss once anywhere in the middle, and you lose at least 100 points, 150 if you hit one of the wrong targets. Though that may not sound bad, it's basically that if you miss... EVER... you can't beat 2000. Given that the targets are on the top screen, and link is in the middle of the touch-screen, aiming that accurately and that quickly takes a lot of practice.
___What also annoys me about the archery game is that it has almost no connection to the rest of the game, as the bow is mostly useless. And once you get the hammer, you never use any other weapon if you can avoid it. It's like whack-a-mole on steroids, but you always win, and you don't even have to retrieve your loot.

Music: It's Wind Waker.
___Traditional Zelda fair, following Wind Waker almost identically. Not bad, not great, not annoying, so good.

Sound: It's Wind Waker.
___Again, sounds mimic Wind Waker almost bit-for-bit, though with significantly less detail (which is expected on a handheld).

Graphics: effects brought to you by Wind Waker
___Very true to Wind Waker, though I'm not the biggest fan of the very pixelated eyes, and one of the characters in the game is just downright freaky because he looks so wrong (you'll know him when you see him). Other than that, looks nice, well themed, gets a thumbs-up from me. I'm a fan of the Wind Waker look, though, because it's so well developed.

Replayability: Very meh.
___Very low, in my opinion. Once you beat the game, the dungeons hold no mystery for you any more. Bosses are easily beatable, likely without being hit even once. Mazes? Hah! If you can remember the one tricky location (which you can, I promise you), you're home free. And, given that you pretty easily discover every island (and almost everything on every island) in the normal course of even a speed-run of the game, you don't even have much free exploration to do. The only reason to really keep a game file around is to try to complete the ship sets, which can take an incredible amount of time to do, and is really only worth it if you have OCD about completing games (which I almost do). There aren't even any respectably difficult puzzles like Zelda games usually have. It's just so shockingly easy after finishing, the fun is completely gone.
___Keep it around for multiplayer if you want, that's pretty cool, and has some unlockables. Otherwise, sadly, be prepared to return it.

Multiplayer: woah, hey, what?
___This was an interesting discovery. It's part Link-action, and part strategy, something missing from game. Essentially, you play either Link or three Phantoms. With Link, you run around and collect the Force Gems (ie, Triforce pieces), tag them your color by chucking it into your base, and get points. Oh, and avoid the Phantoms. As the Phantoms, you draw paths for the Phantoms to follow, and you try to prevent Link from getting points. Hit him, and you end the round early. There are powerups for both sides, which mix things up a bit and can really influence the game if played well.
___Getting into a game usually takes about a minute or less, which isn't bad. I've noticed some lag at times, but it's difficult to tell whose side it's on without more testing. Overall, it seems to handle the time gap due to having to run through the internet pretty well, and most games feel like you're playing against someone 10 feet away.
___If you dump some stuff into the 'magic' trade boxes, you trade after a battle if the other person has stuff in theirs. I've had the occasional battle result in trades, and have filled in my ship collection a bit more because of it, but it's been only about 1-in-10 battles that have a trade. I, personally, always keep something in my boxes because I like the passive trade aspect of the multiplayer portion.

Overall: Mmmmmm..... good, but nothing more
___Too simple, but entertaining. A couple sore thumbs (fishing, archery). Low replay value, due to very few things to actually do in the game aside from working through the storyline (and once you know it, you know it). The overall polish and tweaking compared to other Zelda games really shows that Nintendo has been paying attention to (at least some) gamers' complaints, and have ironed out a lot of the bumps and humor that others struggled through.
___The polish is evident, but the content is too sparse, and the story is too bland. It almost feels like a tech demo.