My first Zelda game was Majora's Mask. As my first experience with a Zelda game, it was the game that blew my mind. OoT was not my first, but I kept hearing people say how it was better than MM. So naturally I expected it to be amazing, as people are saying happened with SS. After playing it, I was severely disappointed and I figured it was because I played MM first while most played OoT first. At the moment, that was the case. But as I started analyzing video-games more, I realized that OoT wasn't worse than MM, it was just that MM came after. MM took certain concepts (and perhaps problems) of OoT and increased them or fixed them. This is the case for entertainment in general. You take a concept that is known to work and you change it to some degree, be it extreme or just slightly, to make another good experience. That concept, however, should still be the same at its core. MM in a technical sense could be said to be a better game than OoT, but I believe the majority of people who look at games do not look at them for their time. OoT for its time was a HUGE step in the series. It not only took the concept of Zelda and made it 3D, but it brought about new innovative ways in Zelda concepts and adventure games in general that no one foresaw. And according to my sources, OoT was actually supposed to be a much bigger experience than it brought us, but something went wrong during the development process which made them had to take alot out. So while MM may technically be a better game than OoT, for its time it wasn't as great of an innovation (not to say MM wasn't innovative at all, it was very much so)
I think this is where the misunderstanding comes in. People, like myself, who dislike SS don't dislike it for what it is. SS is a great game if you look at it alone. In fact, if people call SS a bad game in general, I heavily disagree with them. People like me dislike SS for what it could've been. The game does not bring about innovation in its experience, but rather a vague representation of what gaming generally is today. Sure it had motion controls, but with Kinect, PS3's wannbe Wii mechanics AND the Wii itself, that doesn't set the game too far apart. Sure it had new things like making a frog drink water to open a door, but was that so mind-blowingly unexpected from a game with weird things like Zelda? Sure its story goes well and is (arguably) cinematically okay, but stories today and in the past have proven better, both in and out of the Zelda world, this includes in regards to their series and just in their stories alone. When I play Zelda, I don't expect to have a mundane experience. I expect to have an adventure full of exploration, memorable catchy music, and a nice story (after TP, I also began expecting the story to correlate with the rest of the series as it did in WW, TP, PH and ST). Even if the experience isn't the best I've ever had, I expect it to be very high up because that's what Zelda has brought in the past. I didn't get that in SS, so naturally I'm going to be heavily disappointed. SS brought about a new and decent experience, but it isn't that innovative nor creative for its time, which doesn't meet the Zelda standard I and others have come to know from playing other games. This is especially noticing from an important game like SS, which is the prequel to our beloved series. Add that to the fact that SS changed many of the core concepts that Zelda is known to have, the disappointed increased even more.
And I don't understand the concept of people saying "Judging a game based off its predecessors is wrong!" Past games experiences are proof of what a company is capable of. If a company makes a game that is really awesome, why should I accept less? I understand if the games aren't always the best, but they should atleast be at that level or give the atmosphere that they strove to be at that level. If you give me a delicious cake and then give me a cake that tastes like all other cakes, or is simply not up to par with the first one, why is it wrong to say "this is not your best work"? Or maybe you try to make that same cake over and over and over again but you want to give me a new experience so you make a new flavored cake, but the experience of tasting this cake for the first time is not nearly as good as the experience of tasting the first cake. What's more, the cake has flavors that don't flow well with your style of cakes. Why is it wrong for me to say "I didn't enjoy this as much as when I tried your first cake. Please recreate that experience"? The cake thing is getting a bit off topic, but my point is that people use past experiences to judge current experiences all the time. Its called "having a standard." I've been wowed by video-games many a times in my life, a lot of them recently and a lot of them in Zelda. I'm not going to stop expecting that experience. I'm pretty sure it's true to say "making a Zelda game that will wow people exactly like OoT did is so hard it may be impossible" but I also believe that saying "making a game close to OoT's wow factor or atleast striving to get there is an achievable goal" is true as well.
So while SS may be a good game alone, it doesn't really hold when you place it next to other Zelda games. I expected more out of this game simply because its a Zelda game and there's nothing wrong with that. People did indeed expect to have a similar wow factor to OoT, but that's natural considering how important this game is to the series.
