I completed The Minish Cap yesterday. It took me less than a week to complete which is kinda disappointing, but it is a gameboy game.
Overall the game was very nice and I was satisfied. They made plenty of references to past Zelda games and enough camoes that it was almost annoying. It was nice seeing the Snot Kid from Wind Waker though. This game fits in well with all the other Game Boy games. They tend to avoid the whole Triforce/Ganon storyline and do something on their own. The game didn't even include the master sword.
The one unfortunate thing was that there were only six dungeons if you include the final dungeon. This just kinda disappoints me. That means that you only get five full hearts. Your max is twenty. You start off with three. Thats 12 hearts you collect from finding heart pieces. Thats 48 heart pieces! Yeah, they are everywhere and its way too easy to find them.
The music was excellent for the platform. Many tunes were remixed to fit the sound abilities of the gameboy. Zelda 64, Link's Awakening, and Link to the Past songs were pretty frequent. They had the classic Zelda theme which was awesome. I was pretty upset that they didn't put it in Zelda 64.
The moblins and fox warriors were pretty dumb. The moblins were designed after the ones found in the Wind Waker. Moblins have generally been big dumb scary creatures. These guys seemed pretty harmless. Moblins were usually Ganon's henchmen, but Ganon wasn't in the game. They were pretty bad filler enemies. The fox warriors were more annoying however. They'd touch you and you would lose a good 50 ruppees that couldn't be picked up again. Pretty lame.
Sword Techniques had to be learned in the game. You couldn't do the spin attack without learning it. Same with the Beam Sword. You had to hunt down about 8 trainers. All of them had the name Blade in their name. Swiftblade, Grimblade(ghost, go figure), Greatblade, Splitblade, you get the idea. I was happy to see they brought back the Down Thrust. The last game I remember being able to do this technique was Zelda II and its UBER useful. Unfortunately, its pretty hard to do with Roc's Cape I wasn't able to get it to connect with an enemy ever.
They pretty much recycled all the items in the game. Several were new and kinda cool. The mole mittens were rather interesting. Normally you'd just get a shovel, but no you get gloves that allow you to dig. Of course since its a Game Boy Zelda, they had to have Roc's Cape. Almost everyone knows I don't enjoy jumping :-P
Din and Nayru from the Oracle games make appearances. Being Goddesses I'd figure they would be some what helpful, but no. They just kinda kicked it at the Inn together. Tingle made his presence known right next to your grandpa's house. I hate Tingle. He's so damn annoying. I blame Majora's Mask for so many of these crappy annoying characters running around in the Zelda Universe.
One "exciting" side quest is Kinstone Fusing. You find halves of coins and match them with NPCs in the game. If you match one something "good" happens. Some times its a heartpiece, sea shells, coins, or annoying mega enemies that yeild big coins. The unfortunate part about this is that there are over 100 fuses.
World Map seemed kinda small, but if you actually look at it hard enough, it's probably only 3/4s the size of a Link to the Past's map.
The next game on Game Cub should be a lot better than this one. As long as they avoid the crappy characters I'll be happy.
Excellent game. Recommend to any Game Boy nut.