All the traveling and doing menial tasks in TP bored me to tears my second time through. Sailing in Windwaker may have been boring at times, but at least you could use them for bathroom breaks if you didn't feel like using tornadoes to get around. Also, there was always another island in sight to distract you from where you were headed; the fun part was figuring out why the island was there. With LoZ for the NES, you had long treks between dungeons, but nobody could call them empty or boring. Maybe that's the problem; in TP there was so little sense of danger involved at any given time. Once you get 10 or more hearts you pretty much can't die unless you really, really, really want to.
Another problem I had with TP was the lack of characters there were to fill in those long rides from one end of Hyrule to the other. As large as the overworld map was, I was quite disappointed when I first saw that Kakariko village was deserted save a bombmaker and a shaman. I'd already expected inhabitants of Goron Mountain or Zora's Fountain to have more or less the same opinions on anything. But if you remember the number of people you could talk to(and help) in OoT, MM, or WW it's easy to feel that leaving the town deserted was a huge mistake. Most everyone you encounter in TP is someone you HAVE to interact with, rather than them giving you optional rewarding side-missions.
Now don't get me wrong, TP is a great game, and Midna remains my all-time favorite Zelda character. The variety of gameplay, great environments, and level design make it the aesthetically best Wii game IMO. But it's still a videogame, and videogames can be pretty boring if you feel there's little to no risk involved. It's a problem that OoT shared to a lesser degree, as it had the same number of hearts. Still, it was much easier to take damage (Environmental hazards in TP like steam geysers and long drops take away one heart, if that). Majora's Mask gave you plenty of hearts and that final boss was a bit of a joke. But the added factor of not having all day to beat a boss or fully explore a dungeon(your first time through, anyway) brought the pressure in a way few other games do. There's also so much to be done in a limited time that it's impossible to get bored.
Maybe if they'd done things like given us a limited time to get Midna to Princess Zelda, or introduced tougher, faster enemies like darknuts before the last level these problems would've been harder to notice. If they're not going to toughen up the bosses or lessen the number of hearts for this game, then the least they can do is send you back to Link's house or something when you die, rather than outside the temple you just died in. The easiest way to deal with the difficulty problem would be to finally give us difficulty settings.
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