Ironically, the part of the game that I liked least was probably the shape-drawing-based spell casting, which is advertised as one of the highlights of the game. The game has a hard time distinguishing a lot of the shapes. Part of the problem is that several of the spells involve just drawing circles, and what they do depends on the context, but the context is sometimes ambiguous. E.g. did you mean to circle that tree to make it bloom or did you mean to draw a sun in the sky? But, even ignoring that, the gesture detection is also just not very good. Drawing the infinity symbol, for instance, is really freeking hard; two out of three times the game doesn't recognize it. Ironically, one time I was just a wavey line that wasn't even closed, and the game decided that this was an infinity symbol and expended the enormous amount of ink that it takes to cast that particular spell. Arg. The skills which just involve drawing a line from some object to some other object are a lot nicer, though still annoying to get right sometimes. And, oh yeah, a straight line is also the shape for power slash, so make sure to make your line curvey so that the game isn't confused. (But not *too* curvey or it will think you're drawing an infinity symbol, I guess.)

And, worst of all, you have to draw these shapes using a joystick, using first-derivative movement (i.e. the joystick specifies the velocity of the brush, not the location). First-derivative movement sucks for this. It would have been much, much better with a stylus or even a mouse.

But, fortunately you only spend a very small fraction of the game actually controlling the brush. Everything else about the gameplay is extremely smooth. The graphics are pretty (they look like a primitive painting). The music is beautiful. The story obviously isn't an RPG story, but for its genre it's pretty good and has some interesting themes. And, again, everything is done with lots of style.

In any case, if you like Zelda, you should definitely play this.