I beat another Zelda! Woohoo! This one is kinda mid honestly. It executes the vague idea of a Zelda game well. It has dungeons. It has items. It has heart containers. It has a talky helper. It has Link. It has Zelda. Wow look at it go.
The dungeons are broadly fine. I don't really like any of them. They aren't particularly clever and some of the puzzle solutions made me feel like the game wanted me to scrounge rather than think in any interesting way. None of the puzzles are particularly engaging, and the dungeons lack any sense of real danger with the exception of the final one. This leads to an overwhelming sense of tedium as you slash and dash your way through them. I don't know how to fix this, but the devs for A Link to the Past figured it out. It might be a music thing? Unsure.
The boss fights are unfortunately pretty similar, not being hugely interesting afairs. The exception is the awesome flying manta ray fight which forces you to jump between different mantas as you slowly destroy them. It's radical. The final boss is also quite fun honestly.
The items are pretty cool. They interact with the environment in pretty standard ways, but there's a couple of unique ones relative to the wider Zelda series. The digging claws as basically just cooler shovels, and the flip cane is so fucking funny. Just flip shit. Who cares man. Flip it.
Kinstones suck. They are a collectible you find a bunch of and you have to go to random NPCs and give them one, which then unlocks a chest/door/Goron somewhere in the world to go interact with. It's stupid. They basically remove opportunities to use your tools. Bad.
Vaati's cool. Wish he had more personality. Great fight! Ganon's cooler in a lot of the games, but I liked Vaati.
Did you notice how unconnected this is? That's how Minish Cap feels. My tools rarely build on each other. The world feels arbitrarily put together. The story is essentially nothing. And the actualy Cap? The hat on the head? He sucks. Talks way too much.
Overall, 7/10. If it didn't feel as good on the sticks it'd be a 6, but it's sheer presentation is good. I'm just critical of it coming off of my memories of A Link to the Past and the back to back masterpieces of OOT and MM.