Finished this one yesterday. my comments by category:
Riddler: many of the clues I still haven't figured out the meaning of. Several I only figured out in retrospect. Reading the intro bits in this thread, I now realize some referred to earlier quests, but since I don't have those memorized, those wouldn't have helped me. "the most powerful sword has been stolen" made me think something special would be needed for the magic sword (or that there would be a level 4 sword). A little disappointing there. I actually found the magic sword before the white sword.

Difficulty: fairly easy for me until level 9, which jumped in difficulty greatly. I think the ramping could have been done better. A little disappointed in Ganon being normal, after everything else was pumped up.

creatures: Not much new until the end. As mentioned above, swords instead of magic would have made more sense for the grey darknuts.

dungeons: Too many "search for the bombable wall" moments. Even with 20 bomb capacity, I still had to leave several dungeons to get more. I didn't see any "secret where fairies do live" hints- was there one in the map that I missed? I literally searched every burnable/bombable spot on the overworld before found dungeon 8. I had used the whistle everywhere I didn't find anything the other ways, but I didn't bother whistling on a fairy lake that had one. I won't make that mistake in future quests.

NES feel: pretty good. Nothing special though.

Overall: 2.65/5