Story? Not very strong.
But then, I didn't expect a very strong story from this to begin with, so no big harm done. Boiled down, Cia is an evil sorceress whose love and desire for Link, and hatred for Zelda, has caused her to basically start a war because she really wants to jump Link's bones. And you basically fight war in various locations until you encounter Cia and try to get her to see sense by beating her into submission. Oh by the way, spoiler, Ganondorf becomes the major threat and villain halfway through the game. Bet you never saw that one coming. So once Ganondorf takes the stage, where you actually fight as him sometimes, too, it's the typical fight Ganondorf and Ganon and bring peace back to Hyrule.
Characters range.
I like Cia because I find her interesting. I'm not too pleased that she's just another female (villain) whose motivation is unrequited or scorned love. Seeing that as their main reason always makes me think of people honestly think women cannot do evil things unless it has basis in love to begin with... Nor am I happy to hear she was mostly possessed by Ganondorf at first. But she then tells him where he can bend himself and takes her stage as proper 1st Half Villainess. I like her, she seems to thoroughly enjoy being evil. And, of course, some of her lines towards Link can come across as pretty sexual and innuendo-ridden. But what did you expect.
Her design seems sexualized, but then she seems nowere more sexualized than any other previous Zelda character who was supposed to be sexy and/or evil.
On the other end of the aspect, we have Lana who I don't like. I find her boring, as she is nothing but good. She, too, has unrequited feelings for Link but those are unfortunately not put into the spotlight enough, meaning that her potential sadness or jealousy coming from them being a means of making her seem more than just a Goody-Goody is not used. So she's just good...
Her design and movements and actions all seem to be weird. Even for Zelda-Character-Standards. She comes across as a character who jumped out of Puella Magica that crossed over with Idolm@ster and Vocaloid. Too much of a Pop Idol vibe from her, rather than a sorceress. Though fighting as her can be pretty fun.
Volga is basically a human form of Volvagia... who, honestly, I always thought was female. So seeing the human form and it obviously being a man seems foreign to me. He doesn't have much of a presence or personality, except the hot-blooded warrior who also values a fair fight and is looking for a worthy opponent. As an opponent he's annoying since he barely shows his Weak Point (which you attack to cause massive damage eventually) and fighting as him is sort of okay.
Wizzro is evil jewelry. No, really. A far-range specific sorcerer. Not much to say about him, except he loves carnage. And fighting him can be annoying, though fighting as him can be annoying, too. And those are basically all the new characters. You have characters mostly from Ocarina of Time, Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess as fighters and enemies, though you can eventually fight as all of them. Also two Majora representatives with Young Link and... Tingle.
There are some slight variations in personality and character, though. For example, Zant immediately is portrayed as a psychopathic man-child who exaggerates his reactions at times. And, fortunately, that made him more tolerable for me as he is more humorous this way, but not to the extent that he comes off as a caricature of Ghirahim. He and Ghirahim are still very different in personality and lines.
Battle in the game is practically button mashing.
Comes off as this since 95% of the enemies you fight are nothing but cannon fodder. They die practically after you hit them once. Officers, which are big enemies, are a bit tougher, then you have the Fighters, ranking from Link to Ganondorf and down to Cia and similar. The last enemies are the Giant Bosses. All of them can pretty much be killed simply by mashing your regular attacks over and over with a combo attack here or there.
Everything above cannon fodder has an attack that shows their Weak Point as a gauge and if you empty it, you deal a huge attack to them for lots of damage.
Missions are the same.
Whether you are told to "Defeat the Giant Bosses" within a certain number of minutes, "Fight as a Warrior of (Element)" or to "Defeat enemies and traitors alike", you basically are in one of the 13 maps and are told to fight things until they die. Very repetitive, but as already said, it's still kinda addictive.
The Ally and Enemy AI... is idiotic.
Your allies are pointless and basically stand around and do little else than just standing there, looking pretty. They sometimes fight, but ultimately do so little damage, your basically a One Man/Woman Show. You do everything. Your allies can do something off and on, but it's ultimately faster if you do it.
Fortunately, the enemy AI is just as dumb. They stand around or advance towards you, but don't attack immediately. Some do, others don't, but mostly the cannon fodder just waits for you to hit them and the officers need a second or two before deciding to attack you, otherwise they just block.
Both sides are idiots, so at the very least it's balanced.
DLC is plentiful.
DLC ranges from giving you characters like Twili Midna, Tingle and Young Link as fighters, new weapons that include Epona, the Spinner from Twilight Princess, joke-appearance weapons that are 8-Bit in appearance but that's really all that's worth noting about them since it's basically a stupid looking Level 3 weapon, and new Adventure Maps to fight on... and costumes that, for the most part, are just changing the color of the character's clothes.
The DLC is good, but nowhere near great.
The issue with the Adventure Maps is that, well, they are basically the regular Adventure Map again, but with different labels for the missions and unfortunately, badly balanced. The Twilight Princess Map is especially terrible. While it's intended for high-level characters from 150 onward, the difficulty is not properly done. Enemies are not actually smarter, there's no better difficulty set in the missions, enemies just hit you like a truck and you take a lot of damage. The other issue is that the maps add "Rules" to fight. Like "No Healing", "Speed Run" meaning you need to complete a mission within 15 minutes or even "Don't Get Hit". Half of those rules don't make a lick of difference, since in order to get an A Rank on a mission, you need your time to be under 15 Minutes so the Speed Run doesn't matter or, similar to the Twilight Map, the rules don't alter difficulty or are not balanced. Especially the Don't Get Hit does not mean you have to be any more clever in fighting, it means you either dodge a whole lot or just use a potion that allows you to use a powered up Bow & Arrow constantly to not just halt enemies but also damage them every time you use it.
The DLC weapons are nice enough, but not any better than the in-game ones. Speaking of in-game weapons... there's a heavy emphasis on Link getting multiple weapons. Having him use a regular sword and the Master Sword is, of course, a given. But he also has a pair of Gauntlets as a weapon, Epona and the Spinner from DLC (the latter from placing an Amiibo on the gamepad) and the Great Fairy, which is technically a new character herself and not Link fighting. It's sad as other characters seem sadly un-armed in comparison and feels like there's lost potential in them.
Character Levels.
The maximum level of your fighters used to be 99. Then a patch came out and raised it to 150 and now it's even higher, up to 255. And you have pretty much 20 fighters that you can level up to that height. One extra, if you count Ganon in the Ganon's Fury DLC. So if you want all of them to be decently leveled or even high enough to manage things on the Twilight Map, there is a lot of grinding going on.
Fortunately, there's a Rupee Glitch that gives you the maximum of 9.999.999 Rupees after a finished mission, which allows you to simply use the Trainin Dojo, where you use money to level up your characters. This does considerably cut down in the amount of time for grinding, though you are restricted in that you can only increase the level up to your highest leveled character. Still helpful, as you only have to concern yourself with getting 1 Character up to 255 and not over ten times that amount.
I was originally going to avoid using said glitch, but after seeing the time leveling took and having to do that for so many characters, I decided it's best to use it. It's practically mandatory to use, unless you are a player who really, really enjoys grinding and doesn't mind spending hours on getting multiple characters up to higher levels.
Overall it's a pretty fun game. Very repetitive in its gameplay and DLC, which could be done better, and it really needs some mechanical changes. But definitely worth at least a shot. I started this off saying that the game is pretty addictive despite its flaws and it really is. I am nowhere near getting one character up to the highest level up to now, but I am keeping at it and know the rest will follow, even if it's basically with in-game money.
The game needs some good overhauls and improvements, though, the least being more map locations as you only have about 13 of them and you re-use the same locations over and over. And do something about the music. For some reason, I can't stand the remixes in this game for more than a few minutes before I have to mute it.