I really didn’t think the crafting or limited inventory space did anything at all to the game. None of that was ever necessary to do anything. What was the point of even having extra bomb bags when you can get free bombs from bomb flowers? And the controls meant that the bow was only ever useful for long-distance sniping, and that was almost exclusively useful for solving environmental puzzles, not dealing with enemies, so why bother with a bigger quiver? The only thing I bothered crafting (once I realized how pointless it was) was the upgraded health potion, which was a chore thanks to having to talk to two people and go through unskippable animations to get things done.

Nintendo just threw some new features in and hoped that nobody would notice how useless they were. Playing Okami and Darksiders (both I and II) shows that you can, in fact, change Zelda without ruining it.