Woah! Haven't heard that one before. There were a lot of detractors of the style back in the early 00's before WW came out, but I just assumed everyone fell in love with the look after playing it. I'd never heard anything to the contrary, so I didn't realize anyone legitimately didn't love the look. 

You’re remembering the game wrong, or you only played it once. It’s way shorter than 20 hours if you know what you’re doing: you’d have to waste time to get above 6 hours. And I am not rushing or anything either, I could probably get the game down to 3 hours if I did rush.

The top 500 Speed runners all do the game in under 2 hours, with the fastest speed runners getting it to the 1 hour 23 minute mark. https://www.speedrun.com/alttp

Skyward Sword I didn’t give a fair swing. Largely because of Twilight Princess.

Celda was a real kick in the nuts, and I actually liked the art style, it’s that the overly large and convoluted dungeons were boring and repetitive. The game overall felt really slow. I almost quit early on because of this BS stealth dungeon which pretty much forced you to play the game even more slowly: the biggest obstacle is impatience.

Twilight Princess... It was drab, the whole thing was a mash of dark green, grey, and brown. While the art style has been compared to Ocarina of Time and Majorca’s Mask, this isn’t at all the case - those games were much more colourful, and the design was snappier - dungeons were still a slog on N64, but not nearly as bad as TP, they even made you do an obstacle course to get to the dungeons in TP.

Anyway, by the time I got to Skyward Sword I had little enthusiasm for the franchise. It did have positives, but the controls bothered me.

Breath of the Wild not only saved the franchise, but it revolutionized it and brought it to commercial heights not even dreamed of before. Breath of the Wild is the Zelda game I wanted to play 25 years ago, and certainly what has been needed since Ocarina of Time. Rather than the even sloggier clones of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess.

I know the record is under one and a half hour. That’s not very representative though. Mario 64’s record is like under 10 minutes if I remember correctly. I’m remembering ALttP quite well though because I’ve played it plenty. But that’s it; normal people don’t know what they’re doing. This isn’t a short game. https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=10028

EDIT: That Mario time is with glitches, but still. The 100% record is 1:38:54. (WOW)

Are those people playing it for the first time? Because, yeah, it might take longer that way. It takes me 5-6 hours, and I play at a fairly relaxed pace, but I also know what I’m doing.

Anyway, here's the full game done at a fairly relaxed pace, all items and hearts retrieved, done in less than 4 hours and 15 minutes. So I am not sure why you are even arguing it is much longer than 5-6 hours.

That "howlongtobeat" site also says Final Fantasy 6 is 36.5 hours long. Even my first time through the game wasn't even 24 hours, and I don't even remember the last time it took me longer than 15 unless I was maxing out levels and spells. It just leaves me to believe the users on that site really suck at gaming.

The first playthrough, at least for me, took about 20 hours. Probably more. It's not that the world was big or there was much to do. Just figuring out the puzzles and dungeons. After that, I cut my time down immensely and I imagine it's much easier for anyone playing a newer game before going back to ALttP since it's actually pretty simple compared to later Zeldas.

Lots of games are like this. The challenge is knowing where to go and what to do. 

That's basically what I'm saying. Most games in general are much shorter once you know what you're doing. Most of the time spent is on things like "How do I thwart these dudes with swords" and "why can't I hit this wizard" or "Where the **** do I go with this guy? Why won't he leave the dungeon with me? Let's try this again." and stuff like that. But most of that stuff isn't a problem on the second time through. The guy going through above isn't even an excellent player, he's getting hit a lot, has to take breaks to replenish health and such, but it still took him under 4 hours and 15 minutes to do everything in the game, simply because he knows what he's doing.

Yeah some of us remained detractors and just didn't like it haha. For me in particular I don't like the disproportionate characters with their huge bobble heads, the way the cel shading reduced stuff like water to big slabs of one or two colours, and overall just how much of a departure it was from the look of Ocarina of Time which for me is what Zelda should look like, aesthetically.

It simply didn't look or feel like the series I feel in love with on N64.

 But it sure did look and feel like the series I fell in love with on the NES and SNES.

I played Link to the Past on SNES, but it wasn't til Ocarina that the series truly grabbed me.