First post on the forum, I finished Book I last night on the Wii VC.
It's a really strange game. I'll have more comments/observations later when I have more time, but it's kinda striking how small the adventure is. I don't know to what extent Book I is just a prelude to Book II, but the entire game here consists of two small towns, a tiny field that doesn't even qualify as an overworld, two medium dungeons and one big-ass dungeon. And that one big-ass dungeon is literally half the total play time. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but the pacing/structure of the game is just really really weird, there's never a sense that you're really building or advancing to anything, you just do some odd jobs then go at this tower and that's it.
Darm Tower is really interesting from an art perspective. It's cool the way they try to represent the 3D structure of the tower in 2D backgrounds. It doesn't really work and I'm certain the layout doesn't make any physical sense at all (it doesn't help that you go in doors facing up and out them facing down so there's no way to make any sense of the layout), but they do some neat tricks with the parts outside the tower to convey the 3D structure. It took me a while to figure out what they were trying to show, and it probably would have been helpful if we'd had one of the ending cutscenes showing the outside of the tower BEFORE starting the dungeon just to give some hint of what they were going for. I always think this kind of thing is interesting though, the kinda crazy solutions 2D artists had to come up with to make sensible 3D spaces in their games.
Final quick observation, there's definitely some adventure game logic going on that's not always actually logical. Though I tried to do as much of the game as possible without a guide, there were times when I had to consult one because there are just certain things you have to do in certain orders that don't seem to make much sense. To the game's credit, they do give you some good hints and in retrospect you can kinda sorta see how they tried to suggest the order to you, but often times you have to have a certain random item in a certain place to trigger events and it seems kinda random. Like, how are you supposed to know that a mid-game boss can only be damaged by a certain sword if you don't even know that sword exists yet and you have to completely exit the dungeon to get the sword? That kind of stuff, I'd say I'm just soft now but I consulted guides to beat the original LoZ back in the day too... there's a thin line between overly obtuse game design and outright handholding, this game is on the former side a bit and I'm glad I have the internet to help me out. FYI, if you haven't checked gamefaqs for this game you should at some point, the guy who wrote the guide for this wrote it sorta like a story, telling what Adol does in a third person past tense perspective, it's corny but kinda cool.
Well, that was a longish first post. Like I said, maybe more comments to come, hope these are a good start.