Demonic Spiders: Any time Shadow Link manifests in the air. He's invincible like this and will repeatedly drop Giant Bombs on you; all you can do is avoid them until you escape the area.
Fan Nickname: "Ganondorf II" or "Ganon II" for this game's incarnation of the series' Big Bad, as he is a reincarnation after the original Ganondorf's death in Twilight Princess.
Fanon: Shadow Link spawned a ton of it; chances are if it's not of Ocarina of Time's Dark Link, it'll be of this one. The manga definitely helped this along.
Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans like to discount FSA due to the continuity issues, and depressing implications about fate being unavoidable especially for the Gerudo and Ganondorf particularly for fans who dislike how Ganondorf is the product of Demise's curse. It helps that Miyamoto wrote the plot without continuity in mind.
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Some argue that they recycled too many graphic assets from previous games, even if they were enhanced. Plus, some argue that it plays too similar to the GBA game (despite FSA being a much grander-scope adventure), if not to A Link to the Past itself, since it uses many items from that game.
A good number of the stage gimmicks that require four players to coordinate are just rather janky. Not necessarily through fault of design, but because the game expects the players to work in perfect unison to operate them. A single-player experience will actually be easier since the AI will mirror your actions.
If a GBA is disconnected, the game freezes for a while before returning to the title screen if the controller is not reconnected. This only allows enough time for the event of the cable accidentally being unplugged. If the batteries in your GBA died you better hope you saved recently. Worse yet, the design of the GBA SP and the GBA-GCN cable combined means you can't have an SP plugged in with an AC adapter at the same time you have it connected to the GCN.
The fact that you needed to buy a GBA and a connector cable to begin with is bad enough. When the game was released, that would be almost 200 bucks down the drain if you didn't already have a GBA, and nowadays it's maybe $50-80 on the used games market, but almost impossible to find.
Time-Up Tingle, which steals Force Gems from the players if they stick around in the same spot for an hour. Most players don't even know it exists because it's such a niche case, but there are some choke points like the below-mentioned Temple of Darkness where it's very possible to encounter. And if it happens at a bad time, you may find yourself doing an entire level again.
Special Effects Failure: The game's assets consist of an odd mix of sprites from A Link to the Past, Four Swords on GBA, completely new sprites in neither style and visual effects done in the artstyle of The Wind Waker. Needless to say, it looks rather disjointed.
Tearjerker: The little ghost girl in the graveyard level who doesn't know she's dead, just alone and frightened in the dark. There's not a single thing you can do to help her either.
That One Level: Level 5-3, the Temple of Darkness. An hour-long level which features such thrilling mechanics as a giant block all four players must coordinate to push around spikes and pits, completely unmarked walls that must be pushed against to break through, and an end-boss that can take as long as the level itself to beat.
Underused Game Mechanic: Outside a minigame you can play at Tingle’s Tower in multiplayer, horseback riding is only featured in the first half of one stage in the game.
