When I first played the original, the princess felt like an afterthought. I was after all those magical golden triangles. No telling how much I could get off those things on Craigslist. Then I had to kill Gannon just because, if he was dead, then maybe I could buy the little island I was on with all those craigslist ruppees. That sweet princess poon was just an afterthought.
A Link to the past and OoT were the same thing, albeit a much more linear experience with about 10 pages of fantasy babble shat down your neck every time another sprite opened their mouth. I don't need to know all these gibberish fantasy names. Give me a sword, a shield, and then point in the general direction of a big overworld where hot blondes, badass weapons, and expensive macguffins may be found, and that should be all the motivation a player needs. I don't want this shiny thing because I need it to rescue one of the Ten Frolicking Trollops of the Sacred Sky Pentameter, (They're all well and good in their own right, but the trollops can be introduced whenever they become important. Mission Briefings are for Knights and Secret Agents, not Adventurers!) I want it because it's shiny and it shoots a hook with a chain on and I can put out some poor bastard's eye with it. Or, alternatively, I want it because some price-scalping asswipe is holding it over my head bragging about how fucking expensive it is.
Majora's mask fixed this by keeping the dialogue short and managing to get us engaged with the characters before they started feeding us exposition rather than feeding us ten bales of shredded MS Word documents with the words "Magical", "Sacred", "Powerful", "Ancient", "Temple" and "Zelda" written over and over again and a bunch of other fantasy-sounding things put together by whatever characters were left.
Twilight Princess and Wind Waker preferred to deal with this problem by doing the exact same wrong thing as their epilogue-spewing predecessors, but fixed it by cutting the majority of the crap and making the characters charming and the concept intriguing. The story still boiled down to, "Link must fetch the 32 fragments of Hercule's mystical wang of water-dowsing to defeat the Big Bad", though, and there was absolutely no guarantee of royal pussy afterward, but it was fine.
Then Zelda: Skylander's Shank showed up just to warn us all of what a gigantic, slow diarrhea session that the next game was going to be, and, lo and behold, Hyrule Warriors, the greatest possible shit that had ever been taken on any possible sort of coherent canon that Zelda ever had, sprang forth straight from the puckered anus of Nintendo as it wanked silently in some desolate corner of an alleyway in Japan and smacked some orphans in the face as it flew by. And that's not even half of what's wrong with the story!