Hey I didn't mean to be a Grammar Nazi, it's just interesting how a choice of words can change the intended meaning of a statement.
Besides, Nintendo's "straying" from the Zelda path never cost it its sales in the marketplace or reviews or even general opinion. There would always be some oddball like Gamespot's 8.8 for TP our own Review of Phantom Hourglass, but generally, Zelda games are still well-received no matter what they are.
In my opinion, my statement supports my point more than yours, because the "Zelda Hysteria" may not necessarily come from fans to begin with, just like the whole "ZOMG Non-game" stuff. We are in a brave new games press era, where relative objectivity has been traded for brash side-choosing and open bias, such as evidenced is EGM's two-issue feature on how Endless Ocean is a non-game. Suddenly new definitions pop up left and right and new categories and it's getting pretty hard to keep track of what a game is and what a game isn't. and what's casual and non-core and tonglime-cardhore and graaah! Maybe IGN should issue a chart, Terror-Alert style, maybe some kind of color wheel, so we can all keep up to date on the latest definitions. So, even though Nintendo is clearly not beholden to these hostile press outlets, they do require them to disseminate information. And because of this, when they use the word "Zelda" they better have a left-handed elf guy in green.
Okami does not have this problem, so it can copy parts of Zelda's formula, and put a wolf in it, set it in Mythological Japan and call it "fresh."
Imagine William Shakespeare's King Lear, and Akira Kurosawa's Ran (that's "Rahn" for those unfamiliar.) Ran is really nothing more than a Japanese version of King Lear. No matter how stylistically and "different" it is.. it's still just King Lear in a Shogun outfit.
And as to the unfairness, here is a childhood psychological example. Imagine being a gifted 7-year-old child (I don't have to imagine Ha-HA!) and getting scolded by a teacher for getting a trigonometry problem wrong. The imagine having an autistic or retarded kid in the room write his name in his own drool and get praise for the "progress he's made." While I don't think the differences are that extreme between TP and Okami, there is a certain biasedness towards the new even if all the "new" is nothing more than the old in different clothes. More was expected of Zelda and much, much less was expected of Okami, and that was reflected in it's reviews and sales.