Don't give a shit about the number applied.
My beef with this review- and others of its kind- is that it triumphs a particular point of view of successful game design: specifically, that formulas get "old" and need to be refreshed at certain intervals. The degree to which they are refreshed sounds like a decent objective measure, but it fails by lack of specificity (what exactly crosses the threshold from "too samey" to "new enough"?) and a lack of a compelling argument about whether people actually want the formula changed in every case; whether or not, in fact, the general public really give a damn about the concept of "formula" at all.
So it's a subjective measure the same as other methods of parsing personal responses to a work. This must be emphasized again and again, since so many discussions about the quality of this game (and others) hinges on people tacitly accepting the idea of the Stale Formula as an obvious and objective flaw. Further, it's a particularly unhelpful sort of criticism: it is unspecific, and to some extent depends on a counterintuitive understanding of what people want; isn't it strange to expect people buying a Zelda game to want something unlike other Zeldas?
The truth is, very few games like Zelda are made. If each were nearly identical (and they aren't) they would still be unusual against the background of the thousands of non-Zelda titles in existence that do not share the series' mechanics to any great degree. If we wish to criticize games for being formulaic I would expect attention to turn to the games that ARE very much like many others recently released: your annual sports franchises, your constant flow of team multiplayer FPS, and so forth. The concept of the Stale Formula does get applied sometimes, but other times it is completely ignored.
Some other specific criticisms of TP make a lot of sense to me. This one in particular, though, has been repeated so much but to me says so frustratingly little.