Every time you play, you must remember to load from the backup memory in the options screen. Simply loading to start a continued tournament will do nothing for maintaining your stats and records. So it's at the options screen that you must start and end every game. It's not only a pain in the butt, it's hard to figure out. It's difficult to explain just how this save system works, but it's easy to see how it diminishes the games replay value.
Load times are frequent and excessive.
The game lets you catch bass, and only bass. Another problem is the way that fish don't actually pull the line out. When you land a big one, and he starts on his way in the opposite direction, the line doesn't move outward. Your foot of line reads the same, able only to decrease in length and not increase. This may not sound like that big of a deal to you, but trust me, if it were added it would do wonders to the game's fun factor.