My thoughts are always focused on how to use light, when painting with realistic shading that’s the first and most important factor. It affects composition, staging, story, emotional tone, everything.
Especially in my paintovers, where I usually try to leave pose and staging as similar as I can, if there’s nothing obviously wrong with it, I go to the light first. Looking at your image my opinion was the light was uninteresting, because it created a composition full of maximum or nearly maximum contrast points all over the place. This imo is very bad for an image.
Also imo, logic comes a very distant second in importance to creating an interesting or beautiful image. If logic is going to interfere too much with “coolness”, well there’s just no point in creating an image at all then right? 
But I still try to keep it as logical as possible. And your image was also somewhat illogical in its own way, the sky color peeking through seems to indicate a sunny day in a forest, perhaps close to noon. If so then a person standing straight and looking down will not have sunlight on their face, it will mostly hit top of head, shoulders, sword, outstretched arms, not much else. The sun could possibly be in late afternoon directly behind the “camera” but my advice is to usually avoid that type of light direction, it’s getting close to the dreaded flash light in amateur photos.
I added the edge lighting because it’s a device I personally love.
The bounced light from the sword was to me an easy choice, as it brings the focus to the sword and the face of the character in a way that’s difficult to manage in a full figure image like this otherwise. Perhaps it’s a bit strong. But it would be easy to justify it story wise, if you wanted to, simply imagine Link wiping it with some grass or leaves while he walks. Or his hands. Or perhaps some subtle magic at work.
edit:
oh and as for keeping the details in the sword, there are ways to work them partially back in if you like. But I’ve seen a thousand swords and to me they’re boring, I find faces much more interesting.
I’ve repainted her face with different expressions at least five times and this is the best so far, but still not sure about it.
Here’s the latest one. Now I didn’t use reference for this, I wanted to just follow a couple simple rules, like sky always brighter, and distance gradually lighter, and reflection always slightly darker, and the perspective lines both in the real world and in the reflection. But I recommend using photo reference always - in this case Venice right? After I finished I found this one, and many others, using “Venice alleys”
