The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass – Nintendo – DS

[schild]

Sent in by Cyrrex.

This game is the sequel to Wind Waker, both in story and in style.  If that’s an automatic turnoff for you, then you might be tempted to stop reading.  You'd be making a mistake, however.  Technically, it’s my six year-old son playing this game….I’m just….helping.  Yeah, helping.

Interestingly, you use the stylus for just about everything in this game.  While it occasionally gets clumsy using it for movement and combat (I chalk this up to not being used to the control scheme rather than any fault of the mechanics), this is generally a very good thing.  Zelda games have always been good at providing clever and thoughtful puzzles which, while not terribly hard, give the gamer a sense of accomplishment.  PH on the DS adds a couple new dimensions to this by making clever use of the stylus and even – to my VERY great surprise – the microphone.  A couple of the early puzzles gave me that tingly feeling of wonderment (like a sneeze, but better) that you experience the first time you realize that Someone Has Raised the Bar.  If only just a little.  Get inside the Fire Temple, and tell me that wasn’t pure genius.  At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if I was required to pour boiling water on my DS to make it into the Ice Temple.

The world itself if very much WW-esque, and that unfortunately means the dreaded Boat rears its ugly head again.  Happily, the distances seem smaller, and you can auto-pilot your way as needed.  Hopefully it doesn’t turn into horrible game filler later like it did with WW.  Other than that, though the style is the same, the world feels smaller and a bit…cramped.  It is only a DS game, after all, so it doesn’t feel like true, spacious 3D to me.  Dungeons feel smaller, and possibly a little easier to navigate than we are used to in a Zelda title.  Combined with the use of the stylus for things like directing the path of a boomerang (with no regard to physics), I’d say the dungeon experience is a bit too much on the easy side.  The Map feature probably compounds this somewhat; not only do you essentially have a full map from the moment you enter a cave, but you can draw and make notes on it at your leisure.  Still, it is hard to find fault with the Map functionality for making things too easy, because it’s just damn brilliant that you can draw on your map.  I don’t ever want a map in a game that I can’t draw on, ever again.

At the end of the day, whether it’s too simple or too cutesy or too much like Wind Waker (hell, same story as any other Zelda game ever made), you shouldn’t dismiss this game out of hand.  It still has all that great Zelda charm and style.  The clever new ways to interface with the game are genius.  If there is a must-have game for DS, I think this is it.

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Buy It.

[Sairon]

Hopefully it doesn’t turn into horrible game filler later like it did with WW. 

Sadly, it very much does.

I didn't fancy this one enough to complete it, even if I got a fair bit into it. What mostly didn't do it for me was:

a) Excessive auto pilot boating with random encounters.
b) Tries to tell a story, but it's beyond horrible.
c) Overall feels much less polished in pretty much every department than its 16 years old predecessor.

[Cyrrex]

Well, aren't you just pissing in my oatmeal.

In this case, I'm probably going to be okay with most of those negatives.  Really, I'll just try to get my son to do all the grindy boating parts  .  Most of my being impressed with this game has to do with the clever control scheme. 

[Ingmar]

I liked it, although I didn't finish it. The main dungeon of the game got a little repetitive for me but part of it is I kinda suck at the game and it gets kind of hard. For me. SHUT UP OK.

I liked everything that wasn't the lower levels of the main dungeon though! Including the sailing around and collecting crap and such. Plus the sort of jackass sidekick/semi-antagonist pirate dude was funny.

[Cyrrex]

Yeah, Linebeck.  Funny.

[Kail]

b) Tries to tell a story, but it's beyond horrible.

I dunno, personally, I kind of liked the story.  It's not, like, some epic tale of love and betrayal or whatever, but it is fairly solid for a kid's story.

What killed the game for me was the damned Temple of the Ocean King.  I HATED THAT.  Invincible enemies + half-assed stealth implementation + heavily timed dungeon = agony.  Oh, and when you finish it, you get to run through it again, and then do a second part that's more of the same.  And when you finish that, you get to run through it again, and the second part again, and a new third part.  And when you're done with that, fucking guess what?  GAH.

Plus, I was not a fan of the controls.  Some things worked well (drawing the path of the boomerang, for example, was neat), but the basic stuff, like moving and swinging your sword, is awkward to me.  Trying to dodge around and get in precise strikes feels like trying to knit with your feet.

[voodoolily]

Unsurprisingly, I loved it. But I also found the Temple of the Ocean King to be repetitive and disparately difficult compared to all other aspects of the game. I bought this game twice; first, in Japan a year ago, prior to the US release. Then again when we returned, so I could actually play it for real (I can't read katakana).

The Japanese version also adds something missing from the English version - it has a really cool written language tutor that teaches how to read/write kanji from katakana. This plays more heavily on the stylus-as-writing/drawing-instrument, that certainly adds to its success overseas.