The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a 2D Zelda game for the Nintendo DS. Released after Wind Waker, the game keeps the cell shaded aesthetic of the Gamecube title and takes place directly after the events of that game (I've never played it). In contrast to other 2D games in the series like A Link to the Past or The Minish Cap, this game uses an entirely new control scheme revolving around the use of the DS' touch screen.
As soon as I read the sentiments of that last sentence in other descriptions of the game, I have to confess that my eyes rolled completely into the back of my head. In general, the touch screen on the DS and 3DS is used most effectively for displaying multiple portions of the game, and is typically relegated to displaying statistics or menus. Games that revolve around the touch screen for its primary interface end up being minigame games (WarioWare or XX/XY: Feel the Magic) or frustrating real time strategy games (LostMagic, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings). But I was feeling some handheld Zelda action, and as I only had a few handheld Zelda games left to clear out before I've beaten them all, I went with the next one chronologically.
Frankly, I was absolutely blown away by this game! I am personally biased against touch controls. It's difficult to see what you're doing on screen, and generally games allow for dual modes of control with both touch and button interface options. In these cases, I can't think of a single one where I chose to predominantly use the touch screen. But this game used the touch screen creatively to create a new Zelda experience that notably improves on several areas in which the older Zelda games are lacking, or to push the franchise in directions that the old ones really couldn't have accomplished.
The beginning of the game is absolutely genius levels of teaching you about the fundamentals of the game. Knowing nothing about the game, the title screen greets you with a standard "touch here to start" message. Typically in games, you can just press the A button to bypass this screen, but here, the game does absolutely nothing! You actually have the touch the screen, and then you have to touch it again to select your file. You think this is weird, so you dive into the adventure. You're greeted with text, which you again press A to move through. Again, nothing happens, so you try your stylus out again with better results. By this point, the game's designers have made clear to you that touch is important in this game, and that buttons will get you nowhere! By the time you get to controlling your character, you're not even pressing any buttons, but are using your stylus to explore your world around you. The commands are are very fluid and they just work. Period. Link will do what you ask him to with few errors, which is one of the big problems with other touch games, which suffer for a lack of responsiveness and you'll find your character routinely doing things you did not intend. You can't control him quite as precisely as you would in the older games, but the designers of the game also give you wider windows of time to maneuver, and more plentiful hearts abound to account for the slight clumsiness you'll feel from time to time.
Sure, this is nice that the touch interface works, but why is it necessary? Didn't Link control just fine before? The answer is no, and you didn't even realize it before playing this game! Did you every get frustrated that Link could only throw bombs a fixed distance? Or shoot arrows in four directions? Or throw his boomerang only straight? Or wonder why Bombchus even exist? The touch screen enables far more precise use of all of these items, and unlocks all sorts of clever new uses for them. You can now throw your boomerang around corners, trace perfect paths for your Bombchus to reach their destination, shoot your arrows where you wish, and throw your bombs as far away or as close as you could ever want!
The touch screen also opens up way more interactions with your map than you could previously accomplish. You can now write down notes to help solve a logic puzzle you're given. Or keep track of where you need to return once you get your bombs. Or trace the outline of an island to discover its shape and unlock the secrets within. This will help you to uncover all of the little secrets in a Zelda game in ways you never really knew were possible before.
The visuals of the game are very good, and this is one element of criticism for Wind Waker that I never really got. Sure, they're more cartoony than before, but they have a certain soul that I find delightful.
The music is surprisingly drab for a Zelda game, which almost universally have great soundtracks. Color me disappointed in this one area of the game.
The dungeons are all designed very well, with lots of secrets to uncover and clever and incremental uses of the new items you're given. You'll rarely find yourself hopelessly lost, but also will be challenged by the puzzle presented within.
The game fundamentally revolves around a single dungeon. Completing a few additional floors will allow you to find more and more secrets within, unlocking new areas of the world around you. Thus, the game has a cyclical nature to it, beginning with you going as deep into the dungeon as you can, going out into the world to gain more abilities, and returning to the dungeon to go deeper, rinse and repeat. This can get pretty tiresome, to be honest, although I was grateful that they at least included a checkpoint halfway through so you didn't have to do the entire thing all over again. If it had just been three times to go through the dungeon that would have been clever and fine, but after my sixth journey through I had had enough. The game also felt needlessly long, although that may just be because so much of your time was spent slogging through the same dungeon several times.
There are times that the touch screen controls are not quite perfect, but generally they're a fresh and fun new take on the game. You can lose sight of where you are due to your massive hands hover over the screen to tap, which can get annoying. Maybe if you had smaller hands than me, this wouldn't be a problem, but it did get irritating at times. There's also a strange logic in the items, in that some of them, like the bow, will fire over and over again until you click off of them, while others, like the boomerang, with only throw once, and won't fire again until you click back on. I wasted a fair number of arrows this way, and took a lot of hits trying to run but finding myself aiming the bow instead. I got used to the peculiar rules eventually, but I would have appreciated an identical approach across all items.
In general, Phantom Hourglass was a fresh and fun approach to a game that seemingly didn't need one! Once I played it, however, I found that being willing to go across my comfort zone to a new control scheme can be accompanied by some big benefits! I definitely need a break after this game, but I'll come back to its touch cousin Spirit Tracks at some point. I'll give this one a 9.1/10. I also have no clue what I'll be playing next on handheld, so check back at some point soon!
-TRO
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