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I hate stylus-centric gameplay.
I want to make that very clear from the start. I hate games where the stylus takes the control focus. I especially hate games where the stylus is your only option for control. I prefer traditional control schemes because they work so well. After two decades of home gaming, they’ve simply become natural and comfortable for me. Being forced into a stylus control scheme makes for an unhappy Skittles.
The DS, for all the joy and amusement it brings me, has never particularly thrilled me when one of its games is controlled almost exclusively via stylus control. Sure, it's extremely precise. But sometimes, those touchscreen controls are just so bad when compared to a standard control scheme that it completely sours you on the game (I'm looking at you, Star Fox Command)
So you can probably imagine how much I cringed in anticipated horror when I learned that The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, the first DS entry in the franchise, would be controlled almost entirely with the stylus. Movement, combat, minigames… hell, even the boomerang would be handled by via the touchscreen. Oy. “Can’t these people just leave well enough alone?”, I asked myself. A few hours later, when I realized that no answer would be forthcoming, I decided to try and give the game the benefit of the doubt when it finally did get released stateside.
And now that it’s here, I’ve got to hand it to Nintendo. Stlyus-centric gameplay can be an amazing little blessing when it’s done right, and that’s what Phantom Hourglass does. It gets the controls right. It gets a lot of things right, in fact. Zelda fans will want to grab this as quickly as they can, provided they don’t set their expectations too high. This is a worthy addition to any DS library, even if it gets a few things wrong.
Hit the jump. I hope you brought your swimming trunks.
Phantom Hourglass kicks off with a brief (yet cute) recap of the events in Zelda: Wind Waker. As Link and Zelda… er, Tetra… are sailing into the unknown in search of the new lands spoken of by King Hyrule at the end of Wind Waker, they encounter a Ghost Ship. Said to be terrorizing the local populace and kidnapping villagers, Tetra boldly sets foot on the ship with the intention of stopping these shenanigans. Of course, nothing is as it seems, and when Tetra disappears and Link sets foot on the ship, the Ghost Ship claims the adventurous duo and whisks them away to unknown waters. When Link awakens, he finds himself washed ashore on a strange island with no sign of Tetra. A strange fairy named Ciela and a mysterious old man who goes by the name of “Grandpa” encounter the flotsam boy wonder and help guide him back on his path. As always, Link is tasked with saving the world, getting about a dozen new weapons that he’s had before and has mysteriously lost again (Samus Aran syndrome) and getting back to whatever it was that he was doing before the game started.
From the start, one of the first things you’ll notice about this game is the amazing level of visuals that Nintendo has managed to achieve. Taking a page from its lead-in title, Phantom Hourglass utilizes a 3D cel-shaded graphics system which works surprisingly well, particularly considering that this is a portable game. Think “Animal Crossing: Wild World”, but with much more vibrant colors, sharper designs, and more fluid character animations. It truly feels like Nintendo is pushing the DS to its graphical limits with Phantom Hourglass.
Controlling Link is very easy. Place your stylus on the touchscreen close to Link, and he walks to that spot. As you move it further away, Link runs. Move the stylus left or right, and Link turns on a dime. There’s almost no learning curve here… the game controls so brilliantly comfortably that you won’t be sitting there trying to figure things out. The controls just work, and they feel natural too. Ciela, the fairy companion introduced to Link at the start of the game, serves double duty as both a storyline component and a visual aid for the stylus controls. As you manipulate the stylus on the touchscreen, Ciela moves on the map to show you exactly what you’re touching. This way, there’s no question about where you’re running or what you’re attacking.
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Combat works just as simply as movement does. Tap an enemy on the screen, and Link jump-thrusts his sword into them. Make a slashing motion with the stylus, and Link swings his sword in the exact same manner. Spin attacks are performed by… yep, you guessed it, drawing a circle around Link. It all works in a basic, straightforward manner that requires (almost) no explanation.
For the most part, the control scheme is as smooth as silk. So smooth, in fact, that you’ll wish that other designers and developers would start taking lessons from Phantom Hourglass. The controls here are the exception to many DS games out there, yet they deserve to be the rule. The only real complaint with the control scheme comes in the somersault tumbles. While the game describes them as being performed by scribbling small circles at the edge of the screen, this doesn’t always work as advertised.
Phantom Hourglass also offers you the ability to draw all over your maps. “So what?”, you say to yourself? Well, naysayers.. as silly as this sounds, it’s surprisingly beneficial to the overall gameplay. For starters, you can use it to make convenient notes on your map. Do you see a weak wall that can be destroyed with a bomb, and yet you have no bombs yet? Mark that spot on your map so that you know where to find it when you do get bombs. Trying to remember what symbol activates a Golden Frog to allow you to quickly teleport? Write it down on your map. You can even use this to draw lines between key landmarks to help find treasure. It’s a silly little mechanic, yet it makes a huge difference when you’re adventuring.
After you get through Mercay Island and its temple, both of which are designed to ease you into the basic gameplay concepts and help acclimate you to the stylus controls, it’s time to set off to the open sea, with the wind at your back and a selfish captain named Linebeck at the helm. The game world is divided into four easily traversed quadrants, with ship navigation performed by drawing out your route on the sea chart. If, like me, you were one of those people that quickly grew tired of endlessly sailing back and forth in Wind Waker, then worry not. Phantom Hourglass keeps the sailing fun and enjoyable, and it never reaches the level of monotony that Wind Waker had.
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The game offers a total of seven main dungeons/temples, as well as the Temple of the Ocean King. The seven main dungeons are incredibly fun, but uncomfortably short. Veterans of the Zelda series will get through them much quicker than you might expect, and it’ll undoubtedly have many of you saying “That’s it?” when you finish the early temples. It’s unfortunate that, even for a portable game, the dungeons are so abrupt and brief. When you finish them, you may not feel the same sense of accomplishment that you get from a typical Zelda game.
The Temple of the Ocean King, though… that’s where things just don’t sit right.
The Temple of the Ocean King sits atop Mercay Island, the starting location which serves as a base of operations for Link, Linebeck, and Ciela throughout the game. After completing most of the dungeons, Link is tasked with going back to the Temple of the Ocean King in order to find out his next destination. The temple is comprised of the entry level and 13 sublevels. And it wouldn’t be so bad if the temple maintained your progress from the last visit. Each time you set foot in the Ocean King’s dungeon, though, you have to start all over again from scratch. This is made somewhat easier by the time you’ve hit the sixth floor, when a permanent portal between the entry and the halfway point materializes. But by the fifth time you’ve entered this place, when you’re completing the same puzzle for the third or fourth time, the Temple of the Ocean King feels less like a focal point for the game’s story and much much more like a general nuisance meant to annoy you.
Oh, and did I mention that the Temple of the Ocean King is a timed affair? The Phantom Hourglass referred to in the title is an in-game item which keeps you safe from the harmful depths of the Ocean King’s lair. Once the sands of time bleed away, so do your hearts. It’s unfortunate that something so central to the game’s content becomes a matter of frustration as you get close to the game’s ending.
Phantom Hourglass takes perfect advantage of the DS hardware by introducing puzzles that take advantage of the system’s unique abilities. The boomerang, controlled via the stylus, is probably the most heavily utilized item in the entire game. You draw a line, the boomerang flies along that specific path. It can twist, turn, do a few 360’s, take out a few enemies, and even hit switches between the time Link throws it and the time it returns to his hand.
There are microphone-based puzzles which range from shouting at NPC’s (just snap your fingers in front of the mic) to blowing out flames. Bombchus can now be guided to specific spots on the map by drawing out their course of attack. If a lever’s too far away from you, just use the grapple hook and pull it from across a chasm. There’s one particular puzzle in the game that asks you to copy a holy crest from a wall to your map. The solution is absurdly simple. But I’m almost certain that at least a few gamers are going to sit there and scratch their heads as they stare at the puzzle. When the answer finally does dawn on them, they’ll smile inwardly at just how frigging clever it truly was.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass also offers a very basic multiplayer option called Battle Mode. Playable with local opponents or via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, Battle mode is like a hybrid of Hide & Seek and Football. One player controls a set of three Phantoms, while the other controls Link. As Link, you’re tasked with retrieving Force Gems scattered across the map and returning them to your zone. The Phantoms’ job is to stop Link. Link cannot see the Phantoms unless he’s in a safe zone. And although the Phantoms have superior numbers, you have to draw out their path versus directly controlling them (as you do with link). Players alternate who they control for several rounds, with a total of three rounds per match. It’s a very light multiplayer mode, but plays quite nicely even if it isn’t entirely fleshed out. What’s more, as players achieve certain tasks in Battle Mode, they’ll be granted rewards within the Story Mode.
As much as I rave about Phantom Hourglass, the game’s not without its flaws. Chief amongst them is the difficulty level in the game. In most cases, Zelda veterans won’t find their mental or physical muscles taxed in any way. Combat is so absurdly simple that you’ll rarely have a battle where you’re wiping the sweat off your brow, and the fights won’t particularly give you any sense of accomplishment if you’ve played through a Zelda title before. In fact, the only truly difficult battle is with the final boss. If you’ve played through any game in the franchise before, odds are good that you’ll even be able to make it through Phantom Hourglass without a single death. To be fair, you’ll end up spending about 15 - 25 hours on the game, reaching the higher end of things if you want to find every sunken treasure chest, talk to each NPC, and find every hidden object.
The puzzles are unfortunately easy, as well. Once you get the basic puzzle mechanics down, very little will be challenging. Even in the later levels, you’ll find that the puzzles aren’t particularly compelling. In fact, the further you progress in the game, the more it feels like they’ve decided to give up making the puzzles difficult. Instead, they just make them lengthy.
This isn’t really an adventure for Link. It almost feels like he’s on a vacation.
But there’s something to be said for doing things differently. While series fans may lament the absence of series staples (Heart Container pieces being the most noteworthy absence), Nintendo does introduce a new villain. There’s something to be said for a bad guy in a Zelda game that isn’t Ganondorf or Vaati. Now if only that particular villain were actually interesting…
Phantom Hourglass is all about trying new things, and doing old things in new ways. In most areas, the game succeeds brilliantly. The control scheme and the graphics, in particular, set a high bar for adventure games to come for the DS platform. But the low level of difficulty in the overall game, the ease in which you can solve puzzles, and the unsatisfying combat are unfortunate baggage for the game.
But don’t let the little stuff get you down. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a worthy entry in the franchise, and a wonderful first pass for a DS-specific Zelda. At $34.99, any gamer should easily find their money’s worth here. Fans of the Zelda franchise will definitely want this in their library. For anyone that hasn’t played a Zelda game, welcome back from whatever rock you’ve been living under! Phantom Hourglass treats the new Zelda players just as well as it treats the veterans. For all its faults, and for the little nitpicks, Phantom Hourglass is still well worth the money.
Just make sure to get yourself a real stylus. That little toothpick they include with the DS will only lead to wrist cramping after the first hour or two.
Final score: 8/10
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