The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass Review (DS)
My very latest review!
The wonderful, the fabulous, the magnificent – I think you get the point – new Zelda game for the DS.
This game was like falling into a coma. After it was done I woke up and couldn’t believe how much time had passed. My family almost didn’t recognize me anymore. Thankfully my husband thinks its really cute that I play computer games.
My Impressions
This is the best game I played in 2007.
Clearly I was far from disappointed with the game. This is exceptionally impressive because I had such high expectations. Windwaker was one of my all time favorite Zelda games, scratch that, one of my all time favorite games. I have to give this sequel huge marks for not only living up to my expectations but also exceeding them.
This game sucked me in and didn’t let me come up for air until it was over. Almost all my waking moments were devoted to sailing the high seas of Hyrule. I was so dedicated to freeing Hyrule of evil that when I hit a little bump in the road I ran it over with vigor like Sylvester Stallone in Deathrace 2000.
Not far into the game I found out that my super cute pink DS had a broken microphone. Completely dejected I moped around the house for a day. Not only was my DS broken but it also meant I couldn’t play Zelda anymore. Turns out I really needed my microphone to progress in the story.
After plenty of whining I decided it would take too long to get my DS fixed and rushed out and bought myself a new DS. I got the Brain Age 2 bundle set. Its that racy red and black DS – very stylish!
Anyway the new DS allowed me to continue on my daring sea adventure. Made me a happy little gamer! =D
I’m sure your wondering what happened to my pink DS. Although I really couldn’t wait to play Zelda again (patience? What’s that?!?!), I did end up getting my DS fixed.
I called Nintendo and the person I talked too was exceedingly helpful and understanding. He got me all set up and it was fixed in under a week. Which really was surprisingly fast. I was sure that it would take ages – far longer then I had the patience to wait. Next time something goes wrong I am calling Nintendo before my lack of patience gets the better of.
Review
Release date: October 1, 2007
Website: The Phantom Hourglass Website
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Platform I played on: Nintendo DS
Game Summery
Sail the troubled seas of Hyrule. While saving the dashing Princess Zelda, upgrade your boat, weapons, and hearts. And of course don’t forget to look for treasure.
World and Story
This game is a continuation of the extremely engaging “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker” Game for the Nintendo GameCube.
It seems that the story is almost an immediate continuation, where Link finds himself back on the boat and promptly gets whisked off to his next adventure without so much as a pee break.
It is once again the waterlogged world of Hyrule, where the dashing Princess Zelda has been turned to stone and must be saved. The only way to accomplish this feat is to hunt down and defeat the Evil corrupting this wonderful land (water?).
Not having a boat of his own, Link teams up with a cranky captain who reluctantly helps him out for the promise of treasure. Helping is a bit strong of a word to use. He more comments from the sideline.
Link is also teamed up with a fairy guide. And of course there are a vast array of characters that Link meets and helps.
As always the story is linear and sweet. Link is compelled to help his friend Zelda and in the process helps many others. But the road to heroic victory is filled with puzzles and mysteries and quests. And weapons upgrades – lets not forget those. <3 <3 <3
Game play
This game lent itself to the DS touch pad extremely well. Everything in the game uses the touch screen, from combat to interface.
In the vast ocean that is this world there is a bunch to explore and treasure to find. There is still the heart collecting and finding different weapons and tools. These are then used in your exploration of the world and allow you to go places you haven’t been before. Like the grappling hook lets you pull yourself over a chasm that you couldn’t traverse before. This creates a nice reuse of some areas.
The game is, like most Zelda games, very well paced. New weapons or tools are introduced one at a time with a neat puzzle or dungeon that is devoted to the practice of said item. This allows for a very nice and easy learning curve.
Some of the dungeons have a timed element. If you run out of time (The sand in the Phantom Hourglass) you get punted out of the dungeon. Most games that have this time aspect I usually find terribly annoying, but in Zelda it never seemed that big of a worry.
They provided plenty of places inside the dungeon that would stop the loss of time, plus it was also possible to find ways to get some time back.
There really is so much to do in this game that I don’t think I can do it justice. It ended up being surprisingly deep and engaging, providing me with a wide variety of options – an incredibly smooth gaming experience.
Graphics
When I first saw Windwaker I wasn’t taken with the graphics. Needlessly I worried that the graphic style would disrupt my enjoyment of the game. Turned out that the game was so fabulous it could have been drawn in crayon and I would have enjoyed it.
The Phantom Hourglass was no exception. The graphics are the same cell shading that they pioneered in Windwaker. The art style has the same cute, cartoon like characters.
The cell shading almost gives the art a pop-up book feel – made of cardboard and glued together.
Replay ability
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of replay. The game saves right before you go to the final boss and then it’s over. You don’t get to travel in the world anymore once you have defeated the big bad.
I really was hoping to go back and collect all the treasure I had missed, play some of the mini games, and finish collecting my boat parts but the game is really not built for it.
Multiplayer
There is a battle mode, but I never played it. Not really interested in one vs. one battles. I was really hoping for Cooperative Zelda – any form of cooperation.
Game finished
Played all the way to the bitter end. I didn’t manage to beat all the mini games, collect all the ship parts, or upgrade all my weapons. But I did beat the big bad at the end. =)
I did come close to dredging up all the treasure. My plan had been to go back after I completed the main story line. Sadly that didn’t work out.
Things that bothered me
-Some of the mini games were really hard. Now I don’t mind having to practice and repeat them a bunch of times, but honestly the mini games are not interesting enough for me to want to play them more then a bunch of times.
On a few I didn’t even managed to come anywhere near the required score, even after trying quite a bit.
Thankfully none of the games or the prizes are required to save Princess Zelda. Otherwise my Zelda would still be stuck in stone.
-This game pretty much requires a cheat book. They might call it a guidebook but really its just one big long walk-though manual. There is no guiding here. Guiding requires subtlety, not the directness that I found in my handy cheat manual.
Okay so you can play the game without a guidebook, but I honestly don’t have the patience it requires to snoop in every possible nook and cranny to find every single treasure in every dungeon, and I really can’t do without all the nifty little hidden treasures.
The way I used the guide was that I played through an area or dungeon and once I finished it I would look through the guide to see what I missed. Then I would go back and pick up all the overlooked items and treasure.
The few times I did get stuck and looked things up, I was really happy to have the guide. It’s a fairly linear story, which makes progressing rather hard if you can’t figure out one little puzzle. Thankfully most of the game is easy to figure out if you take your time. I’m just not very patient some times.
-I missed Tingle.
Guide Book
The guidebook that I got was the Prima Games Premiere Edition. It was pretty good, but I would have liked a better index. Also there are a few discrepancies. Maybe the game was changed after the guide was already written.
Overall, three mushrooms for the guide. Well worth the money, and it increased my enjoyment of the game.
Time played
Okay so most DS games keep track of the time for me. How come this one didn’t? By the time I noticed, I was already half way through.
A pretty decent estimate is around 40 hours of playtime. It might have been more, but I seriously doubt it was less.
Rating
Mood Progression
Final thoughts
Best game I played in 2007. Now I didn’t play every game that came out in 2007, but I would probably still be playing this one if there were cooperative play or viable replay ability.
Tags: adoration, ds, puzzle, roleplaying
