KABUUM!

Today I beat Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the first time. I was motivated after seeing that recent trailer for Spirit Tracks the other day. This was actually my second attempt at beating the game, but it stopped at the same place: right before the last time entering the Temple of the Ocean King, aka that place that you have to go through TEN MILLION TIMES and it doesn’t change at all. Although I have yet to 100% the game (that’ll come soon now that I’ve beaten it), I feel I can now offer a full opinion on the game. Be warned! Thar be spoilers ahead on these waters:

Well, it’s not so amazing. It falls into the classic Zelda trope of, “Get item in dungeon. Use item in dungeon on boss. Put item away and never use again.” Although, Phantom Hourglass is mostly good about reusing items. The boomerang always got some pretty good use, and I have to admit I got some mileage from the grappling hook as well. But I don’t ever recall having to use the bombchus more than ten times outside of the initial dungeon.

But that’s not the main problem I have. My problem is that the game is just laughably easy. There wasn’t a single point where I felt that my hand wasn’t being held by the game designers. Maybe they thought the target demographic was different on the handheld console. I don’t know. Either way, I felt that too many things were just handed over to me. Show me the treasure chests in every floor of every dungeon for only 20 rupees? How can I refuse? And the final boss was a piece of cake, unfortunately (side note: Bellum? what an awful name. “Hey guys, let’s take the Latin word for war and not disguise it at all!”).

Aside from that one major complaints and a couple minor ones, I still felt that Phantom Hourglass was a good game. It had some good variety in it, brought some new things to the Zelda table, and was an okay sequel to my favorite Zelda game (yes, that’s right). BUT THE TEMPLE OF THE OCEAN KING. Once is enough. Maybe twice. But no. You’re forced through the same thing 5 times. It’s awful. But enough about that. It’s time to move on to rant Part II.

I think the Zelda series is getting stale. With Mario, you can have new levels and you don’t even need to change the formula around, because that’s just the nature of a platform game. But I think Twilight Princess and now Phantom Hourglass illustrate that without a really strong gimmick they can’t really stand out as Zelda games. Link to the Past had the Dark World. Ocarina of Time had time travel. Majora’s Mask had the masks. Minish Cap had shrinking. The wolf in Twilight Princess just wasn’t used well enough to make it interesting. The Phantom Hourglass itself isn’t really notable enough to be a major gimmick. I think Nintendo realizes this fact though, and I hope that Spirit Tracks and Zelda Wii are more than, “Well, Ocarina of Time was really good, let’s try and do that again.”