Having played for a couple of hours, I’m somewhat conflicted about this game. I expected a Wind Waker sequel but Phantom Hourglass is more like a SNES/GBA Zelda with added sailing.
The view on land is top-down to make the stylus controls work. Unfortunately, the sprites are also huge compared to these older games which means the range of vision is extremely limited. When I enter a large room I literally have to run around the edges to figure out its shape and contents because only a small part fits on the screen at a time… that’s kind of dumb.
I was also expecting more of the wonderful quests we got in Wind Waker, like the photography stuff. But so far there really aren’t any quests at all – NPCs are mere signposts, and gameplay consists entirely of fighting and puzzle solving. It’s definitely more of a casual experience, if only because this type of gameplay can’t really hold my attention for very long.
That said, combat with the stylus works generally very well, and the puzzles are nicely designed, cleverly embedded in the game world, and just the right difficulty. Also: no differently sized purses! You can hold many hundred rupees right from the start. And you can even buy expensive and relevant stuff for your money. This might be the first Zelda with a working “economy”.
All told it’s a very good game, but unfortunately not a Wind Waker sequel in terms of gameplay, only in terms of story and setting.
Are you talking about Phantom Hourglass specifically? If so I don’t get it. The touch screen can be switched between left & right at the start of the game, and the button assignments are completely symmetrical.
Not that you need them – I would have liked some more useful button assignments but apparently they didn’t want to disturb the purity of their touch screen controls.
Okay, now that I’ve finished the game I have to retract my earlier statement about “casual” gameplay. That applies only to the first part of the game when you’re skippering about, trying to figure out what you can do yet.
But the intensity, difficulty, and overall quality of the gameplay ramp up mightily over the course of the game. This is one fantastic game, perhaps the best Zelda and the best DS game ever.
Pros: Fantastic dungeons, solid puzzles, imaginative weapons and enemies, intuitive physics, excellent boss battles, working economy, nice Wind Waker cartoon style and gameplay that alternates between ship and land, brilliant use of dual screen and touch screen, difficulty always finely balanced between rewarding and frustrating.
Cons: Ramps up slowly, one obscure side quest (the mermaid), one lapse into non-intuitive boss strategy (the precise time when you need to hit the final boss), one move that’s very hard to pull off (the somersault, fortunately rarely needed), Wind Waker graphics are too much for the DS (small viewing range, ugly textures in cutscenes).
Notably absent from Cons: The much-maligned backtracking into the timed dungeon. This is actually completely unproblematic – the dungeon is well-designed and interesting, you get plenty of time, you can continue for a good long while even when you run out of time, you get plenty of shortcuts with new weapons, and you even get extra chests along these shortcuts. So don’t fret about it!
Chris, you say it’s the best Zelda game. I dunno how much I usually agree with you, though, so, uh… how does it compare to the others, specifically? Link to the Past is probably my favourite, barring it being very, very generic later. I didn’t really get on with Ocarina of Time but Wind Waker was great. Am I likely to enjoy this? From your pros/cons it looks like it, but I’d appreciate your input.
Yes! The game feels a like a mix of Wind Waker and the classic 2D Zeldas, and from the (much longer) NeoGAF thread it seems that Phantom Hourglass splits the Zelda audience in the same way that Wind Waker did. Apparently the Japanese like Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass whereas Americans like the traditional style of Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess… so I guess we’re Japanese after all.
I enjoyed PH, but one problem I had was that the game had abit of trouble recogizing some of the symbols you had to draw for certain puzzles/events. It seems that it’s based less on what the symbol looks like but more on how you made it.
The triforce symbol has an arrow that tells you where to start drawing, and in what direction, so I do think that matters. I generally didn’t have much trouble with that, except the hourglass shape which apparently needs to be drawn really quickly.
