Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Available On: DS

The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda title to follow on from a predecessor, proving a wonderful sequel to the Gamecube’s “The Wind Waker” and an ingenious adventure game unrivaled by any other on the DS market.

Set after the events of The Wind Waker and set on a different chart of islands, Phantom Hourglass finds our beloved green Elven warrior Link again facing a set of trials and tribulations to both save the land (and sea) and yet another beloved imprisoned female companion. Coupling with a reluctant sea captain and an amnesiac yellow faerie Link must sail the seas from island to island, discovering the fate of his friends and the power behind the evil.

It’s rare that a familiar character base (especially a popular name from Nintendo) can emerge these days as fresh and new as Phantom Hourglass on the DS. While a lot of people have at least experienced one of Link’s past escapades, the control system on the DS coupled with the nautical sea-faring is interesting and instantly adaptive right from the start. The feeling of controlling Link via stylus is enjoyable and smooth, and though the odd accident may occur involving our hero leaping into oblivion off a close-by cliff, battles and puzzles are solved rapidly and fluently with nothing but a stylus and great collection of fun items (with a shoulder button in there sometimes).

There’s no doubt that the most interesting appeal of Phantom Hourglass is the control scheme. Hold the stylus against the touch screen and Link will follow, swipe for a sword slash and learn a variety of movements to roll, throw bombs, spin-slash, fire arrows, fling the grappling hook and more.

In fact, Phantom Hourglass feels so comfortable on the DS that it may be a largely contributing factor to the ease of difficulty. While Zelda on DS has massive appeal for many age groups, the older and more experienced players who have been following Link for years may find this adventure a little too easy. Combat is thoroughly enjoyable yet easily accomplished whenever rarely forced. It would have been nice to have a few more epic fights throughout Phantom Hourglass as the combat scheme seems unwarranted against such low difficulty and rare significant battles.

Puzzles are a creative affair, and occur quite frequently on nearly every island. It seems the people of Hyrule enjoy a complicated lifestyle, continually dooming their next generation to the slavery of interpreting several signs, switches, levers, caves, maps and more to do so much as find an old family album. Though I say this in an assumption that puzzle solving will eat a lot of time, it’s more the frequency of very easy puzzles that pads out Phantom Hourglass. Most puzzles are easily solvable once presented, to be followed up by a sudden character or sign pointing out what is fairly obvious in the first place. Despite the ease of dungeon navigation and puzzle solving in Phantom Hourglass, it’s hard to not enjoy the continual opportunities to combine great items and their touch-screen utilisation to navigate the many dungeons and hidden areas in Phantom Hourglass.

By far the easiest puzzles to solve would be that of one particular dungeon - the 3rd time around. While parts of this dungeon introduce some new elements (such as a very strong stealth theme) and variety to the mesh of advancing through Phantom Hourglass - quite literally players are forced to reventure it’s many floors several times resulting in some frustration.

Outside of the standard monster slaying and dungeon navigating you’d expect from a Zelda game, some significant elements can really boost the experience. First coming to mind is the utilisation of the top screen as both a map and note pad inside and outside of dungeons, even out at sea. A quick tap of the D-pad will pull the top screen map down, allowing players to draw freely on the map and leave many necessary notes for future reference. Used frequently, other methods of DS manipulation provide new puzzle experiences like you would never think of, as mentioning these could ruin the experience I’ll leave it at that.

With the variety of approaches the DS provides Phantom Hourglass, there are a lot of other islands to explore and treasure to find. With some tricky sea navigation, one could even discover “Dee Ess Island”, a large rock island in the shape of the Nintendo DS console.

As with most handheld titles a few nags of the DS system can cause embarrassing moments. Like a neglected friend or pet, Phantom Hourglass forces you to talk to it quite a bit. If you’re not a fan of chatting with portable gaming devices in public places - it won’t take long to realise that the game doesn’t actually map any voice patterns so merely blowing into the mic will provide the same result. While I continually slander the DS for it’s audio capabilities in general, Phantom Hourglass can actually present some pleasant sound bytes and a lot of familiar Zelda tunes that sound quite nice. Kudos to a DS game that can actually have some appeal to plugging in headphones and humming along.

While Phantom Hourglass has a few nags and is generally quite easy, the expansive and interactive world coupled with a wonderful control scheme and good length creates the best DS game on the market and a Zelda experience to rival it’s brethren.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

92%

The Good -

* A lavish Zelda adventure all in your hands.
* Unique controls assure continual fun.
* A lot to explore and do.

The Bad -

* Repeated dungeons.
* Generally quite easy.