The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

Phantom Hourglass is at or near the bottom of virtually every Zelda ranking, including mine. If Spirit Tracks, its direct successor, was going to make a good impression, it had to put in a lot more work than usual. For what it’s worth, you can’t say the developers didn’t try. Several shortcomings of Phantom Hourglass have been addressed: the central recurring dungeon featuring stealth elements is considerably better designed, the soundtrack is much more expressive and versatile, and the story is more than perfunctory this time. Unfortunately, Spirit Tracks is still slavishly insistent on using the once-unique features of the DS – and only those features – for everything, which was the greatest sin of its father. It also adds a major annoyance of its own with what might be the worst traversal mechanic in the series.

Sailing in Wind Waker was infamously criticized for its emptiness, so Phantom Hourglass filled its oceans with shallow albeit frequent diversions. But Wind Waker’s beauty, atmosphere, and openness arguably redeemed the sailing gameplay, while Spirit Tracks looks decent at best, has a control scheme that actively impedes immersion, and takes place literally on rails. Most activities available during train segments are as one-note as their equivalents in Phantom Hourglass, so it’s basically the worst of both worlds. And the game makes you do it all the time; nearly every side quest and decent chunks of the main quest involve riding back and forth over the same stretches of track. The one place it comes alive is when you’re required to fulfill certain criteria to satisfy passengers while still fending off enemies as usual. The tactile sensation of the train’s various levers is satisfying, but not enough to make up for its hollow gameplay.

As for the on-foot controls, it’s Phantom Hourglass with some different items available. For every worthwhile use of the touch screen, like guiding the path of a boomerang or making map notes, there’s an aggravating counterexample, like accidentally walking into enemies or throwing items into lava, because every action has to share the same interpretable interface. It’s particularly ridiculous when having to switch between two characters repeatedly, when the obvious solution of controlling one with the D-pad and the other with the touch screen is staring you right in the face. The second character in question is actually Zelda herself, in her first playable appearance – as a ghost possessing magical suits of armour, no less. It’s part of a larger Link-Zelda dynamic that’s quite possibly my favourite incarnation of the pair across the whole series, propelled by the occasional unusually self-aware writing. I wish it was tied to an installment where there weren’t so many caveats to entertainment.