"The Legend of ChooChoo: Phantom, the Friendly Ghost"

There’s something we all need to come to grips with right now: Link rides a train. Why does Link ride a train? I have no idea, but let’s just get past that for now.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks demo was divided into three sections. Each one had a different focus. The first one put you in a dungeon with your new Phantom pal. The other scenarios showed off a boss battle and Link’s latest wacky vehicle, the train. Thanks to multiple visits to the Nintendo booth, I was able to try out all three.

I selected the dungeon scenario first. Controlling Link is identical to how it was in Phantom Hourglass. Dragging the stylus around will make Link walk and drawing a quick line will have him perform a slash. What made things interesting was Link’s new Phantom friend.

Controlling the Phantom is done indirectly. If you put your stylus on the Phantom and draw a path, he will slowly follow it. Clicking on objects will have him interact with them, whether that be hitting a switch or an enemy. Thankfully, there is a call button to command him to follow you so that you don’t have to constantly be drawing paths while you move around the dungeon.

The Phantom appears to be invincible. Because of this, you have to use him to get past obstacles that would normally harm our fragile hero, Link. One example is lava pits. Disregarding all empathy, you can send the Phantom into a pool of lava, jump onto the safety of his head, and tell him where to go. Another part of the dungeon required me to have the Phantom walk across one path to block streams of fire while Link walked across a lower path. This also caused me to be separated from my ghostly chum temporarily before solving another simple puzzle. Other uses of the Phantom were pretty predictable, such as having him stand on buttons or hit switches.

The item I found in the dungeon allowed me to shoot tornadoes by blowing into the microphone. It’s similar to the gale boomerang in Twilight Princess, except without the boomerang. I’ve never been fond of blowing into the microphone to perform actions, but it seemed to work well enough.

The boss scenario was everything you would expect from a standard Zelda boss fight. I had to use the dungeon’s item in a two-form battle with a giant beetle. Much like Phantom Hourglass, the battle took place on both screens.

Now what you’ve all been waiting for: the train. If you thought the boat in Phantom Hourglass was boring, I have some bad news: the train isn’t much better, if at all. In fact, a few of the train’s controls are lifted straight from the boat. Tapping the screen will shoot bombs out of your cannon, breaking rocks and destroying enemies. The right side of the screen has your throttle. There are two different forward speeds, stop, and reverse. Finally, there is a rope you can pull to sound your horn.

To allow you to still control where you are going, there is a switch at the bottom of the screen that controls which track to go on in conjunctions. One thing the train has over the boat is scenery. Looking at a lot of flat areas covered in blue gets old really fast, so it’s nice to see some landscape. I even had the pleasure of going through a tunnel with enemies crawling on the walls and ceilings.

I’m disappointed that Nintendo still feels that we need a vehicle to traverse the overworld map. The horse featured in Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess was a fine addition as it was fun to use and didn’t impair your freedom to roam the world. Both the boat and train feel like a chore, dumbing down the very thing that made me fall in love with the series in the first place: exploration.

Fortunately, I had a lot of fun playing the dungeon scenario. In fact, controlling the Phantom was much more enjoyable than I thought it would be. When I played Phantom Hourglass to completion, my enjoyment started high went downhill by the hour. I can only hope that Spirit Tracks doesn’t suffer the same fate.

Tags: hands-on impressions, Nintendo, nintendo ds, PAX '09, PAX 2009 COVERAGE, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Zelda

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.