Matthew Fioti
Staff Writer

The sequel to Nintendo’s 2006 game The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks is the second in the series’ recent titles for the Nintendo DS. The games in the Zelda series generally revolve around Link, who, armed with a sword, must fight his way through a variety of dungeons based around a central item, namely bombs, or a boomerang.

The DS Zelda entries are set apart from the other titles in the series with their cel-shaded graphics, more child-friendly approach, and most radically, their control scheme. Utilizing the touch screen of the Nintendo DS, Link is controlled by using the stylus to tap where Link should move on the screen and by drawing a circle on the edge of the screen to dodge roll and sword fighting is conducted by making a swipe with the stylus or tapping on an enemy.

The control scheme has since been tightened from Phantom Hourglass. Rarely does Link ever make stray swipes with his sword, and the dodge roll action is now much more executable as a double tap with the stylus. This leads to its own problems, of course, with accidental dodge rolls taking place when the player rapidly taps multiple enemies. The spin attack, used to attack surrounding enemies, is slightly more difficult to pull off, as well.

Sprit Tracks follows Link, a newly certified train conductor. When Princess Zelda is murdered by her chancellor, Link must rescue her body to prevent the chancellor’s plans of resurrecting the Demon King. To prevent the resurrection of the Demon King, Link, with the help of Zelda’s ghost, must restore the Spirit Tracks, a set of railroad tracks that have served as chains to the Demon King.

It’s a fun story, but it’s little more than a reason to string together a series of dungeons. Once the game’s setup is explained within the initial hour of the game, it is rarely spoken of again until the game’s end, and Zelda is reduced to little more than a reminder of what to do next.

Just as Phantom Hourglass used a boat as its primary form of transportation, Spirit Tracks allows the player to control a train to navigate the game’s overworld. As the transportation is linear, conducting the train is rather hands-off. Unfortunately, the train is incredibly slow moving, and the majority of the game takes place just going to the dungeons.

Combat during the train-conducting sequences also suffers slightly. While Spirit Tracks sports some of the best visuals on the Nintendo DS, the game has an incredibly poor draw distance. All too often the game’s enemies cannot be seen until they’re right on top of the train. Once an enemy does attack the train, it’s also difficult to see them. The game’s camera shifts each time the train turns a corner, and changing the camera angle is slow, allowing for the enemies to get a lot of cheap shots.

Luckily, the dungeons themselves are quite fun, and well laid out, and Spirit Track’s puzzles are better than its predecessor’s. The puzzles are still primarily observation-based though, and feel almost directly out of Phantom Hourglass, and the puzzles requiring using items in clever ways are not only the most challenging, but ultimately the most rewarding.

Spirit Tracks also introduces two new items for its dungeons: the whirlwind and the whip. The whirlwind is used to spin windmills or light torches, taking over a few of the boomerang’s purposes. The whip suffers from quite a few problems, however. While jumping from pole to pole is quite fun, the other aspects of the whip feel rather phoned in. Combat with the whip feels too imprecise and the puzzles related to its abilities are nearly all observation based, or are overly simple, and feel pointless.

The dungeons’ bosses are spectacular though, with the screen panning out into a full 3D view to take in the scope of the enemies. The game’s bosses are not only great to look at, but also fun figuring out how to defeat, with one boss even requiring an elemental puzzle to solve. None of the bosses are particularly difficult, however, as the focus is not so much on combat but discovering how to hit the enemies.

The game’s crowning achievement in its dungeon design is the Tower of Spirits. While Phantom Hourglass’ Temple of the Ocean King left players dreading returning to it, the Tower of Spirits doesn’t require any of the backtracking found in Phantom Hourglass, and, through clever design turns what was Phantom Hourglass’s greatest weakness into the game’s greatest strength.

In the Tower of Spirits, Zelda has the ability to possess Phantoms, giant armored guards. Once Zelda is inside the Phantom, the Phantom can be controlled by using the stylus. Waiting for the Phantom to catch up with Link feels tiresome, and Zelda often ends up bumping into walls.

The puzzles implementing the two are fun, namely those in which Zelda must distract an enemy while Link sneaks behind its back, or attacks it from behind, or must guide Link to a path.

It’s a pity then that the Tower of Spirits is the game’s only major turn-around from Phantom Hourglass. While Hourglass does feel virtually unplayable in comparison, Spirit Tracks feels more like a patch than anything, and what may be its biggest challenge is the fact that it’s the second Zelda DS title, leading many to overlook the game entirely. Spirit Tracks is an incredibly solid, fun adventure that’s comes eagerly recommended, but it doesn’t feel like enough of a change after three years of development.

With Phantom Hourglass, Nintendo proved that stylus controls could work with Zelda, and in Spirit Tracks, Nintendo has further developed their technology. While Nintendo’s aim to younger audiences is certainly noble, I can only hope that the third Zelda DS title focuses more on creating well-designed puzzles throughout the game, with an excellent story to boot.