Kevin Roberson

Most franchises change up the gameplay, setting and tools while telling essentially the same uninspired stories of power-armored space marines saving the galaxy. The Legend of Zelda series completely reverses this trend by telling wildly different stories about the same boy saving the same kingdom in exactly the same way every time.

Say what you will about repetition in franchises, but Zelda has found more original and thoughtful ways of endangering herself than Princess Peach could dream of. She’s been kidnapped, drowned, lost in time, possessed by demons and now had her soul removed from her body because for some reason the lord of evil wants to look like a ten year old girl.

It should come as no surprise that the way you go about reintegrating Zelda with her body is by traveling to the realms of forest, snow, fire and water to retrieve color coded rocks from dungeons made by an ancient ancestor of Alfred Binet, creator of the IQ test, to ascend some ultimate tower that has been converted from benign purposes to a ritual focus of utter evil and destroy a monster that was once a normal person turned mad magician.

If you’re a LoZ fan already you’ll have no problem accepting that previous sentence, but if you’re a casual DS owner who’s never gotten into Zelda, you’ll be feeling a little put off right about now. Good. Spirit Tracks doesn’t love you, casual DS owner. Spirit Tracks is for the fans; another Zelda game to fill the gap between Phantom Hourglass and the next installment for Wii. It isn’t bad, but it’s Zelda formula with almost no deviation or innovation. Not that there’s anyting wrong with that. If you have a good formula for a game, every other game made for that formula should only improve with time. But Zelda has always had a few quirks that have become beloved by the fans, but tend to ostricize the incoming crowd as they’re not qualities I would call good game design.

The most noticable problem with LoZ as a whole is it’s concept of a learning curve. Every challenge in the game’s dungeons are puzzles involving the unique properties of your items, not disimilar to a point and click adventure game. When you get an item, you’ll encounter a few puzzles along the lines of “light the torch” or “move that block” to teach you the properties of the item you’re holding. But puzzles are harder to design than rooms full of aliens and chest high walls, and so Spirit Tracks pole vaults from “good you lit the torch” to “now light dozens of torches in a pitch black maze full of monsters with a flaming boomerang as you’re only light source,” because designing lots of intermediary puzzles is hard.

LoZ, along with Metroid, also loves showing you strange paths that you can’t take, and objects you can’t interact with, to make you feel proud of yourself when you find the object that unlocks these areas. In practice, this means you never get ahold of an item until passing by many instances where it would have been useful. On it’s own this is just annoying, but it ultimately works its way into the realm of hair pulling rage when you spend twenty minutes trying to get to a chest the game wasn’t going to let you have anyway because you haven’t learned the song that makes the seagulls carry you across the water yet. For that matter, the game foregos any tutorial on how to learn songs and just figure’s you’ll pick it up because it’s the same as Twilight Princess. Of course Nintendo, we’ve all played Twilight Pricess. No one is going to encounter a puzzle that requires a song to solve and wander around for hours before checking GameFAQs to discover there was a rock they were supposed to whistle at two worlds ago.

The Legend of Zelda: Back Tracks, excuse me, Spirit Tracks, derives its name from the magical train tracks that allow you to travel to places you’ve already been so you can get all the stuff you missed when you were there. The tracks mysteriously disappear and it’s up to the Hero of Time to restore them so he can eventually save the princess. When driving around in your train you can shoot rocks with a magical cannon for money and fend off wildlife with your whistle. Later you must contend with pirates and raiders while changing your path to avoid evil demon trains that  will kamikaze you. This makes for a fun little minigame even if the frame rate does tend to chug along, pun intended, when you get attacked. This at least manages to keep the transit interesting, though not enough to justify how much of it you have to do.

The dialogue and story telling is top notch; Zelda is actually a character this time, rather than a damsel in distress, and her dialogue made me laugh a time or two. Even Link’s dialogue options are written with the American gamer in mind. “We’ve done well to have gotten this far,” says Zelda. Link responds, “go, us!”

The controls are touch screen only, using the face buttons to configure items and your map, and shoulder buttons to ready your items for use. I’m not sure what Nintendo found appealing about making the player block their own line of sight, but someone needs to explain to them that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Touch controls should be used responsibly, and these controls are all about the gimmick. Reversing the controls entirely, that is to say action commands on the face buttons and menu options on the touch pad, would be a significant improvement. But I suppose they can get away with this because no one complained about it in Phantom Hourglass.

Spirit Tracks features 4-way, single card multiplayer, which lets you and your friends run around collecting gold things in competition with one another while being chased by monsters. Fun for a few minutes, but not really a selling point. There are even Mario Kart style items to ensure that skill has nothing to do with the outcome of the game.

It’s fun and enjoyable despite its glaring flaws. It’s Legend of Zelda shovelware, but it’s about 20 hours long and on the DS, so it’s hard not to call an excellent value, even if you hate it. I can recommend it to fans, but it wont stand out in the franchise and if you aren’t into Legend of Zelda, this wont change your opinion.

Survivor… barely 4/5

Thirty bucks for a twenty hour game on a handheld. I mean, come on.