Zelda continues downhill in this childish and drawn out fetch-questathon with less dungeon material than ever before.
What a ridiculously horrible premise Spirit Tracks makes. Trains mixed in with the Zelda universe of high fantasy. Only Miyamoto and Nintendo have the audacity of taking something so sub par and expecting everyone to love it anyway.... and don't they all. On the other hand on a garbage console like the DS with it's pathetic hardware and barely functioning outdated systems the game's polish and production values sparkle and shine.
CHARACTERS
I won't kid you, I HATE the stupid 4 year old characters and the lame one sided forced interactions in Zelda games. I always have. Even in Link to the Past there were a couple of characters I really wanted to put to the sword.
Miyamoto and his team are incapable of raising the bar and of creating a world which feels magical but at the same time more mature. They are forever stuck in this low grade representation of Hyrule where everyone is a paper thin two dimensional character and everything is predetermined in sometimes the most irritating and nonsensical manner possible.
And why do I have to play as an 8 year old? Wind Whacker introduced this kiddie version of Hyrule where adults are all retarded and useless and the masters of the universe seem to be toddlers in diapers. What kind of messed up world do these designer live in? Can't they move on.... can't they expand their story telling in such a way that it looks at a grander philosophy?
What's with the Locomos? Not just the name but the whole concept.... little wheelchair bound people with steam coming out of their butts? Is this Nintendo's way of showing acceptance for handicapped people?
They kinda forgot the Zoras which is funny because out of all the alien races they were the most pivotal in the old games. Instead we get some half bird, half deer, walrus people who all speak like the dudes from "Strange Brew" and the "Great White North"... basically like morons.
Again we have an entire world populated by 15 people split up into 5 different "races" with not enough males and females between them to ensure the survival of "intelligent" life in Hyrule. They are all horrible little greedy and self centered people who are all oblivious to the fact that their world will end and will gladly charge Link massive amounts of ruppees for the most useless junk. They all try to be funny and cute but at the end of the day everything is preset and they might as well be a just a button that you press with a
consequence instead of wasting your time on long winded pointless dialogues.
STORY
There are so many Zelda games and the links (hahaha) between them are so tenuous that at one point they decided to invent new bad-guys. This is fine. After all how many times can you put Ganon down before you begin to question what's the point if he just get's back up each time.
I really don't have much to say about the story..... except how come Zelda didn't figure out that Cole, her adviser was a demon... he's wearing two friggin' hats for god's sake, and he's got sharp demon teeth, and not to mention the bad attitude. What will it take for someone to take a hint?
Other than that the story is standard Zelda phantasy garble, not interesting enough to care about, and not bad enough in the presented context to care about either.
GENERAL GAME DESIGN
So let's talk trains. Cause that is supposed to be the "BIG" attraction when it comes to Spirit Tracks.
You know I remember when I liked trains, it was when I was 4-6 years old. And when you look at the rest of the game, the setting, the colours, the lame characters, the giant heads, the 5 year old atmosphere, it's true that Zelda DS games are really meant for young children. Too bad that the controls and game-play are simply not on a level that these children could enjoy. Why is it that most fans of the Zelda franchise are 25 + yet Miyamoto and Nintendo seem to want to make games for their great grandchildren. Strange....
But getting back to trains. Since Link to the Past the Zelda franchise has been suffering from nice dungeons surrounded by boring, massive and empty outside environments with nothing to do and very little to see.
(Wind Wacker and Twilight Vomit were both notorious for their flat empty landscapes) The DS compounded this problem with it's ability at pushing only a minimum amount of polies and art that dates back to the 3D console stone age.
So we got a world that we need to traverse and no real way of doing it properly due to hardware restrictions and lack of design ideas. "I know" yells one of Miyamoto's underlings (who's been chained to his desk since 1997) let's put a bunch of railway tracks all over the entire world of Hyrule. This way the player will be forced to travel only along linear paths, they will not be able to truly interact with anything, we can drag out game-play time to horrendous amounts with annoying fetch quests and painful distances and the environments can be as drab and simple as we want because we're seeing it from a train's point of view." Miyamoto smiles and Nintendo smiles too.
Although you can waste tremendous hours looking for randomly spawning junk in order to get bamboozled by this jerk of a guy for extra train parts... why would you ever want to? The different trains don't move faster, they don't fire better cannon balls, they don't have more passenger space, cargo areas. They just look different.
But for the massive amount of time it takes to unlock them all it really isn't worth it at all. If you unlock 1 other than the original and manage to somehow suffer your way to getting the Gold one you can get more life points for your train. This is only useful in the final train battle. So don't waste your time.
Blowing the horn on the train was fun for the first 5 minutes after which time I got so bored with the whole train thing that I actually turned off the game and had to come back later.... yes, I came back because I wanted to see for myself why people love something so monotonous and lacking in entertainment value.
In Ocarina of Time somebody thought it would be cool for the player to play tunes on a make believe instrument, and it was a great idea. Now after X games the idea is boring and lame. You get a pan pipe because the Japanese have finally realized that nobody knows or cares about ocarinas. Blowing into the microphone on the DS is just as frustrating and painful in this game as any other game that attempts to use this sad hack of a
gimmick. To make it worse you have to blow into the microphone from a proper angle, really close while you move the pan pipes using the stylus using your hand on the bottom screen and while you're trying to not pop out an eyeball as you try to see what's the next note from your difficult angle of view. The microphone doesn't work well and even though the songs are ridiculously easy it doesn't always work. And worst of all why is this supposed to be fun? People have this messed up idea that "interacting" with the game in as realistic a manner as possible is the way to make it fun. Well let me tell you that, that is absolutely false. Tetris has nothing to do with reality, you press buttons and use a D-pad yet it's one of the most time tested and fun games in video game history. Slapping a crappy microphone which cannot detect anything except On/Off and using it over and over again in a game isn't cool, it isn't new, and it isn't fun.
And last but not least we come to Zelda. Although you don't play as her, you do play as Phantoms with her controlling inside. Pretty good idea. Too bad that controlling 2 characters at once is not particularly fun but at least the way they pulled it off wasn't the worst I've seen. Making her move around isn't the easiest and her pathfinding isn't too well tuned either so that you often have to run back to get her.
She can carry Link on her shield but only in certain places and can replace Link's boomerang to light areas without torches and break objects instead of Link using bombs. So actually her only useful attribute is to carry Link across Lava Pits. She cannot kill other Phantoms and her movement and path following is kinda slow so she might arrive at an enemy's position and the enemy is no longer there. Also tracing her path is slow and painful since you cannot see far enough ahead in the dungeon to know if you're directing her
into a dead end or what. She can also only be used in the Tower of Spirits cutting her appearances down considerably.
So here are a couple of other things that really pissed me off. The game breaks it's own design when you go to the Pirate Lair and suddenly you're riding a cart firing arrows like mad. You have unlimited arrows yet in the rest of the game you're forced to deal with only a limited amount at a time. Consistency people! You can't nerf the player's abilities whenever you feel like it in order to shore up bad design.
The Pirate Lair was the most horribly limited side quest yet that involves pirates. Wind Whacker did it better and even Phantom Hourglass was more engaging. 1 lame-ass room where all you do is a carnival style shooting game? So lame, it just depressed me.
You'll laugh but another thing that pissed me off is that Papuchia village is drawn on the wrong side of the tracks on the main map. It's the only area which is incorrectly placed... I know it's lame but it sticks out like a sore thumb every time one of my many monotonous side quests takes me in that direction.
Then there is "Teacher" some annoying character who goes around the world looking for Zelda. He is the only character who will keep showing up an unlimited amount of times... his side quest never ends. Every other
character has 1 side quest each so you're really nervous when you screw them up... but this guy his side quest is completely pointless, just to get you some cash... but there is no way to know that. So when you screw up his quest the first time, you might think that you just messed up your save game and be thinking of resetting which would be a big mistake. I never reset because I just didn't care but it did piss me off when I realized the difference.
Nintendo must touch on every gimmick the DS has to offer and so they have some "online" "multiplayer" game-play that they tacked on so that they can add it to the back of the box. Zelda games have been trying for god knows why to tap into the multiplayer market on the handheld scene for years. Instead of wasting resources and time on this half baked addition why not put more dungeons, or upgrade the story line or fix the controls... so much wasted on something nobody will ever appreciate.
CONTROLS
The atrocity! As usual Link is controled by the Stylus so that half the time your own hand obscures the environment and you cannot see where you're tyring to go.
Tapping the stylus to attack and to roll creates massive amounts of screaming frustration especially during time trial races when "Dink" will refuse to roll only to wave his sword around. The stylus positioning isn't perfect either so that "Dink" will not always move precisely where you want him to move.
Worst of all are the puzzles where you have to jump gaps or place "Dink" in a particularly precise position especially near a precipice... and there are a lot of those. Link will randomly roll, leap and throw himself into spikes, into pits, and into enemies. When trying to block attacks using Link's shield you cannot turn him in the proper direction in the limited amount of time you have to react to most danger (although even if you had all the time in the world the controls wouldn't allow it) and Link will roll or move quickly into an unwanted often deadly new position, creating precisely the situation that you wished to avoid or worse.
If you roll too much Link will become dizzy which is cute the first time but creates a hindrance when trying to get from A to B at faster than a snails pace. Link moves ridiculously slowly through environments that are drab and empty making the track a chore. Link never got dizzy in any of the pre-DS games and it was an asinine decision to punish the player for wanting to move faster.
Why can't Link swim? It's like we are going backwards in time. Instead of improving their games they make them worse. Link could swim on all console games since Link to the Past, albeit with some items (that
would work automatically once found... and not have to be equipped each time), but not in the DS games. There is an awful lot of water, because it's cheap art-wise and so Link spends lot of time falling into the drink
or trying to get around 1 meter wide gaps with 2 feet of water depth.
I actually enjoyed controlling the train for what it was worth. If only you could have had more upgrades to the trains and tracks and actual game-play when on the tracks instead of sitting around being bored.
With different types of trains and extra carriages I might have bought more into the whole train transporting thing, but not in the bare bones manner that it was presented in Spirit Tracks. That would have also allowed the different trains to drive differently, maybe you could lose carriages or even have
multiple trains that work for you generating income, town upgrades or character quests and interactions...but all that was not to be.
COMBAT
Link's most basic attack include the sword and 3 different attacks. Once again you're using the stylus and because the controls are so bad you cannot place yourself properly next to enemies, or objects. So Link has a horizontal slash attack that becomes completely useless due to these problems, but never fear he can leap attack or strike anything by the player simply tapping any target on screen. Of course the DS stylus is not super precise and so you must constantly double tap or triple tap an enemy depending on how far you're from it in order for "Dink" to actually deal some damage. Link doesn't upgrade his sword until the end of the game so you're going to be hacking away at enemies for the same amount of time all through the game.
The last and most useful move is the spin attack, which causes 2X the damage of a regular tap attack and due to the range and 360 degree hitbox be the one that any player will be using most often. It's also the only attack that seems to be immune to the horrible isometric camera allowing you to hit and protect yourself when your depth perception fails you. Too bad some moron at Nintendo decided to nerf the attack by making Link dizzy after spinning 3 times in a row. Thank god that the enemy AI is retarded and that you only get
attacked by 2-3 enemies at once ever... if you're unlucky. Mostly it's one enemy at a time.
As soon as you get some of your other weapons like the boomerang or bow you will use those to dispatch most enemies anyway so that fighting with the sword becomes mostly a boring last resort when nothing else seems to work.
Of course these secondary weapons come with a major disadvantage. To use them you must pick them out of your inventory..... only 1 at a time of course.... (in some other games you could have 2 items at a time)
and then you have to tap an icon to activate them and finally you have to interact with the touch screen in order to have them do something all the while the game is running in real time, so of course you cannot fire a bow or throw your boomerang while moving/strafing, you cannot raise a sand walkway while walking forward and the list goes on. Fighting bosses is a major pain because you are often stuck in a position that quickly
turns bad but you cannot get out fast enough, because you're in frozen retard aim mode. The bombs funnily enough don't suffer from this because they are still based on the old nay ancient original Zelda controls.
Sure we all love that aiming your bow and tracing your boomerangs path is all cute and precise using your stylus but even there it doesn't work perfetly. The boomerang runs into objects bouncing back prematurely
because you cannot see with the path trace mechanics if you have enough room. When firing an arrow straight at at a location it's devilishly hard to hit straight on because Link is always a couple of degrees off. So, so
much for being more precise with the stylus. Sure it's great that we can now aim at angles or fire twice at a target if we first missed, but I really don't see the positive overall impact on game-play. The old system worked fine with its limitations, at least it was precise and consistent.
And lastly the game will at certain moments disactivate the item after you've used it and sometimes it won't. So there are moments when you wish it would have removed it so that you could follow up with a sword attack or movement to defend yourself while at other times you wish to fire a second time if your first shot missed. However since it lacks consistency you can never tell which will happen. And either way not being able to do more than 1 thing at a time when the world moves in real time around you is a definite disadvantage for an action game.
USER INTERFACE (UI)
The UI has been dummed down so that even a 2 year old can understand it. Gone are the days when you needed to care that Link had 3 different shields, swords and armours. No more do you have to care about any of the junk that Link will fill his inventory with. None of it matters. Only 1 thing at a time
matters and the UI does an excellent job of showcasing how much less there is when it comes to Link's abilities and items.
The map has been slightly improved and although drawing on it is still painful due to the lack of space, because there are so few things to do in the world of Spirit Tracks in general you have space enough for what you will need to scribble down. And yes, drawing on the map is still a cool feature.
There is the train and the battle interface both of which suffer from the same problem. To change Link's facing direction or the camera on the train you must interact with the screen using your stylus unfortunately you have interactive elements that crowd the left side of the screen meaning when you're trying to do something with your limited point of view you keep tapping on the interactive UI elements and not moving the camera like you would like and vice versa. How bloody annoying is that. And it's all thanks to that turd of a control scheme using the stylus.
CAMERA
The amount of the environment you see is so ridiculously limited that you can barely see far enough and so must constantly use the boomerang or the arrows to stretch out your point of view artificially in order to get a better lay of the surroundings. In the Tower of Spirits a quicker if not less painful way is to use Zelda's path drawing ability to move the camera around the level so that you can actually see what you're dealing with.
The camera is placed in a horrid semi isometric fashion so that you have a very difficult time telling the true distance between objects especially vertically. This causes "Dink" to fall often into lava pits or other dangers when trying to leap between places or navigating the environment. A more top down view much better fits the Zelda franchise and for good reason. Link to the Past anyone?
ART & ENVIRONMENT
3D on the DS is like expecting a toddler to win an Olympic race. It's ugly, it's glitchy, and it creates so many limitations that everything including the combat, characters and environments suffer. However the masses don't seem to understand that the DS is a 2D machine and that trying to crush low grade 3D graphics onto it's miniature screens will never amount to great visuals or improved game-play. So as usual the crowds of eager purchasers with obviously so much money that they don't know what to do with it will gladly shell out exorbitant amounts of money for broken 3D on a 2D machine.
Despite all the drawbacks of 3D on the DS thanks to the tiny combat areas and minuscule dungeons with their midget sized rooms Nintendo can afford some decent textures making the areas quite attractive visually if not
diverse.
The look of the enemies and characters is marvelous for the number of polys used and their animations are very well done. The bosses look impressive and everything about the game visually stands out despite all on the DS going against its success. Especially the intro screen. When the game loads you are instantly drawn to the over polished look that the intro video showcases, too bad the rest of the game is a mere shadow of what it promises.
LEVEL DESIGN
Believe me I don't mind when something is re-hashed, re-used or repeated if it's fun and well done.
And that is why I don't mind that almost all of the items are identical to previous games, in fact all the way back to the first 2 games. Why did they switch out the hook shot for a whip? It does exactly the same thing, but worse because it has no range. Also when you swing across the logs? (that are placed in precisely the right location to be used by someone with a magical and unique whip?) sometimes a log will be placed lower
than all the others and Link instead of grabbing onto it will plummet to his death. For some bizarre reason Link cannot whip whenever he wants to but at precise moments only......people complained about the lasso/whip
in the "Ice Age 3" game on DS but Zelda ST isn't able to do it any better.
Yay for the stupid rabbit catching game. I wouldn't mind the actual game, although the timing is very difficult, except that you have to do it 5X10 times. And Ocean rabbits? What the hell? I'm using a net, from inside my train? Were there no better ideas than this kicking around?
I really liked the Sand Wand item that allowed Link to raise the collision & sand in certain areas. What a great concept ruined partially by the horrible controls. And only if it was used more.
Using the whip on birds to get to different areas was very long and painful, in fact this entire game can be summed up with those words, "SLOW & PAINFUL" instead of allowing Link to get around quickly everything
including the train tracks is made to drag out the sordid game-play as long as possible. You will have played for 20 hours half of which was spent watching your character move from location to location. Where is the ability to warp whenever you want to a preset or better yet player defined location? Where are Link's dashing boots? Not in this game that's for sure.
Zelda games have another major problem and that is the lack of use for the equipment you find in dungeons outside in the rest of the world. This rears it's ugly head instantly in Spirit Tracks with certain items getting only 1 or 2 uses outside of their own dungeon. What's the point of creating a game-play mechanic if you're not going to bother giving the player the chance to truly use it?
In general the game is too empty, both on the world map, in the different locations and in the dungeons themselves. Each of the main dungeons would only qualify as a side dungeon in a real console Zelda game.
Why are we being jipped with only these half sized areas?
The lack of upgrades or truly useful items and abilities is the other bane of quality games that shows it's face quickly. Link has only 1 shield, 1 sword, 1 armour, with a change for each that does nothing for game-play.
You can upgrade your bombs and your arrows but why would you care or want to. You can also find heart tanks but with everything being such a pain in the ass by the time you're given the chance it's best to pass on it.
The game is really not that hard to beat and since all the dungeons and areas are so small, and even if you die the dungeons save what you've already done you don't really need the extra hearts or items to get to the end.
MUSIC & VOICE ACTING
The music is fairly catchy and horrible at the same time. All the dungeons have the same crummy track, whenever you're on the bleeding train you're listening to the same brain numbing 10 second loop. It's enough to make anyone go mad, and it does because it sticks in your mind even if you don't like it.
The sound effects are the same as in the previous DS game.... I still hate Link's guttural screams every time he swings his sword.....annoying as all hell.
CONCLUSION
This game is a disappointment even when compared to the Phantom Hourglass, and that game suffers from major problems and irritations. The number of areas to visit and the sizes and interest of the dungeons themselves is lacking. Most of the game is filled with the player falling asleep as Link drives his lame little train along bland environments.
However if you loved Phantom Hourglass than you're already set in your ways and I'm sure that you're going to greatly enjoy this one as well.
If however you've been around since the beginning of the Legend of Zelda then get ready. For here is what you're going to get. You will get a game that is a sad and mediocre Zelda title with aggravating controls, pathetically small and insignificant dungeon sections and a couple of decent puzzles. The rest of your time will be spent on a bloody rail on a simple train doing boring fetch
quests at a snails pace on a massive empty map. On the DS ,and that is critical to remember that it's on the mediocre DS, the visual quality of the work is truly astounding but you gotta ask yourself why are you settling for a game with under developed game-play on a bad machine when you could be
playing something else on a better system or revisiting Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time.