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The Legend of Zelda and The Phantom Hourglass is a first for the series world in a couple of ways. The most obvious being that it’s the first Zelda game for the DS and the less obvious being that it’s my first experience with the Zelda series. Yes, The Phantom Hourglass popped my Zelda Cherry I’m not sure if that makes me more or less qualified to give an appropriate review, but we’ll see how this goes…

As far as DS games go, this one is beautiful. Usually for the DS I’m not a big fan of anything that tries to be 3D, but Zelda is among the few that I consider to pull it off very well. The controls were easy to get used to and flowed very nicely. The only negative thing I have to say about that is I would have preferred to have the option of using the D-pad as the calibration on my DS touch screen is off and try as I can, I’m unable to fix it. However, despite poor calibration on my part, I was still able to play the game easily and it didn’t mess me up in any way (where as with games like Picross I do need to use the D-pad or I’ll make mistakes on accident that will cost me points/time). I’m not saying the controls were perfect, because there were definitely times when Link did something I didn’t want him to do because some of the sword movements are similar, but they were still pretty good considering this is Zelda’s first DS game.

The use of the second screen was pretty well done and helpful, as was the ability to make notes on the various maps of islands and sea charts. This saves you a lot of time, especially if you need to go back to a specific island or you want to remember which islands had stores on them, or even which levers to pull when you were in caves. When you’re sailing about, the top screen shows you an overhead map of your course and also lets you know if there are any enemies around that maybe you can’t see from that angle on the bottom screen.

The story is not quick and not always easy to sit down and just plow through. For me, it had the right combination of easy to not-so-easy puzzles. It had enough easy puzzles to motivate me to keep going, but it also had the not-so-easy ones that I occasionally had to find the answer to online which kept it from being too boring. It was definitely not too easy or too quick, it wasn’t a game that I beat within a matter of hours or even days. Although, had I sat down played nothing but Zelda, I would have beaten it in a matter of days, definitely not hours though.

Sadly, the entire review is not completely positive. There were definitely some things I absolutely hated about this game. First was the save feature. I’ve also briefly played Twilight Princess on the Wii and found the save feature to be the same on that. I thought “Save” meant it would save the game exactly where I was, as in, it would save me in the exact location I was when I pushed the save button. Alas, this was not the case. If I saved the game in the middle of a cave, it put me at the entrance of the cave when I loaded my game again. This made me crazy, especially if I was pretty far into a cave and just too sleepy to continue, and drove me to take full advantage of the sleep mode for the DS rather than saving and turning it off when I was done for the day. Once or twice, I did take advantage of that if I got stuck somewhere or just wanted to go fishing, but not often and I hated it more than I liked it.

Also, talk about repetitive! By the end of the game, I was screaming at my DS:

“If you make me go back to that stupid Sea King’s temple one more time I’m throwing you against a wall!’”

Five or six times the game sent me back to the same f-in temple, way past the point of absurdity. I could see going back to the same place a second time, maybe even a third time, but come on, six?? Wtf? Can we please be more creative than that? It was like the writers got stuck when coming up with the story and said, “Screw it, let’s just send ‘em back to the Sea King’s temple again until we come up with something else.” and that was it. Seriously, there were four quadraints to the map, was it REALLY necessary to send me back to one little temple six times?

Those are my two major complaints with the game, other than that I really enjoyed it and look forward to playing more Zelda games in the future! Overall, I give the game a 3 out of 5, half a point off being for the save feature and one and a half points off for the sending-me-back-to-the-freakin-temple-so-many-damn-times thing. I highly recommend this game for returning and new Zelda users.

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