Platform: DS (Played on a 3DS)
Developer: Nintendo
Genre: Action, Third-person, Puzzle
Gameplay Stats: 16/20 Stamps, 11/16 hearts, 21/40 rabbits
This game frustrates me so very much. I'll get into why here in just a bit.
Visual: This game looks pretty good for a DS game. Similar to Phantom Hourglass before it, Spirit Tracks looks as much like Wind Waker as it can given the limitations of the DS hardware. Every aspect of the look of this game was crafted lovingly in keeping with the style and tone of the game. The characters, the monsters, the NPCs, the trains, and the environments all look great. Even the items in the character's houses in each of the cities fit both the tone of the game and of the area. When you are using the items, the animations look smooth, and it's mostly easy to see the environmental cues necessary to progress. It's a little hard to control precise movements due tot he game's zoom and the necessity to control the game with the touch screen, but that's my only complaint about the graphics. The GUI looks very nice as well. It keeps with the train aesthetic while being clear and conveying what it needs to very well
Audio: Pretty standard for a Zelda game to be entirely honest. By which I mean that the sound effects and soundtrack are both lovely. Every track in the game sounds pleasant and is well suited to the area in which it is played. The sound effects from enemies, events, and even Link are pretty perfect too. A lot of this game is kind of re-used from Phantom Hourglass, but you can see where they have had a bit of time to hone their craft. I'm going to look for an actual instrumental version of the soundtrack to see what it would sound like when it wasn't limited by the DS hardware which I think is a pretty big compliment.
Story: None of the Zelda games, apart from maybe Majora's Mask, are especially known for having a nuanced story. Spirit Tracks is much in the same vein, where the story is pretty predictable and there's not especially much in the way of character development. The writing for the characters is well done however, and seeing the characters interact is pretty generally enjoyable. I think it's important to note that this game keeps in the modern Zelda tradition of including a lot of puns. One of the central characters is named Anjean, which is a play on Engine, and when I figured that out towards the end of the game I had quite a hardy laugh.
I know what you're thinking... Ryan, you said this game frustrated you, but you've given nearly universal praise. What gives? Well, here's where I get to vent...
Gameplay: After a little more praise. Spirit Tracks has some of the best puzzles in the whole series. All 6 of the items that you get in the game are meaningfully different and change the way you interact with the world in different ways. Now the shit throwing. The game is almost entirely controlled via the touch screen. The buttons are used a little bit, but 95% of the control for this game is done with the touch screen. Your mileage may vary, but I absolutely hated this. Some of the precision controls that are necessary for the platforming parts are difficult to perform because of a mixture of the zoom and the control scheme, so I fell off ledges pretty frequently. It could have been my unfamiliarity with the touch screen on the DS/3DS, but using buttons feels so much better! The imprecision of the touch screens is exactly my biggest gripe with smart phone games as well. It just doesn't feel as nice as some analog buttons. I felt like a completely new gamer again and not at all in a good way. The controls broke the immersion of the game and I was often sighing as I would roll into enemies instead of slash or jump headfirst into bottomless pits. I don't normally have these issues, so it was almost embarrassing. The instrument that you get in Spirit Tracks is a pan flute. Much of the music in the game includes a pan flute and it fits pretty well with the train theme. The rub though, is that to play the flute you need to blow into the mic which likes to hide under your wrist if you're right handed. So this means you need to hold the stylus with your left hand to select the notes while you blow into the mic, or you need to use a very odd claw grip with your right hand. All in all, not a huge complaint. It's annoying, but doable. However, the 3DS mic doesn't seem to like being blown into and will break up the steady stream of air into little bursts. The game wants steady streams of air, and unless you provide steady streams of air you have to do a few of the little duet sections over and over again. There were several that literally only required a steady stream of air and dragging the flute a small amount to hit all of the notes, but with the 3DS mic I was being made to do each section several times until the mic cooperated. Maybe there was a trick to it that I didn't pick up on, but it frustrated the hell out of me. In the final boss fight you have to do one of these duets and that was the section that took me by far the longest. Close to 15 minutes to play the same series of 6 notes, 4 times in a row. If I had done it flawlessly, the whole scene would have taken maybe 1 minute.
I'd really love to recommend this game, but I honestly can't. If Nintendo re-releases this game with a way to use the damn buttons on the controller/console instead of the bloody touch screen and mic, I would absolutely recommend it. As it stands, I probably won't ever touch this game again since the controls hampered my enjoyment so much. Finishing this game was one of the greater slogs in my recent memory of gaming... The game was largely so well done, but in my opinion the controls make it fall so terribly flat. 3/10
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