The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
Nintendo DS/DSi
Nintendo
Rating: Everyone 10+
Score: 4 (out of 5)
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The newest Legend of Zelda game takes a shocking turn, forcing players into a mature, bloody, almost nihilistic gaming experience that... oh, who am I kidding. This is a Zelda game. It’s cute. It’s accessible. It’s fun. And it’s got very few surprises.
Like your favourite comfort food, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has all the elements that fans crave from Zelda games, particularly 2007’s The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Although it’s not a direct story sequel (the Zelda games seldom are), it’s very much a successor to Phantom Hourglass, with the same visual style, similar controls and a familiar progression.
This time around, our hero Link is a budding young train engineer who must thwart an evil plot to release the Demon King on the land of Hyrule. Travelling with the disembodied spirit of Princess Zelda herself (look, it’s complicated), Link must find and restore the magical railroads called Spirit Tracks that serve to hold the Demon King at bay.
Naturally, this requires lots of exploring, collecting items, chatting with townsfolk, fighting monsters, upgrading equipment and delving into the series’ trademark puzzle-festooned dungeons, which make wonderful use of the Nintendo DS touchscreen (and in some cases microphone, as you blow notes on Link’s pan flute.)
Having Link and Zelda cross the Hyrule countryside by train in Spirit Tracks is a novel idea, but it does make the game feel more constrained than Phantom Hourglass, in which players could sail Link’s boat pretty much anywhere they pleased.
Travelling from town to town by train involves more than just setting the throttle and sitting back, sure... there are enemies and objects to blow up with the train’s cannon, other trains to avoid through careful track switching and a whistle to blow as much as you please, all of it controlled via the Nintendo DS touchscreen.
But despite the meticulously designed dungeons and the addition of a spectral Zelda as a controllable sidekick who can possess certain enemies, having the train as mode of transport sucks a bit of the thrill out of Spirit Tracks. Imagine instead that Link was travelling by hot air balloon, which could be periodically upgraded to fly over higher mountain ranges or equipped with engines to steer into the wind – now that would be cool. Here, exploration is literally on rails.
It’s the only significant knock against this otherwise worthy sequel to Phantom Hourglass. Nintendo excels at doing games that play to the strengths of previous iterations without actually rehashing them, and Spirit Tracks is a particularly good example of that. But it’s also an example of Nintendo’s unwillingness to tamper too much with a franchise formula. So if you’re expecting a reinvention of the Zelda series here, you’re definitely on the wrong track.
Bottom line: Fun, cute, and very familiar – there aren’t many surprises in this latest Zelda game, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Only the slightly rigid exploration by train dings an otherwise solid and satisfying Zelda experience.
