One thing I don’t think I’ve made quite clear yet here at the Dojo is my disdain for the current trend of the Zelda series. Don’t get me wrong – I fucking love Zelda. The first was a shining beacon of originality in a console filled with side scrollers, the third was a SNES classic with gameplay coveted to this day, and Ocarina of Time lands on more Best Games Evar lists than even Half-Life. Even when the series had strange tangents like Link’s Awakening or Zelda II it always was experimenting with new tweaks and camera angles, like a hauteur pornography director, and I kept coming back for more like the little Nintendo whore that I am.

However around the Gamecube with Wind Waker I was starting to notice a distinct pattern, and by ‘pattern’ I mean ‘obvious bullshit’. Copying Ocarina of Time in new settings and scenarios does not count as a new game. Link’s travels took him out of Hyrule and to a city that’s somewhere between Armageddon and Groundhog day, then Epona became this dragon/boat type thing, then later Link gets turned into a wolf and put through a Hyrule that got mixed up with some Tolkienian concept art, but at its core its still the same game. Even the utterly fantastic Link’s Awakening got copy-pasted into the the twin Oracle games, and though I love Zelda the sense of deja vu with the same buttons and control make me start to go to sleep.

I’m being overly mean of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of taking the same gameplay and dicking about with it in new ways. It’s mostly the combat, I think, as whacking people with your sword gets a bit monotonous and there’s few upgrades that aren’t an entirely new weapon with similar combat mechanics, or the hookshot used in combat.

Normally I can get through it for a good story but Zelda games have rarely had much more than retelling of the Good vs Bad Save Princess schema. Link is still just as much a blunt object to be used against Ganon with over and over, Whack-A-Pig style, and Zelda’s still the princess that gives you the quest to be done. The problem is that between iterations the controls are all the same with only slightly differing mechanics, and I lost interest back in Ocarina of Time. This is probably why I have yet to express enough interest to finish Twilight Princess.

Spirit Tracks seems to be the concentrated ideal of this thought philosophy. The big touted innovation is replacing the magic boat with a magic train. Sure you lose the ability to play the Lonely Island to make it funny, but sounds promising, turning this fantasy epic of Zelda into steampunk or something equally cool.

But as it turns out, what a shocker, it’s just like Phantom Hourglass with the cel-shaded graphics. Actually no, wait, it’s just like Phantom Hourglass period.

What I don’t get is this game’s place in the timeline, as the Wind Waker games have always been linear. It sticks out like a locker-room erection that this isn’t explained, but fuck it, Miyamoto’s never tried anything more than on-the-spot spluttering attempts to strangle a linear universe out of all of the Links and Zeldas in Hyrule’s history books that are starting to resemble the naming catalogs of the Amish.

(I’d feel bad about that joke if I wasn’t completely assured the Amish are not reading this website.)

So, the story. This Link is working up towards being an engineer, netting a peasant-level job of ferrying townspeople from place to place on his train, and he goes off to meet Princess Zelda for his certificate. The scheming chancellor who – I must admit this was very funny – wears two top hats takes the opportunity to destroy the spirit tracks and separate Zelda’s spirit from her body, in effort to resurrect an evil power from…oh jesus are you seriously reading this? It’s fucking Zelda. Apocalypse is nigh if evil douche gets plot dingus, bam, now go get Heroin’.

Did you ever bitch about how Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass’ sailing was really boring? Well if so, please do me a favor; hold out your hand, palm down. Then grab your middle finger by the nail and pull back until you feel searing pain. Thank you, you can stop now. This act of cruelty is your punishment for such a stupid, stupid statement.

The trains work exactly the same way as the sailing from Phantom Hourglass, but (appropriately enough) on rails. Instead of pirate ships or sharks or killer fish things, you have cows that sit in the center of the tracks that don’t move unless you blow your horn at them, and the occasional ram you shoot your cannon at. I thought the entire point of overworld screens was exploration! That was the best part of Phantom Hourglass, now here we are restricting you to a crushingly linear path.

Zelda’s always been a bit on the easy side – I recall someone suggesting the best challenge in New Moon Princess was ‘trying to lose’ – but this is going beyond that, now there’s not even any real sidequesting or searching about to do. As I said the gimmick is about the trains, and how appropriate, as the entire game is on rails.

This was about the point the little devil on my shoulder observed that maybe they were taking this game in a new direction, and the cut overworld was to make room for a more interesting single-play path. Alright, I thought, let’s see what’s new from Phantom Hourglass’ inspiration then.

Zelda and some oracle tell me that I need to go into the upstairs segment of the shattered tower to retrieve the map, which would rebuild the rails connecting to the next overworld area I could explore. The map segments were guarded by animated armors called Phantoms, but I was only visible when not standing in rainbow colored tiles. After finishing clearing out that segment and gone through the unlocked temple, I’d have to come back and find a new…map piece…oh.

While there certainly isn’t retreading the first levels over and over again like in the Temple of the Ocean King, it still gives me that feeling of tedious back-and-forthness that was kind of dragging back in Phantom Hourglass. Now I’m just doing that game over again with a few tweaks. This wasn’t nearly as prominent in most of the other console iterations such as Stephanie Meyers Princess or whatnot, but here it becomes astonishingly more boring.

So temples and cities filled with exactly three Errors all spouting the same sentence take up all the stuff that I liked about PH. There is one new innovation, and that is instead of playing a game of hide-and-seek you can actually attack them after collecting three distinctly not Triforce pieces and powering up your sword. Zelda’s spirit also follows you around, acting like this game’s Navi, and she can possess the armor suits. It is a bit satisfying to have control over a Phantom with which they treat as an ally until they get thumped upside the head with their greatswords, but it leads into my next complaint, which you may have already guessed, the stylus controls!

Classic Zelda button controls have always been about adventure with a spice of action, and usually required a bit of skill, Stalfos Knights and the Lizardmen being the hardest ones to fight of all. When this was brought to the DS, it was replaced by easier combat and vigorous poking with the stylus, like trying to crush a tiny gnat that flitted about on your screen. I could take that with good graces, though, because the sailing and map-writing was the best part. Fighting and puzzles were sleepwalkingly easy, but after interesting boss fights I was back out on the ocean, listening to the music, journeying to new islands, and firing my cannon at indestructible seagulls.

As I mentioned the big gimmick is getting control of Zelda if she possesses a Phantom suit of armor. And while it is satisfying to finally be able to get back at those golem assholes for what they did in PH, all of Zelda’s control is done by dragging a line from her to the destination or enemy you want killed.

Can you hear the Scribblenauts reference incoming?

Since you control everything with the stylus there’s some exceedingly frustrating moments where you’d draw Zelda a path carefully only to have the camera pan the direction you’re looking. This leads to the drawing of a straight path turning into a jagged scribbled mess. And if you were planning on double-teaming an opponent, it’s the equivalent of using an Atari 2600 pad with a broken button to control two characters. It keeps the flipping between Zelda and Link on opposite sides of the room, like a pair of passive-aggressive lovers. Actually I’m pretty sure that’s on Fanfiction.net.

This is naturally compensated by the game being extremely easy, so even the most brain-damaged moron can finish it. Go me, bitching about a game being easy, right? Just because Devil May Cry 3 kicked me in the crotch fifty times I feel like every game needs to be painful, right?

No, as I’ve said in the past. My problem is with the casual market relying on gimmicks of uniqueness to take over for skill and technique. Ocarina of Time had some really challenging enemies, but Nintendo ran the risk of being too hard with the stylus controls. Making it so pitiful even a three year old aspiring gamer can finish it was the only option to prevent frustration.

Speaking of frustration! Do you remember in my Mario and Luigi 3 review how my biggest complaint was the asinine and tacked on DS gimmicks during the Mega Bowser fights, especially the microphone blowing that never worked? Well it seems like Nintendo thought it’d be great if they built an entire game around it.

Let me start off by saying that not only does the finicky microphone return, as I’d cautiously blow into the mic steadily and it would flit erratically, it made the new magical pan flute instrument sound like the beatboxing flutist. Better yet the microphone is between the screens, and the touch screen, via draggin the flute left and right, dictates which note you’re hitting. Nintendo must have a very strange concept of human anatomy, maybe with extra airholes in our foreheads, because while doing this I had an impossible time seeing what I was playing, made even more impossible while trying to expel my lungs in just the right manner so I wouldn’t have to do this anymore.

But even if the boomerang came back it’d still feel all too familiar. After finishing the first dungeon, running through another Phantom infested tower chunk, getting a new rail map, pairing up the peasants of a snow village like some kind of elven matchmaker, and moving to the next temple I began to feel like I was just driving a car in circles, going from encounter to encounter with little more than The Plot keeping me going. I certainly wasn’t entertained or interested.

But the real breaking point, the point that I prepared to smite this boring game with a He-Man cry of ‘By the power of Gamepad!’, was with the fucking table fan.

Boomerangs have always been a Zelda staple, almost beating out the bow and arrow in terms of efficiency and ease of use, and best of all there’s no ammunition to deplete. Nintendo seems to have decided using the boomerang via stylus was too useful and intuitive, so instead you get a table fan that creates gusts of wind. How exactly a table fan pointed forward can create a miniature tornado is a mystery for science, but that’s beside the point.

In the first dungeon when I got the thing it was mostly used to whisk away bombs and items to switches to turn them on, or blow aside enemies, or knock a twat off of his perch so you could tap him to death. Not awful, but they way you use it is by activating the item, pointing at it with the stylus, and god help me blow into the mic.

I was at least okay with it to start but forcing me to stop and line up my shot, usually compensating for distance and speed of enemies, got a bit annoying, made all the worse without a lock-on feature. But in the snow temple I threw up my hands and said, fuck this shit, I am going home, and this game gets no score. It was for three reasons;

1 – Controlling Link via the stylus while skittering about on slippery floors, while combating enemies that freeze you if you attack them without blowing on them was something akin to trying to sing and orchestrate a symphony via baton while standing on a vibrating bed.

2 – Tiny wooden boxes would be pushable into the water, but they were unmovable. Standing on it and pointing the fan in the opposite direction and giving it a good blow would push me forward. A neat idea, until enemies start attacking you and knocking you into the water, forcing me to start all over again while they giggled like cruel maniacs.

3 – HOLY SHIT I AM SO FUCKING BORED