#8 - The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

I feel like Spirit Tracks is an attempt to make a little kids game out of a series that was always lighthearted and fun anyway. So I feel like where most Zelda games appeal to all ages, this one just kind of makes me feel like a child but not in the good nostalgia kind of way. The game is basically about Princess Zelda being turned into a ghost, and making some random kid engineer help her save the day. It takes quite a while to actually get to this story though. While most of the time in Zelda games this prologue is cool because it gets you used to this world they've built, and this incarnation of Link. But in this game for some reason I was super bored super fast. It took quite a while to get your equipment and get to the first dungeon. Maybe it's this new engineer/conductor Link, because he's kind of a douche. He's not really ecstatic about helping out zelda, and you're frequently given dialogue options that seem kind of inconsequential. People will ask me questions in the game and my options will be like "Yeah..." or "Uh..." and I have no idea what each response means. I can't help but imagine this Link as some kind of hipster douche hero, because he's so god damned cocky all the time. And sometimes these dialogue options are unimportant and just change tiny things the NPCs say, and other times you have to respond a specific way before you can go forward with the story, and there's nothing to tell you which is which. I think this game shows why they haven't wanted Link to have a voice for so long, because it's pretty easy to fuck it up...

When I first started playing I thought to myself "Man, these train bits are alright, but it could be more of a mini-game than just traveling parts.", and it slowly does turn into a more and more complicated mini-game, but not really a fun one. Did you enjoy riding the boat around for long sections between islands in Windwaker? Well this is just like that... but worse. I personally enjoyed that kind of exploration, but in this you're stuck on set rails that you'll go over several times drawing attention to the less than amazing scenery. There are also monsters that appear along these tracks to attack you as you ride, and I have to think that the only reason they're there is to make sure you're still playing the game, and haven't just plotted your course and then put the DS down to get a drink or something. This is all compounded at times when you have a passenger on board, and you have to abide by signs on the side of the railways telling you to blow your whistle, slow down, or pick up speed, or else he'll jump off... And make sure you don't forget something that you need in a town, because if you get somewhere and find out you forgot something, you're going all the way back. After a while it kind of grew on me to where I didn't mind so much, but there were times that I was downright pissed off that I was driving a train around. There were two parts specifically that I enjoyed driving the train, but they were special instances when they actually used this mechanic instead of it just being there. The first one is when you're riding through a tunnel with a giant spider/crab monster thing chases you. The second was when you're transporting a passenger and a band of pirates attack and board your Train. I feel like if there had been a few more of these moments between major plot points, then the train sections wouldn't have seemed so weak. Also, and this is a tiny gripe, but whenever you want to board your train, you do this by talking to Ghost Zelda and she asks you if you're ready to go. sometimes she even yells shit like "AAAAAALL ABOOOOOAAARD!!!"... isn't Link the conductor? Like, why wouldn't I click on the train to leave? Why do I have to talk to some random ghost girl who doesn't know shit about trains?

Then, there are these parts where you play a musical instrument to unlock pieces of the map. I don't know what was going on, because whenever I used the instrument outside these sections I had no problem, but these parts I had to play over and over. Apparently I wasn't playing good enough for some old man who lives in a temple. Gone are they days when in Ocarina or Windwaker that he musical components are simple button combinations, and then the game (who has professional composers playing it's music) takes over for you. No here I had to sit and blow spit all over my screen trying to get this fucking thing to do what I was telling it, and it wasn't even being the slightest bit lenient. You'd think the game might cut me some slack considering A) I'm not a musician, I'm a gamer. WTF do I know about playing an instrument. and B) I feel like DS games should know their hardware kind of sucks. We all put up with it because it's what Nintendo decided to run with, but that doesn't mean it handles the way anyone wants it to.

There are some cool puzzles in the dungeons, and some of which were pretty cool and some of which were just aggravating. Despite how much I hate the touch screen controls and how almost all the controls to this game piss me off, the Boomerang works so well with the touch screen. I wish I could just use the touch screen for that one item. Also, navigating on a box using a gust thing is cool, but I will say though, that blowing on my DS to use this, and other items, doesn't get more fun as the game progresses... Why not just map this shit to a button? Then there's a section where several floors of a dungeon are completely dark and you have to navigate it using your boomerang to light shit... as I entered this part I was like "oh, this is a cool puzzle" and then immediately took it back. It's one of those things that seems cool on paper, but isn't when you are playing the game. It was just frustrating and kind of annoying. The bosses are kind of cool, but it doesn't help that my favorite boss was the first one in the game, so the rest of them didn't seem as cool because the game got my hopes high. And the whole last section of the game was bad. Not only was it not fun, it also just wasn't challenging, and it took me several tries to beat it for the wrong reasons. There are no stakes really, on the final boss I just took my time, and eventually beat him, and I wasn't even dying. You basically just have to protect Zelda while the monster hurls boulders at her, and if you don't, then the sequence just starts over... I think the boss even sighed at me at one point because it just wasn't happening. I'd tap the screen to block one of the boulders, and Link would run over to it instead without attacking... there are serious problems in your game design when the attack and move function are exactly the same...

If you're a Zelda die hard and you've got to play this, I say don't go in with your hopes too high. This is one of the worst games in the series that I've played. I just don't really even know what to say. I could go on and on about tiny things I didn't like at all, but I'm already beating a dead horse at this point. To me, this game seems like a Greatest Hits of shitty Zelda moments. All the stuff you didn't like in all the other games, compounded into the ultimate shitty Zelda game. They really missed a golden opportunity when they forgot to add the Water Temple from Ocarina, and some of the Wolf sections from Twilight Princess...

Also, I dug this new look for Link, but it's quickly disregarded for the outfit he's worn since Windwaker. I feel like if they had just made this outfit green, it would have been a nice change up to things.