The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (2007)

A stunning entry in the Nintendo DS series, it lets you sail the vast oceans. It takes full advantage of the DS's features.

It does have a slight drawback: some backtracking to the starting temple.

But the game is still excellent. It's a true adventure, imbued with a spirit of adventure, and incredibly enjoyable to take part in as you complete quests and explore the ocean and islands.

The Nintendo DS brought with it the promise of new and innovative forms of controlling games, and one series that was at the forefront of this was The Legend of Zelda. It may seem unremarkable now that we all carry powerful touch screen computers in our pockets, but Phantom Hourglass released at a time when touch-controlled games were a little hard to wrap your head around. It would not be until a few years later that the touch screen gaming scene would truly flourish with the popularization of smartphones.

So, as a full-featured and lengthy adventure game that can only be controlled with touch inputs, Phantom Hourglass was way ahead of its time. Directing Link's movements and attacks with a simple touch is intuitive enough, but where the mechanics truly shine is in its puzzles. Next to most Zeldas, this game has a rather simple set of items, but the controls breathe new life into staples such as the Boomerang, Bow and Hammer. Many puzzles require you to jot down notes on your map or to figure out specific shapes to draw. It's all great stuff.

But there's a reason that the touch screen didn't beat out the standard controllers that we use today, especially for adventure games. With Phantom Hourglass, the controls can often hinder quick reactions against fast-moving enemies, and precise movement can be tedious. This game breaks the series' trajectory in getting easier with each game, but for the wrong reasons. When it comes to moving Link, the touch screen can often be a barrier to my immersion as much as it enables it.

Nonetheless, there is plenty of fun to be had with Phantom Hourglass. It is a direct sequel to The Wind Waker, and as such shares the same joyful vibe and visual style. The gameplay merges the top-down perspective of the classic Zeldas with the ocean-faring exploration of Wind Waker's world, and it works quite well. This time you navigate a steamboat by charting its path on the touch screen. Sailing is a great deal of fun, and while the exploration is smaller in scale than in a home console Zelda game, it still holds up. The standard dungeons hold up even better. The difficulty curve is excellent, with some of the later dungeons like the Temple of Ice and Mutoh's Temple being some of the most fun in the series. Bosses are usually impressive spectacles that make great use of the DS's dual screens. But there is one single feature that is so poorly conceived, and so oppressive in nature that it single-handedly brings this game down very close to the bottom of my Zelda rankings.

The Temple of the Ocean King is Phantom Hourglass's centerpiece feature, a huge dungeon with several gimmicks that are not found elsewhere in the game. First is the titular hourglass, which limits the amount of time that you can spend in the temple--if you run out of time, you have to start over. Second are the terrifying Phantoms, invulnerable knights that patrol the temple and can take Link out in one hit, draining valuable time from the hourglass. Last, but not least, is the simple fact that you unlock parts of the temple piece by piece, and you have to return to it at several points in your adventure.

While the game does offer you little shortcuts and checkpoints to ease things along, the repetitive nature of trudging through the same areas and solving the same puzzles multiple times is horrible. During the course of Phantom Hourglass, I had to return and redo the Temple of the Ocean King SIX TIMES. Each visit grew more tedious than the last. There were moments where I would rather be dealing with Wizzrobes in the first Legend of Zelda.

It's a bit of a headscratcher how such a misguided dungeon made it into an otherwise pleasant game. There's so much that I like about Phantom Hourglass; I like new characters such as Linebeck and Ciela, I like finding treasure charts, and the story has plenty of cute moments. The soundtrack lacks the variety and vibrance of most other games in the series, but still had its moments. None of it matters when it comes to rating the game, as the Temple of the Ocean King is so bad that it overwhelms everything else.

Finally, a couple of miscellaneous notes. I debated the best way to play this, and even played a chunk of it on my DS due to emulation for this title not being the best. But ultimately, I finished it on my Steam Deck OLED, which was a great experience. Seeing the game blown up on such a large screen was wonderful, and the Steam Deck OLED's more responsive touch screen worked well here. It was still not responsive enough when it came to quickly writing down precise notes at times, but that was hardly a game breaking issue.

It's also easy to forget that Phantom Hourglass had a competitive multiplayer mode! I remember having so much fun with this mode, and it's a shame it is no longer playable online due to Nintendo's shut down of the DS's online service. Finally, I know there are patches that add D-Pad controls to the game, but I opted not to use this for my playthrough. I think I will give this a shot for Spirit Tracks though, just to keep things fresh as I play both games back-to-back. Now, let's skip forward a few years and hop on to a train for our next adventure.

After looking at a few reviews, I'm amazed at how many people said this was their first video game. That makes me feel old.

Moving on from that, Phantom Hourglass isn't too bad of a game all in all. It's a direct sequel from Wind Waker. After joining Tetra's pirate ship and sailing off for adventure, the crew runs into the mysterious ghost ship (possibly the same one from Wind Waker? Not explained). Unfortunately, the ghost ship steals Tetra and forces Link into a new world to go find and save her.

The main gimmick of this game is that virtually everything is controlled with the touch screen, from movement to interactions to items. While difficult to get used to, this mechanic actually works decently well and paves the way for some neat puzzles. For the most part, I did enjoy using the items with the touch screen, except for when I got stuck on the item screen and couldn't move around (pro tip: use L to activate your items instead of the button in the corner). However, moving around with the stylus was just annoying enough to make me not really want to explore that much.

And that was kinda of the theme of the game for me. I never felt overly encouraged to explore, and the mechanics turned me off of doing it anyway. The is the first Zelda game where I didn't find a single heart piece on my playthrough. To be fair, I didn't go after any of the sunken treasures, but that's because my freaking anchor broke, and I didn't want to go fix it. Just another thing that deterred me from exploring everything the game had to offer. I also never really found out the purpose of the different ship parts. Side quests are a really important part of the Zelda series for me, but I just didn't want to do any of them in this game.

But the big downfall of this game is the stupid Temple of the Ocean King. If you know anything about Phantom Hourglass, you know there's a huge temple you have to come back to between almost every dungeon. That's not such a bad idea per se, but you have to start at the very beginning again every single time you go through! They do a few things to alleviate this dungeon crawl, like building shortcuts you can only access with certain items and allowing you to skip half the dungeon at a certain point, but honestly it did little to improve it. The temple isn't that exciting to begin with; doing it six or seven times just sucks.

All in all, Phantom Hourglass is a fun enough game. It's quite linear (maybe some of the most linear dungeons in the series) and pretty easy, but the boss battles are actually pretty good, and like I said, the items are fun to use. But the touch screen mechanics and the Temple of the Ocean King are just annoying enough to have made me not want to get back to the game sometimes. I would go a couple days without playing because I just wasn't feeling it, and I rarely played through more than one section at a time. All that being said, I was left on a positive note, because the final boss battle is actually pretty decent.

This is was my first Zelda ever so bias may apply, but to be honest I HATED this game as a kid because after the first dungeon it was too hard for me so I would give up and restart the game.

I did this a lot because I enjoyed that one dungeon and the rest of the game so much. Phantom Hourglass is considered by many to be one of the weaker entries in the Zelda franchise, which is kind of sad because I like Phantom Hourglass. As a Zelda game, Phantom Hourglass is ok, but not the best but it is still a VERY GOOD GAME. It has everything that makes a Zelda game special: The adventure, the exploration, the dungeons, the treasure, the items, the bosses, etc. What makes this Zelda title stumble in comparison to other entries are 3 things: The side-story nature of the game, it's small scale compared to other Zelda games, and one specific dungeon. Phantom Hourglass is a direct sequel to the beloved Gamecube legend, Wind Waker and picks up where the Wind Waker left off. Link and Tetra are now adventuring together across the seas when suddenly a Ghost Ship abducts Tetra. Link tries to save her but slips and ends up falling in the ocean to then wake up on an island.

A fairy named Ciela who has lost her memory discovers Link and hears Link's plight. Ciela introduces Link to Oshus, Ciela's adoptive grandfather who, in short, trains Link with a sword and sends him on his way to find a sailor named Linebeck who can help Link find the Ghost Ship and save Tetra.

A simple premise and pretty solid start to a game, but what I think turns people off about this story is that it is coming off of Wind Waker's heels, which had Ganondorf, the Master Sword, and the emotional connection between Link and his sister.

Phantom Hourglass's plot seems insignificant compared to the grand journey that was The Wind Waker, but I disagree. While the villain is not as interesting or as iconic as Ganondorf, and you can't get the Master Sword, I still think that this story strengthens Link's connection to Tetra and introduces incredibly memorable characters such as Linebeck.

Linebeck is an unforgettable addition to the story as he is the pettiest, most egotistical, and hilarious character in the Zelda franchise. Every time he is on screen I crack up. Oshus is also likable and I find Ciela to be a great companion for Link. Ciela is loyal, kind, and is always leading the way, and she never gets annoying. Ciela also has a cool character arc regarding her memories.

Overall, I would say the story is good, I like it. Gameplay is different from Zeldas before this one because now you got a touch screen, yay! You move Link and attack using the stylus. You drag Ciela across the screen and Link will follow. Tapping on enemies performs a targeted attack, swiping the stylus to the side performs a slash, forward is a thrust, and a large circle is a spin attack.

It's easy to get used, but some people don't like it, but honestly, it works and is very responsive. The best part about the touch screen system is how items now work. You can draw a path that the boomerang will follow, allowing for some really neat puzzles. The best use of the touch screen is the map system. You can draw notes on the map to keep track of ANYTHING and is also used in some awesome puzzles. I remember a note in a dungeon has a map of one room full of traps but has the safe route outlined so that you can draw it on your own map to go through safely. The game does many things like this with ALL MAPS.

The overworld, islands, dungeons, houses, you can draw on them all! There is even an island that has no map and you have to draw the island yourself! Nothing like it in other Zelda games and they NEED to bring it back. Sailing is also back with an ocean to explore except you have a steamboat and you can customize it with parts you can find with treasure maps, which is neat.

You use the map to draw a course and you have a cannon that can shoot enemies. There are also some side quests like fishing, hunting for treasure, and NPCs to interact with like in all Zelda games, but the selection is a little slim. There are these gems that represent the aspects of the Triforce (Power, Wisdom, and Courage) and collecting them powers up your sword and defenses, and even adds a sword beam.

Heart Pieces seem to be absent in favor of straight up Heart Containers, which shortens the collect-a-thon quite a bit. The dungeons are pretty good, with the intricacy and cleverness to be expected from a Zelda title full of puzzles and enemies to face off against. The bosses are also very fun to fight. There is one elephant in the room that I have not addressed and it is probably what I dislike the most about Phantom Hourglass and that is the TEMPLE OF THE OCEAN KING. This dungeon is the front runner in worst Zelda dungeons of all time in my books and everyone agrees that it is dreadful.

The idea is that you go through the dungeon but it drains the life from you unless you are in what are called "Safe Zones". The Phantom Hourglass protects you from the life sucking effects of the temple but only for a limited amount of time, so you must make use of these Safe Zones. There are also enemies called "Phantoms" that cannot be defeated and must be avoided throughout the dungeon.

The dungeon is composed of many floors, but you can only go so far until you find some item or whatever that lets you progress. You have to revisit the temple over and over and over from the 1st floor, doing all the puzzles and avoiding Phantoms over again. Sure, you get more items making the process faster, but it still time-consuming and you have to do it until the end of the game.

It's not that fun. The sound track is good, but not the best, in fact, the ocean theme is just an altered version of the Great Sea from Wind Waker.The game's visuals also are at a disadvantage due to the DS hardware, but they are nice enough. That's it really. Phantom Hourglass is good.