Link is back for yet another adventure, this time on the high seas in another part of Hyrule.

This being the tiny fellow in green’s 14th adventure, one begins to get the feeling that they’ve been here before. Despite this sense of deja vu, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (PH from now on because I’m lazy) is a great adventure game for your DS, and Link’s best outing in the hand held world since Awakening.

PH is a spiritual successor to Wind Walker, from the cartoony cel-shaded graphics to sailing from island to island to progress the storyline. You’ll even be given a vague overview of the storyline of Windwaker at the beginning of PH, right before Tetra is again kidnapped and you’re tasked with saving her, again. If you are looking for innovation in gaming, don’t bother looking here - it is a Zelda game, so besides the single gimmick that each game embraces (time, seasons, dark and light, size), this is the same solid game play Nintendo has been pushing on us since 1986.

Interestingly enough, PH doesn’t seem to have much of a gimmick this time around, unless you consider the use of the stylus as a gimmick. The titular Phantom Hourglass is only used in one dungeon, and all it imposes is a time limit to your exploration. PH borrows heavily from it’s predecessors without giving us something new to experiment with.

Speaking of the controls, that is greatest change here, and the one that everyone seems to have a strong opinion on is the new control scheme. This is a DS game, and Nintendo made sure that their newest game on the system exploited every last one of its tricks. Link is controlled by pointing where you want him to go. Hold the stylus on the edge of the screen, and he’ll run that direction. Twirl it and he’ll roll. Tap an enemy he attacks. Draw a line between him and an enemy, and he’ll slash. Draw a circle around him and he’ll use a spin attack, and every new weapon you get is operated using the stylus, or the microphone, or one of the other interesting doo-dads Nintendo crammed into their portable fun box. There was no learning curve for the control scheme; everything that the game presents to you seems natural. I was never left wondering how to perform a move or puzzling over just how to use a weapon, the majority of the time the in-game explanations were unnecessary. This either means that I am a very smart fellow, or that Nintendo spent serious time on making the touch screen controls as intuitive as possible.

Another new addition made possible by the touch screen is the customizable maps for the over-world and dungeons. Several times, characters will offer information or clues to reaching new areas or unlocking secrets, and instead of having to remember every vague statement an NPC offers you, you can just bring the map down and jot it in. This is a handy feature in an adventure game where everyone is dropping hints that lead to something. My only problem was how large I write, and how small the DS screen is.

Other than the new controls there isn’t much here you haven’t seen before in a Legend of Zelda game. Go on fetch quests, play mini-games, explore dungeons, back track as you get new gear, search for hidden treasures, and fight large bosses. This is were the deja vu I mentioned earlier comes in. I don’t want to say that PH is boring or not worth your time, because I dragged my DS around with me every where this last week, and any place I could catch 10 minutes to play a little more. What it isn’t doing is exploring new ground or wowing me with new gameplay. While the touch screen stylus controls are great (I expect other companies too soon be releasing their own games with much the same schemes) I don’t know if controls qualify as ground breaking, though the Simon-says button mashing of God of War was touted as such (and subsequently ripped off indiscriminately). If anything could be seen as trend setting in PH, this is it.

In the end, if you love what The Legend of Zelda is, you’re going to enjoy Phantom Hourglass. If you are looking for something more, something a little different, and are tired of the fetch quests and dungeon crawls, then you might want to move on. PH is Zelda through and through.

4/5