THE HUB

OMG!!!

FEATURED GAME

FEATURED MEMBER

elementxstyle

elementxstyle

GP Design shop.

QUICK POLL

Who will have the biggest E3?

ASK THE PROS

THE GAMEPROS

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Sign up now to receive weekly or daily updates on your favorite games, stories, and more!



DS | Adventure | The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

Boxart for The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass 13 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 4.50
  • SOUND: 5.00
  • CONTROL: 4.00
  • FUN FACTOR 4.75
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.8
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 4.6
Winner of the GamePro Editor's Choice Award

Hands-On: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass Hands-on!

Hands-On by Dave Rudden | 07/18/2007 | 18:17:58 PM PST

Wind Waker's disputed art style combined with a completely new control scheme? Sounds like a recipe for disaster.. or one of 2007's best games.

I went into my demo of Phantom Hourglass at E3 with pretty low expectations. While the series is still garnering critical acclaim, it lost me right around Wind Waker's seventh hour at sea, and the tacked-on control scheme for Twilight Princess didn't woo me much either. The fact that the game liberally borrowed my least favorite Zelda game's art style certainly didn't settle the uneasiness in my stomach.

A Rude A-Waker-ning

Starting up Phantom Hourglass, my fears weren't assuaged when the game began in another nondescript town with Link being awoken with an ear-piercing "LISTEN!" from a Navi-like fairy. Link's quest in the short time I got to experience it didn't seem to differ much from previous adventures--he had to chat with local townspeople about how to find a mysterious girl and the items needed along the way. What made the normally mundane opener worth working through was the seamless new touch-screen control setup.

The Master Stylus

Whereas Twilight Princess seemed to assign extraneous activities to motion control, just about every action in Phantom Hourglass made ingenious use of the touch screen. The only instance of button use in the demo was to toggle the map from the top screen to the bottom, where it could be marked. Dragging the stylus to the side of the screen moved Link, which worked far better than I expected, as I was able to traverse across bridges and around the village as easily as in any other Zelda title. The combat, also, was pretty easy to grasp, with vertical and horizontal stylus strokes corresponding to sword swipes and stabs. The powerful spin attack, which was made a bit too easy to pull off in Twilight Princess, requires a welcome bit of effort once again--you have to draw a circle around the enemy in order to pull it off.

All things considered, I was pretty impressed with the control scheme, with every action working almost perfectly off the bat--only the running roll took some getting used to. The only stylus use I didn't get the hang of at all was mapmaking. Most instances where the demo suggested marking up the map were either for instances where you're noting a spot on the map that the game would do for you in previous titles, or marking clues to puzzles that, quite frankly, don't need them. Hopefully, the puzzles will increase in complexity to the point where the map markup ability becomes a necessity.

While the demo may not have broken new ground in terms of style or story, the control scheme is new and exciting in ways that even Twilight Princess could match. With an intruiging multiplayer mode to boot, Phantom Hourglass could be my key to Zelda relapse.


Related Articles