LOOKBACK: Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

9:40am Monday 7th April 2008

People are funny,aren't they? One minute (when Windwaker came out) they didn't like cel-shading but, when Twilight Princess came out, they said that they missed it. D'oh!

So Nintendo then had the difficult decision on whether the next Legend of Zelda game should be cel-shaded or realistic. Well they came to a decision and it was a mighty good one at that. They Decided on drumroll please cel-shading. This is mainly because it was on a hand-held console so realistic graphics would end up getting squashed. And it really works. The graphics are the best on the Nintendo DS, really smooth, with everything looking beautiful. If there is one complaint about the graphics, it is how the doors open: the camera zooms in on the doors and it looks a bit fuzzy but that is my only graphical complaint.

So does the control scheme work? The answer is a very enthusiastic yes! At first, your fingers might stray to The D-Pad but it will all feel natural after a while. You probably know that where you touch, Link follows, and you touch your enemies to attack them etc. But my favourite device reinvented perfectly are the bombchus. You draw a path where you want your bombchus to go. Now that is innovation! Something that also put many people off Windwaker was the sailing, basically because it took ages to get from one place to another. But this is solved because, even when you are sailing, it seems fun for some reason, possibly because there are always enemies to defeat along the way.

I can't really find anything wrong with this game, but if I had to it would be that it's too short. But that doesn't stop it from being the best Zelda game since Ocarina of Time.

5/5

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