My way of playing this game went like this: I started playing concurrent with Twilight Princess, then stopped this so I could focus on that. I went back to this later, spent a while trying to get a feel for the game. Then I decided to do all the plot first, and get the good sword. Then do sidequests. I got bored of the sidequests so I went straight to the finish.

I feel like my playthrough isn’t exactly the intended way to play. But still, I’m happy with how it went. I really wanted to know what sort of direction they were taking the Zelda series on DS, since they were quite different to any other title. It turned out to be quite simplistic, and getting around the overworld by train (or boat, in Phantom Hourglass) was a big focus. This is one of the reasons I wasn’t always totally enthralled. As it went on, the oft-stated tedium of this travel became more apparent to me. And when the sidequests were always about ferrying things and people around in the same way, and were sometimes a bit vague, I got sick of them when I made it my task to do them.

I mentioned that the whole thing was quite simplistic. Not always a bad thing, there was less getting lost in areas (the good maps on the other screen helped), and the control process was streamlined. My feelings on the controls really picked up when I realised that you could hold L instead of tapping the touchscreen button. I have all these fingers and buttons, might as well use them in an action game! But the dungeons did steadily ramp up in complexity as the game went on.

As for the Zelda formula, it was fortunately diverted from a fair bit here. There was a progressive intermediary central dungeon, for example, and Zelda was even with you the whole time, even if her body this time had been kidnapped. Your standard MacGuffins this time were Force Gems, a cool callback to Four Swords Adventures, of all things. There was also some experimentation with items, with the blowy wind thing and the whip.

I don’t want to get too mad about this, but the translations differ between regions in an absurd way. NOA and NOE did mostly completely different translations, changing names and plot details willy-nilly, resulting in lnaguages with two official translations (English, French, and Spanish). What does this mean for canon? How can a fan reconcile these differences? It annoyed me because I’m OCD and stuff. Bleh. Whatever.

Finally, I should mention that the final boss inventively uses many of the tricks of the game in a multi-stage fight, but the second-last stage was annoying. You have to deflect all these rocks in a row in a very long pattern, and if you miss one you have to start again. The whole phase has just one pattern, but with the controls it’s hard to do. But like I said, the rest was good and a good culmination, and the last section of the Tower tests all the other stuff you’ve done that isn’t covered here.

All in all, Spirit Tracks is quite interesting. It’s a bit more experimental than most Zeldas, appropriate for a handheld game. Like other portable titles in the series, there’s no Ganon, no Triforce, no Master Sword. It (and Phantom Hourglass) have a unique control scheme. It’s not dependent on other games, but takes a few elements from them that are fun to notice. Spirit Tracks never got a whole lot of attention, as Phantom Hourglass was a bit divisive and its separation in plot from the series probably harmed it in popular terms. I was glad to play it though, even if like I said I had to decide to finish it rather than do 100% of everything, because the training around was tedious. But now I can move on to other things, and there’s a few in the old DS backlog here. So long!