The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

There is something immensely appealing about the simple act of blowing your train’s horn in The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. You’ll find yourself making the classic “toot-toot” sound often as you travel around the world of Hyrule, reveling in the way it makes your inner 10-year-old kid giggle with glee. Playing Spirit Tracks brings up similar feelings; it’s fun and familiar, basking you in the nostalgia of the Zelda series’ well-trodden gameplay formulas while adding enough changes to make it feel exciting again. And while its look will undoubtedly bring up comparisons with 2007’s superb Phantom Hourglass, Link’s new adventure does away with its predecessor’s repetitiveness and pacing issues, making Spirit Tracks the superior of the two Zelda games available on Nintendo’s handheld console. It not just an art style that Spirit Tracks shares with Phantom Hourglass. This new game is a sequel, and while, you’ll play as a new Link, several familiar faces from the 2007 game make an appearance in Spirit Tracks (some as direct descendants of old characters and some as older versions of their Phantom Hourglass selves). Spirit Tracks takes place 100 years after the events of Phantom Hourglass, and the land of Hyrule is in peril. The demon king Malladus is stirring, threatening to break free from the Tower of Spirits (his prison for the last century) and throw off the chains that have kept him suppressed. These chains are actually the game’s Spirit Tracks, a series of lines crisscrossing the world that the inhabitants of Hyrule have been using to drive their trains on. Young Link starts the game as a newly graduated engineer, off to see Princess Zelda and gain his official train driver’s qualification. Once there, Zelda confides to Link her fear that Malladus may be on the rise and urges him to take her to the Tower of Spirits so they can both investigate. But before they reach the tower, they are attacked. The tower then breaks into several pieces, and the evil Chancellor Cole and his sidekick Byrne steal Zelda’s body for use as the resurrected Malladus’ new body. Zelda’s spirit remains, however, becoming Link’s guide as he strives to prevent the demon king’s rise and to reunite his beloved princess back with her physical form. Link’s usually a lonely hero and Zelda a distant ideal, but in Spirit Tracks they’re inseparable, engaged in an adorable, innocent childhood romance straight out of a Hayao Miyazaki film. It’s eloquently spelled out in the exchanged looks and gestures of the animation and in the simple zest of the script (even though Link, as ever, doesn’t say a word). They even high-five at one point, one of many moments in which the game’s youthful exuberance runs away with it (you respond to questions with “Yep” or “NO WAY!”; one character actually says “Woot!”), but it’s so charming it always pulls it off. It’s a long way from the melancholy lyricism of Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess; Spirit Tracks must be the happiest, most heart-warming Zelda to date. The Temple of the Ocean King’s less popular features – its maddening time limit, and the need to start from the beginning on each visit (albeit with shortcuts) – have thankfully been ditched. You’re even allowed to best Phantoms eventually, at which point Zelda can possess them and you can control her and Link simultaneously by drawing a path for her to follow, and pointing out things for her to interact with, with the stylus. What’s also surprisingly engaging is riding your train around on the spirit tracks covering Hyrule. You would think that having fixed railway lines to travel on would make moving from location to location boring, but the game throws enough variety at you to make most trips interesting. As well as using your train’s horn to scare away livestock clogging up the tracks or using your cannon to blast away roving enemies, you’ll have to contend with demon trains cruising the tracks. You’ll need to plan ahead to avoid these enemies, keeping a close eye on your map and switching lines when necessary to make sure you don’t end up on a collision course. Crashing into one of these enemies is the biggest negative of riding a train in Hyrule. You’ll become familiar with the crushing feeling of inevitability that comes when you’ve made a mistake switching lines and are forced to simply wait until the collision. And every hit sends you right back to where you started your trip, resulting in a fair bit of repetition.The game also comes with a fun four-player competitive mode which, in a plus, can be played by using one game cartridge and the DS’ download play mode. It’s a pretty simple set-up–you and three other players race around single-level dungeons trying to grab as many force gems before the timer runs out. Dying–either by getting hit by a roaming Phantom or falling victim to an environmental hazard such as lava or a deep pit–will cause you to drop some of your collected gems, which your competitors can then swoop up. And while you won’t be able to use your weapons, you can cause mischief to your fellow players in other interesting ways. If a Phantom is chasing you, for example, running past another player will cause the Phantom to switch their brutal attention onto them instead. You can also activate switches to open trapdoors which, if timed correctly, can send your competitors hurtling to their doom, allowing you to pick up their hard-earned gems. Multiplayer games–especially with a full complement of players–are usually hectic and lots of fun as you scramble to grief other players in order to steal their gems. But with only six maps available, multiplayer is more an interesting little distraction rather than a fully-fledged time sink. Spirit Tracks uses exactly the same all-stylus control scheme as Phantom Hourglass – Link follows where you point, faster if it’s further away, with taps, swipes and circles executing sword attacks. It proved divisive two years ago, and for the life of me, I still can’t imagine why. It’s swift, snappy and unfailingly precise. It’s the best non-traditional control scheme for a traditional game anywhere, and one of the most transparent and intuitive in Nintendo’s long (and glorious) history of making great videogame controls. However, if you didn’t like it then, you won’t like it now. Also divisive, longer ago, was the bold, bright cartooning of the Wind Waker art style. Few would dispute its suitability for these top-down DS games, though, especially with the portable really starting to show its age. The geometry and texturing in the environments are sometimes shockingly basic, but that’s surely because the important things – the characters, the enemies, the train – are so detailed, so expressive, so exquisitely animated. Sound is magnificent too, with the trademark tinkles, smacks and booms, and the squeal and hiss and chuff of the train, popping out of the DS’ speakers over catchy, rollicking folk music.It is, in other words, vintage Nintendo. Maybe a bit too vintage – Spirit Tracks is, like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a straight rehash, a derivative sequel of the kind the company used not to make, and based on a decades-old template. You could easily mark it down for that. But that would belie the fact that it’s also a tighter and more rounded game, crafted with more care, than not just Phantom Hourglass but most modern games for grown-up consoles. As an all-ages adventure with a spring in its step and a twinkle in its eye, it’s hard to beat. All aboard!