Listen to the Rain

​Phantom Hourglass is the most recent Legend of Zelda game I've played until now, other than about five minutes' worth of Skyward Sword while visiting melishus_b in December of 2011. In preparation for moving to Japan, schoolpsychnerd and I bought a DS--we had a PSP before then, but weren't that happy with it--and several games. schoolpsychnerd picked Puzzle Quest and The World Ends with You, and I picked Final Fantasy IV DS and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. I played it almost entirely on the train, as we went to and from Hiroshima City and on the shinkansen throughout Japan, and I thought it was cute and fun. It wasn't until years later that I looked it up on the internet and discovered I was supposed to hate it.

Playing it again I still don't hate it, but the shine has worn off.

The Japanese title reads Mugen no Sunadokei, "Visionary Hourglass" or "Hourglass of Dreams."


I remember when the DS came out and everyone was like, "Two screens? No one could possibly look at that many!" and then it blew up into into the second-best-selling game system of all time. Nintendo has a history of doing that, and then proving how their off-the-wall design is actually brilliant. They did it with the Nintendo 64 controller and Mario 64, they did it with the WiiMote and Super Mario Galaxy, and they did it with the DS and Phantom Hourglass. Mostly.

Phantom Hourglass's innovation is that the entire game is controlled with the touchscreen and the stylus. Moving, attacking enemies, talking to NPCs, solving puzzles, piloting the ship as you sail from island to island, it's all tapping away. When this works, it works very well. Drawing a line and then having the boomerang follow that line, letting Link throw around corners or in curves to hit enemies in the back, is fantastic. Aiming the bow or the ship cannon just by touching the spot where you want Link to fire eliminates a lot of the annoyance in trying to find just the right angle to hit the target. And the ability to draw means that puzzles can involve shapes and designs, and as gimmicky as this may seem, it's much more interesting than the Zelda mainstay of "Find the eye somewhere in the room and shoot it."

But I think the designers were a little too strict. Movement and basic attacks are okay, but often imprecise. Sometimes Link would take a tiny step toward an enemy rather than attacking because the game only thought I was tapping nearby. I only managed to successfully roll once, so I'm glad that there were no puzzles that required rolling. The player already has to hold the DS with one hand, so they could have easily mapped movement to the Dpad while leaving attacking and special moves on the stylus, eliminating these sources of confusion.

When it worked, it worked really well, but a little sauce is plenty.


This same dichotomy also applies to the items that Link finds during his travels. I’ve already mentioned the boomerang, which gets the most interesting upgrade. Bombchus are back with the same mechanic, meaning the item I almost never used in previous games unless necessary because they were nearly impossible to target properly now becomes an invaluable tool for killing enemies from safety. Tap-to-attack makes it easy to throw bombs exactly where they should go. The hammer is back too, and it’s no longer a tool that Link himself uses. It’s held by his fairy companion, meaning she can range around the screen and hammer enemies at range. The ability to draw lines means the hookshot is not only a grappling hook, it’s capable of creating tightropes or ways to slingshot Link up to higher platforms. And there’s the old trusty shovel.

And...that’s it. Other than Zelda II, Phantom Hourglass has the fewest number of tools of any Zelda game so far. Something like the fire rod, with the ability to draw walls of fire, could have been a lot of fun. The seeds and slingshot from the Oracle games, with precise control over where to shoot them. The shovel and the bow almost seem wasted where there are already past Zelda items that could have been more interesting in a tap-and-draw paradigm.

This is mostly just my lament for the lost opportunities since A Link to the Past, though. More Zelda games need hidden items that aren’t necessary to win but make the game interesting and fun. Phantom Hourglass has ship parts, but they’re really not the same thing.


The structure is pretty derivative. Phantom Hourglass is a direct sequel to Wind Waker, with Link and Tetra having sailed away from Puroro Island to find treasure. Chasing the legendary Ghost Ship, they board it and Tetra is spirited away. Link follows her and has to track down the three spirits of Power, Courage, and Wisdom in order to successfully board the Ghost Ship. This is obviously the "collect three things, then the story changes" section, and indeed on the Ghost Ship the true enemy is revealed. Beramū (Eng: Bellum) appeared and devoured the Force--the same term used in Four Swords Adventures--of the Ocean king Shīwan (Eng: Oshus). So Link needs to find the three Steels (Eng: Pure Metals) to forge a sword powerful enough to defeat Beramū, and then descend into the depths of the Temple of the Ocean King to confront the monster.

This is where the problems start. I appreciate what the designers were trying to do. There's satisfaction in returning to a place you've been before in a game, now with new abilities, and using those powers to unlock secrets or defeat previously unstoppable enemies. The entire Metroidvania genre is based on that, after all. But it doesn't quite work in Phantom Hourglass.

Some of it is because the dungeon is timed, so there's constant pressure to keep moving and the knowledge in the back of your mind that any experimentation has a permanent cost. Some of it is that most of the enemies in the Temple are invincible and if they discover and catch Link, his remaining time is reduced. So the Temple of the Ocean King is a giant, timed stealth sequence that has to be done repeatedly. The only thing that could possibly make it worse would be an escort quest.


The mechanical problems stand out to me because the rest of the game is so charming. It's styled after Wind Waker, with big-eyed Toon Link actually being expressive, but it improves on a lot of the problems I had with Wind Waker. Each part of the map is far more dense, with multiple islands, multiple other ships, multiple treasures, and just multiple actual interesting elements. Each island is worth landing on, avoiding the problem Wind Waker had where over half the islands were just the site of a puzzle for a piece of heart and 95% of the map was empty ocean. And unlike Wind Waker, there's no Triforce hunt. The Steel is all found in dungeons with puzzles and proper bosses.

It's more character-driven than usual, too, since Link is constantly accompanied by the treasure-hunter Linebeck and the spirit Shiera (Eng: Ciela). Linebeck has a nice character arc, as he goes from a self-obsessed greedy coward who always sends Link into dangerous situations while he has to go back and "repair the ship" to a man who takes up a sword to fight Beramū and, when offered his heart's desire, does not pick riches, and who finally calls Ciela by her name instead of チビ妖精 ("midget fairy"). I also liked Jolene, the cosplayer so dedicated to her pirate cosplay that she acquired a ship and took to the high seas, and Maigoron, son of the Goron Chieftan, with whose help Link can conquer the Goron Temple.

This does make Phantom Hourglass very wordy--Linebeck talks about how great he is, Shiera argues with Linebeck, Shīwan explains to Link and Linebeck how Beramū came it take his power, Shiera and one of the other fairies have a very long conversation about the Phantoms in the Temple of the Ocean King that boils down to "Don't attack them or be seen by them" except ten times as long. It's a good idea, but it's taken too far.


Excess is really the theme of Phantom Hourglass. The Temple of the Ocean King requires too many re-traversals. There's too much reliance on DS-specific controls when tried-and-true control styles would work just as well or better (and have been hacked to do so). There's too much dialogue that's just characters yammering at each other and not conveying any new information. If all of this had just been balanced a little better, Phantom Hourglass could have improved on Wind Waker's flaws, shown how motion controls can improve gaming, and been a great game in its own right. As it is, it only manages about 80% in each category.

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