Listen to the Rain

​Love them or hate them, there's no one other than Nintendo who'd look at the Legend of Zelda series and say, "Yes, but...what if there were trains?"

I suppose it's not that much of a stretch when you think about it. The real groundbreaker was Wind Waker, which turned the expansive overworlds of the older Zelda games into an endless shining sea with a few points of light in the form of islands. Looking at it that way, a rail network is a pretty reasonable next step. It keeps the advantages of the points of light area design while restricting movement to the tracks, solving some of the problems of Wind Waker's enormous travel distances. It takes advantage of the DS touchscreen and allows drawing a path along the rails so there's no need to babysit the train. And Link gets a spiffy engineer's uniform. What's not to like?

The Japanese title, Daichi no Kiteki, means "Steamwhistle of the Earth." This is another case where the localized title is better.


A hundred years after Phantom Hourglass, the people have left the Great Sea and founded the country of Hyrule (Eng: New Hyrule). Hyrule is crisscrossed by ancient railroads left by the gods as a seal on the prison of Maradō (Eng: Malladus). Over time, the tracks have slowly been disappearing, and I probably don't have to explain what that means. The tracks finally vanish entirely due to the machinations of Chancellor Kimaroki (Eng: "Cole") and Princess Zelda is kidnapped. Can Link save her and restore the railroads, imprisoning Maradō for all time?

Is that even a question?

While it wasn't true in the original Legend of Zelda, subsequent games all had some kind of mechanism to prevent Link from exploring the entire world at the outset and Spirit Tracks' use of the railroads is probably the most naturalistic of them all. Boulders could be climbed over, rivers could be swum, but a train can only go where the tracks lead. The premise is strange, but once I accepted it, it made more sense in the moment.


Spirit Tracks is another one of Nintendo's "look at what the DS can do!" games, but it handles it better than Phantom Hourglass in all way except one.

I'll deal with the one first. The instrument in Spirit Tracks is a set of pan pipes, and the DS has a microphone. Not only that, one of the dungeon items is the Gale Propeller (Eng: "Whirlwind") that can't be used without blowing into the mic. If you thought the an entirely-touch-screen-controlled game was a silly gimmick, let me tell you that constantly blowing into the mic for the first 15% of the game will make you realize what silly gimmicks truly are. And unfortunately, while the Gale Propeller eventually becomes much less useful, the pan pipes are required for the entire game and the songs get more and more complex to play. I read of someone stuck for a week on a particular song due to the tricky timing required.

I just set the emulator to 75% speed and passed it on the first try. But I found the flute finicky enough that I'm positive I would still be playing if I were using original hardware.


The counterbalance to the DS-isms is that this is the first Legend of Zelda game where Zelda is actually a co-protagonist. I said above that she was kidnapped, and that's true, but it's only her body that's stolen. Her spirit is expelled from her body and visible only to Link, so the two of them team up to defeat Kimaroki, restore the railroads, and save Hyrule.

It's a little astonishing that in a series called the Legend of Zelda, a series where fans are constantly joking about why "Zelda" always wears green clothes and coming up with amazing ideas for games starring her, it took fifteen games before Zelda actually had a major role. On the other hand, it's done so well here that I can't complain too much. Zelda is bodiless but not powerless--in the Tower of the Gods (Eng: "Tower of Spirits"), she has the ability to possess the phantoms inside and help Link conquer the tower. She's also very talkative, and even counting the revelation that Tetra is Zelda in Wind Waker, Spirit Tracks is probably the game with the most personality for the titular princess.

That was a major factor that elevated it above Phantom Hourglass for me. Linebeck does have a good character arc, going from greedy coward to taking up the sword and helping in the final battle, but he spends most of the game insulting Link and doing nothing to help. Zelda provides advice and commentary like Linebeck does, but she also assists in the main dungeon and has a real connection to Link. She cheers him on and celebrates in his victories; victories that she has an equal role in. At the end of the game, when a train whistle sounded and Zelda abandoned her paperwork ran to the window, it was a moment earned through their travels together.



The Tower of the Gods also elevates Spirit Tracks over Phantom Hourglass, but only just. Like the Temple of the Ocean King, Link is required to return there multiple times over the course of the game, it has Phantoms, it has multiple floors, and going there opens up new areas of the world. But unlike the Temple of the Ocean King, there's no time limit and no requirement to revisit already-completed floors.

The real high point is Zelda's help, though. Relatively early on, Link gains the ability to attack Phantoms and Zelda discovers that as a disembodied spirit, she can possess them. All this combined removes the most annoying elements of Phantom Hourglass's main dungeon--the requirement to cower inside the safe zones to hide from patrolling Phantoms and avoid the relentless fall of the hourglass sands. Zelda can talk to other Phantoms to distract them and allow Link to sneak up behind them or use the Phantom's weapons to attack the other monsters in the dungeon. It's the opposite of the essentially passive role Link is forced to assume for most of the Temple of the Ocean King.

Unfortunately, it can't overcome the basic flaw of both dungeons, which is that they require the same activities over and over again. The Tower of the Gods doesn't require redoing floors but it still has the same challenges set in the same scenery. In the beginning I was excited by the way it was improved, but it was much like when schoolpsychnerd and I moved back from Japan and were impressed that the apartments we were looking at had ovens and a kitchen that both of us could stand in simultaneously. The improvements are real, but the baseline is very low.


However, toon Link continues to be best Link. Link's characterization in most Zelda games is "serious adventurer" with occasional moments of "HOO! HA! YAAAH!" and most NPCs follow suit. Humor exists but doesn't have a strong place, but that's not true in Spirit Tracks. Toon Link's expressiveness plays a part, of course, but there's also a lot of physical comedy with Zelda not realizing that she can't interact with the world or with her mannerisms while possessing a Phantom.

I also appreciate the names. "Kimaroki" is a type of train, and the localization preserves that connection without being extremely obvious. The Lokomo Tribe, the sages who protect Hyrule, all have appropriate names as well: Sharin (車輪, "car wheel"), Barube ("Valve"), Suchimu ("Steam"), Boira ("Boiler"), and Tenda ("Tender") are all train-related. Only Senrin doesn't seem to fit, but it may be a reference to the saying 千里の道も一歩から, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

The music is also a little unlike every other Zelda game I've played. In the Fields, the overworld music, is probably my favorite Legend of Zelda overworld music ever, even eclipsing the Dark World music from Link to the Past. One of the villain's themes is played on Spanish guitar. The soundtrack has some low points, but I appreciate the way it struck out on its own way and didn't feel railroaded into just repeating the themes from previous Zelda titles.


The DS games are generally looked on as the black sheep of the Zelda series. Too repetitive. Too weird. Too married to using all the extraneous functionality of the DS and not providing a "core gamer" experience, because real gamers are too good for scritching a stylus and blowing into a microphone. And mostly that is true (well, not the "real gamer" stuff). Not all new control schemes are bad and there are reasons to move beyond the basic D-pad, but playing a fiddly flute or rubbing to break stuns is not one of them. Ocarina of Time's C buttons worked fine, and The World Ends with You showed the possibilities of the DS setup better than either Legend of Zelda DS game ever did. Nintendo's efforts are obvious, but even with the improvements over Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks still isn't running at full steam.

⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index