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Phantom Hourglass
Aug. 10th, 2016 12:16 pmPhantom Hourglass was recently made available on the Virtual Console for Wii U, and I bought it on the very hour of its release. This was a mistake.
Phantom Hourglass is a Nintendo DS title that can only be played with the stylus. Although the stylus controls are... fine, I guess... I've always wanted to play the game with a more traditional control scheme. Barring that, I assumed the bottom DS screen would be displayed on the Wii U remote, while the top DS screen would be projected onto the television. Or something?
Instead, both DS screens are made to fit on the screen of the Wii U controller, which is unfeasible for two reasons. First, it's way too small; and second, it means that the player can't look at the television screen, which defeats the purpose of playing a Wii U port. After two hours of disappointment, I returned the game to Nintendo for a refund. I still wanted to play Phantom Hourglass, however, so I ended up buying a New Nintendo 3DS XL.
Unfortunately, Phantom Hourglass has problems on the New Nintendo 3DS as well. The major gameplay issue is that in-game postal mail is not delivered (perhaps because the system uses slightly different internal software to register the passage of time), which means that I had to return the cartridge to a regular Nintendo DS in order to advance the game. The major hardware issue is that the New Nintendo 3DS wasn't designed for the sort of heavy and rapid stylus movement necessitated by Phantom Hourglass, and I ended up scratching the shit out of the console's touchscreen (and I'm actually really pissed off about this).
I remember being annoyed with the game when it first came out because of its lottery mechanics, and my feelings haven't changed. I'm generally not a completionist, but one of the things I love about the Zelda games is that it is in fact possible to complete them. However, by my estimates, "completing" Phantom Hourglass would probably take at least three months. Specifically, the game randomly offers items that change from day to day in much the same way that Animal Crossing does. I want to think the developers included this feature in order to simulate a sense of a larger world, because I can't think of what purpose it could fill other than to hook players into returning to the game every day.
Because of the limitations of the Nintendo DS hardware, Phantom Hourglass is a small game, and it takes place in a small world. I wish that, instead of attempting to expand the scale of the game through artificial means like a lottery mechanic, the developers had allowed the game to be relatively short and self-contained, which is what many Zelda fans love about Link's Awakening. From what I remember, Spirit Tracks takes these clumsy attempts at expansion and exacerbates them with a literal lottery system of mail-in postcards. The game also exaggerates its scale by restricting the player's movement to a path laid out on literal rails. As much as I love the Zelda series, I didn't enjoy Phantom Hourglass as much as I wanted to, and I think I'm going to take a hard pass on replaying Spirit Tracks.
Phantom Hourglass is a Nintendo DS title that can only be played with the stylus. Although the stylus controls are... fine, I guess... I've always wanted to play the game with a more traditional control scheme. Barring that, I assumed the bottom DS screen would be displayed on the Wii U remote, while the top DS screen would be projected onto the television. Or something?
Instead, both DS screens are made to fit on the screen of the Wii U controller, which is unfeasible for two reasons. First, it's way too small; and second, it means that the player can't look at the television screen, which defeats the purpose of playing a Wii U port. After two hours of disappointment, I returned the game to Nintendo for a refund. I still wanted to play Phantom Hourglass, however, so I ended up buying a New Nintendo 3DS XL.
Unfortunately, Phantom Hourglass has problems on the New Nintendo 3DS as well. The major gameplay issue is that in-game postal mail is not delivered (perhaps because the system uses slightly different internal software to register the passage of time), which means that I had to return the cartridge to a regular Nintendo DS in order to advance the game. The major hardware issue is that the New Nintendo 3DS wasn't designed for the sort of heavy and rapid stylus movement necessitated by Phantom Hourglass, and I ended up scratching the shit out of the console's touchscreen (and I'm actually really pissed off about this).
I remember being annoyed with the game when it first came out because of its lottery mechanics, and my feelings haven't changed. I'm generally not a completionist, but one of the things I love about the Zelda games is that it is in fact possible to complete them. However, by my estimates, "completing" Phantom Hourglass would probably take at least three months. Specifically, the game randomly offers items that change from day to day in much the same way that Animal Crossing does. I want to think the developers included this feature in order to simulate a sense of a larger world, because I can't think of what purpose it could fill other than to hook players into returning to the game every day.
Because of the limitations of the Nintendo DS hardware, Phantom Hourglass is a small game, and it takes place in a small world. I wish that, instead of attempting to expand the scale of the game through artificial means like a lottery mechanic, the developers had allowed the game to be relatively short and self-contained, which is what many Zelda fans love about Link's Awakening. From what I remember, Spirit Tracks takes these clumsy attempts at expansion and exacerbates them with a literal lottery system of mail-in postcards. The game also exaggerates its scale by restricting the player's movement to a path laid out on literal rails. As much as I love the Zelda series, I didn't enjoy Phantom Hourglass as much as I wanted to, and I think I'm going to take a hard pass on replaying Spirit Tracks.
