The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is an Adventure/Puzzle game for the Nintendo DS and was the first Zelda game to be released on the system. This was actually the first Zelda game that I played and completed. Now is this a great introduction to this majestic series? Lets find out!
Story - Phantom Hourglass is a direct sequel to the Wind Waker for the GameCube taking place several months later. The game begins as Link and Tetra are sailing in their ship when they encounter a Ghost Ship which has been haunting the seas. Tetra jumps aboard to explore but the ship suddenly begins to disappear with her aboard and it is up to Link to save her. Link see's a vision of Tetra as she is calling for his help. He then wakes up on an Island where a fairy named Ciela finds him. Ciela takes him to see her grandfather named Oshus which tells Link to meet a man named Linebeck who has a ship so that they may sail the seas and find the Ghost Ship. I think I've said just about all I can that isn't a spoiler.
Gameplay - The gameplay is very simple but really difficult to get used to. Moving around is done entirely by using the DS stylus, so all that needs to be done to move around is to point the stylus in the direction you want to go and to attack enemies you can either use a targeted attack, where you point on the enemy with the stylus and Link jumps on him with his sword, or you could just swing the stylus around to make Link swing his sword in front of him. Now for the sailing parts. Before setting sail you get the sea chart on the bottom screen. This is where you draw a line on the chart representing the path you want to go. Later on in the game you get a cannon which serves as your weapon out in the sea.
Puzzles - Now this is basically the prime element in every Zelda game, the puzzles, you just can't have a Zelda game that doesn't have dungeons that make you solve all kinds of puzzles. To me, the puzzles were fun and challenging without being frustrating. I'm not going into detail on every puzzle or anything but all I can say is that they were fun.
Music - The soundtrack did have some really good tunes. The music while sailing the seas and fighting the final boss were some of the best tracks of the entire series. But other than those the soundtrack didn't really have any memorable tunes, the song while running in the wild just sounded like noise to me and the song for the central dungeon didn't have any melody to it, it was just sound that was repeated in an infinite loop.
Conclusion - Phantom Hourglass is a great game to introduce gamers to the Zelda series, although there are better way's like Ocarina of Time with its new 3DS remake, this game did get me into the series, and I don't regret getting this one.
8.5/10 - I would give it a 9, but only being able to use the stylus just knocked it down a little.
