You can continue to tap a foe, or draw short lines across it to continue a series of sword slice maneuvers. With sword in hand, tapping on an enemy will cause Link to leap at it and execute a standard sword lunge. Combat and item usage is also incredibly simple. His movement speed increases or decreases depending on how far away from him you move the cursor (Ciela), and he can tumble by drawing squiggles at the edge of the screen. Tapping and holding the stylus over a location on the touch screen will cause Ciela to fly there, and Link will move in that direction as long as the stylus is not lifted from the screen. Link's fairy friend serves as a cursor to guide his movement. Every other action associated with controlling Link is handled completely with the stylus. The d-pad is only used to access shortcut menus, check maps, and for on-the-fly item selection. This may sound pretty standard fare, but it's the way the controls are handled which keeps these tasks feeling incredibly fresh and fun. Players will find themselves dungeon hopping, hunting for items on islands and in the ocean, solving puzzles, chatting up a bevy of strange characters, unleashing some sword action, and generally engaging in many of the same kinds of activities you'd expect to find in a Zelda title. Beyond that, the memorable story unfolds across a lengthy quest spanning land and sea, with numerous side quests and hidden secrets to uncover. You wash up on a mysterious island, meet a fairy companion named Ciela, and set out recover your friend from her ghostly captors. Before long Tetra is in trouble and Link jumps to her rescue, only he misses and falls into the sea. Set upon by a patch of ominous, thick fog, the group discovers a ghost ship, and Tetra foolishly jumps aboard to investigate. A brief story recap on the events leading up to the game's opening scene is included, executed in a neat grainy cut-and-paste art style, for players picking up a Zelda game for the first time - yes, it's hard to imagine. Essentially, Nintendo has successfully taken an epic, console-level production and refined it down to a pocket size format, leaving the overall quality intact.Īs a true sequel, the story picks up months after where things left off in Wind Waker, with Link sailing the high seas among a scruffy batch of misfit pirates led by Tetra (a piratical Princess Zelda in disguise). The high-quality presentation is certainly a huge cut above the standard fare players have come expect on the DS. The cinematic cut-scenes and environments are marvelously put together, and even the dungeons - the one part of the game which will likely remind players of the old school days of Zelda - are impressively designed. There are an abundance of moments throughout the game where it's hard to believe this kind of stuff is happening on a handheld system. Though the overall graphical implementation is slightly rough around the edges when compared to the Wind Waker, mainly due to the DS's limitations, the visuals are still quite stunning. After Link's (you can name him whatever you like in Phantom Hourglass) mature transformation in Twilight Princess, it's great to see the cutesy cartoon style hero back in action again. Phantom Hourglass retains the same beautifully rendered cel-shaded look of its Game Cube predecessor, and even with less power under the hood the 3-D graphics come amazingly close to the original. Not only is this ambitious move pulled of almost flawlessly on the DS, which is a truly impressive feat in itself, but vast improvements have also been made to suit the system's unique capabilities. Rather than dishing up a completely overhauled design concept for the series' first entry on the DS, Nintendo has opted to give fans something they've craved for some time: a proper sequel to The Wind Waker. Quite some time has passed since we've seen a new handheld Zelda game, but once you get your hands on The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass you'll see it was well worth the wait. Ask any Zelda fan what their favorite game in the long-running Nintendo franchise is, and you'll get a plethora of different answers, ranging from last year's enthralling Twilight Princess all the way back to the original 8-bit NES hit that started it all.
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