Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

My friends laughed when I told them I’d bought Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for my Nintendo DS. “Kiddies game” they said and warned me about a lot of text chat spieled of by Manga looking characters while needing a walkthrough to really advance through the game.

How wrong they were! This is a fantastic game with oodles of features to keep players entertained. The game itself is a RPG story run along with not too much “stop and read” story stuff. You play Link (as usual) trying to save his woman Princess Zelda from an unspoken evil - sound familiar?

Basic controls start easy, point to move, tap to hit stuff etc. But as the game goes on more and more features are added until you become a one child army capable of slaying millions of minions and the most oversized bosses you could imagine. I don’t want to spoil it so I won’t go into too much detail.

Numerous mini games are hidden within the Zelda: Phantom Hourglass game world, while old islands can be revisited with newly acquired powers/gadgets to unlock new areas or items. This greatly increases playing time as you try to gather treasure and complete sets of boat plans that allow you to “pimp” Link’s ride.

There is even a fantastic multi-player mode of the game allowing you to pit your wits against foes through ingenious game modes. My favourite of these is “Phantom” where you switch each round between Link and the Phantoms trying to score as many points as you can before the timer runs out. Basically Link tries to score points while the player on the Phantoms draws patrol paths and performs cut off manoeuvres trying to catch Link outside a safe zone - easy to play, but oh so difficult to master!

In short Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is one of the top games of the Nintendo DS, it’s entertaining and will have you hacking your way through a third world population while making you look moronic as your gran solves the puzzle based problems – that’s one way to avoid needing a walkthrough for the tougher sections!