Oh Spirit Tracks, my beloved. I was a train kid, growing up in a post-decline industrial city with miles upon miles of rail infrastructure from WW2 and earlier. The Royal Engineer spoke to a long-dormant part of me, not to mention the excellent soundtrack of the game and the repetition of Phantom Hourglass mechanics that…
The concept of a tutorial level in video games is long-historied, replacing a longer game guide as the storage space available for the game itself increased. Some games will give you prompts at certain intervals or triggers to teach you new mechanics, like how Breath of the Wild has control pop-ups when Link first picks…
Almost any Zelda fan can recognize the most iconic races, from the rockin’ Gorons to the elegant Zora. Some may even be able to identify more obscure (but still important) races, like the Picori who forged the Four Sword in The Minish Cap, or the cute forest-penguin Kikwi from Skyward Sword. But of all the…
Of all the games in the Zelda series, my love of Twilight Princess is second to none. As a fan who became involved with the series during the DS era (with Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks), I did not experience a truly dark Zelda story until I picked up Twilight Princess, and it quickly became…
Nowadays, I would argue that the DS-era installments of the Legend of Zelda franchise are criminally underappreciated — most of all Phantom Hourglass — but if you had asked me about it many years ago, I would have been singing a much different tune. As a child, the two-screen puzzles that required me to keep…
