By the time that Spirit Tracks came out in 2009, the Zelda series was facing its most vocal, pointed criticism yet faced. Usually accepted as the pinnacle of interactive achievement, Spirit Tracks was faced with something else entirely: boredom, uninterest, and most damningly, the now-common idea that Zelda was out of ideas, and merely recycling the same gameplay.
What this demonstrates, of course, is the fundamental misunderstanding of what the Zelda series does and how it does it, of course, but it also demonstrates that people have no idea just how progressive this series is, especially in comparison to, well, just about every other series out there (excluding Mario and a few others). Spirit Tracks shares as little in common as it can with something like, say, Ocarina of Time, while still remaining faithfully a part of the Zelda series and mythos. The idea that Zelda should toss out everything and reinvent itself with every new iteration is a clearly unreasonable request (and as I've posited now several times, would severely damage the "Legend" signifier in the title). But the little innovations, or in the case of Spirit Tracks, the actually rather large changes on display, help keep everything fresh.
When I boot up a Zelda game, basically what I know I'm going to be getting is a quality experience basically unparalleled for thoughtfulness and creativity and straight-up enjoyability in any medium. Spirit Tracks delivers in the "quality" and "fun" areas of the Zelda experience, while also delivering atmosphere, story and dialog quite unlike anything else in the series, even the game's obvious forebear, The Phantom Hourglass. Indeed, what most blew me away in Spirit Tracks, other than the continually razor-sharp gameplay and design, was the writing. This may be one of the best-written games Nintendo has ever put out, perhaps only topped by the likes of Super Paper Mario or Bowser's Inside Story. Every single line of dialog is witty, charming and expertly crafted, making for a whimsical journey through the land of Hyrule that makes the heart sing.
Without giving too much of the story away (its twists and turns are quite enjoyable to follow), let's say that Princess Zelda has joined Link on his quest to imprison the demon God Malladus. The relationship between Link and Zelda, often simply hinted at in previous games, is brought to the forefront as the central relationship in the game. This isn't really an outwardly romantic relationship – instead, it maintains a childlike, platonic whimsy that is expertly conveyed by the game's writing. It actually reminded me of similarly-handled relationships in Hayao Miyazaki's more child-oriented films, such as Kiki's Delivery Service. There's a moment where Zelda and Link share a sincere high-five, and the moment is just as heartwarming and magical as anything I've ever seen.
A large part of this is of course due to the decision to continue to use the same graphics engine behind The Phantom Hourglass, which was in turn heavily indebted to the Wind Waker for aesthetic direction. For the limitations of the DS hardware, both games sing on the handheld console, but Spirit Tracks does a nice job of making sure that the environments have some architecture to them. The art style is great in both games, but Spirit Tracks does the better job of creating environments with depth and scope.
Because I haven't actually reviewed Phantom Hourglass yet, I suppose it would be appropriate to talk about the controls found in both games here. In case you weren't aware, both games utilize a touchscreen-only configuration – every move, every action, and every facet of the game's design is based around this conceit. It could have come off as gimmicky or grating, pushing the touchscreen functionality simply as a means of showing off what Nintendo could do with their system that so many developers couldn't. Instead, especially in the era of touchscreen mobile gaming, it comes across for what it is: the single greatest nontraditional control scheme in a traditional game ever, pushing an aspect so beloved by Nintendo – that is, the gameplay system – into every facet of the game's design. This isn't at all a halfassed or not-entirely-thought-through integration. It is instead the absolute pinnacle of Nintendo's commitment to control innovation. There's a simple brilliance to the controls that make them almost entirely intuitive – movement and actions all seem like something you know how to do before the game even shows you how to do it, and outside of some niggling item use issues, everything is natural, precise and super responsive.
The only real difference between Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks in this regard is the sheer amount of new things you'll be doing. Whereas Phantom Hourglass focused primarily on drawing as a form of interaction, Spirit Tracks seems to highlight another oft-forgotten feature of the DS, the microphone. Now, this too could come off a little gimmicky (and comes much closer to that than the other control features), but blowing into the microphone, either to control the Spirit Flute or any of the weapons that use that functionality, is also just as responsive and pleasingly tactile. As with the best of Nintendo's control schemes, the controls themselves lend quite a bit to the enjoyment of the game, and they're present for a specific design purpose. Analog controls and buttons are perhaps more objectively familiar, but they're definitely not objectively better, nor should they define the only things we can do with video games.
The only element of Spirit Tracks that I found lacking, and this too was the case with Phantom Hourglass, is the strange design decisions regarding pacing. As in many Zelda games, the overall structure is as sturdy as, well, a legend. Link has to travel to the four corners of the world map, collecting… things from each dungeon in each area. That's all fine and good, but where the game loses its way is in the inclusion of a central dungeon. Though much of the tedium of traversing and retraversing the same small dungeon over and over again, as seen in Phantom Hourglass, is gone, going straight from one dungeon into another, kind of "megadungeon," gets tiresome. In the best Zelda games, there's a little bit of downtime, to go and explore the vast playground at your fingertips. That's not really an option in Spirit Tracks. The game is designed with the handheld player in mind, which is great if you're planning on playing a 30 hour game on the go (seriously, this is a really long game). But because I consume my Zelda like I consume TV or Old Dutch Creamy Dill chips (that is, voraciously), it almost made the game feel compartmentalized into levels. This isn't helped much by the vastly different landscapes on display. While every area is interesting and beautiful and populated with interesting characters, there's a real lack of cohesion, making it feel like a snow world, a grassland, a fire world and an ocean world were introduced merely as a way to introduce new landscapes, rather than something that was thought out in thematic terms completely.
I mentioned that exploring seems like a bit of an afterthought, and that's for one reason: the train. The main feature that sets this Zelda apart from all others is its era, as Spirit Tracks takes place in something akin to the 1800s. It's a big stylistic change for the Zelda series, and explored more in depth, could have been pretty interesting. It certainly adds a flavour not seen elsewhere in the series, as Spirit Tracks feels the most overtly European of any of the Zelda games. Traveling by train is intuitive and fun, especially if you were ever a ten-year-old boy. It does, however, sacrifice scope. It makes the game more overtly linear than any Zelda game before it, and while I didn't find this to be too problematic, occasionally I wanted to jump the rails and just take a look around. That feeling is also reinforced by the lack of a compelling villain for most of the runtime. The villains, Cole and Byrne, are introduced very early on in the game, and Cole especially is a devilish villain that I would have loved to see more of. But they both basically disappear in the game's middle section, and while that's not a huge problem (unlike Final Fantasy games, Zelda games aren't really assessed on the quality of their villains), it makes the pace a little more lackadaisical than the constantly forward progressing train system wants to make the game.
Those pace-y feelings might have made the long, long haul through the game's runtime a little bit more of a chore than it should have been, but the fact remains that this is an outstanding bit of video game characterization and writing, and it's that charm, that polish, and most of all, that restless innovation that keeps Spirit Tracks as one of the most enjoyable and touching experiences I've had in video games.