N'Gai Croal
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Nov 2, 2007 08:27 AM
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
In which N'Gai forsakes the superior Phantom Hourglass on the DS for the troubled Manhunt 2 on PSP, while Stephen berates journalists and developers who fail to complete the games that they begin playing.
In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer), we once again admitted to our ignorance of the Legend of Zelda series (and offered up an eminently reasonable explanation as to why games of that type don't appeal to us). Totilo, meanwhile, confessed to a crisis of faith over the fact that the franchise he'd once loved for its innovation was now suffering from advanced genre decline (thanks to commenter ksteshenko for reminding us of that excellent Lost Garden essay.) Round 2 and Round 3 could be considered The Re-Education of Level Up, as our staff underwent a crash course on Zelda classics--Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask--from gaming sensei Totilo, prompting a sprawling face to face discussion about the challenge of keeping franchises of long standing fresh.
In today's Final Round, we bring it home with more analysis (of why the sailing controls in the latest Zelda represent another breakthrough of which developers should avail themselves) and another confession (that we've forsaken Phantom Hourglass for the less-polished Manhunt 2). Totilo responds to this disclosure not with rage, but with sorrow, imploring developers to find a way to DVR-and-YouTube a multitude of games so that completists like himself can school slackers like us on exactly what we're missing. Some excerpts:
N'Gai Croal: One of the shorthand ways of criticizing a modern game is to say that part or all of the game is "on rails," meaning that the player doesn't have control over his or her character's path through the level. By letting us determine the path we want our ship to take, Phantom Hourglass gives us control over the rail: first, we trace a line to set the desired route for our ship, then we switch to the sailing screen where we can look around freely, fire cannons, stop the ship, start it up again, or jump over obstacles. And at any point, we can switch back to the map screen to set a new path. With that simple addition, Eiji Aonuma and his team have effectively taken that relic of videogames past, the rail shooter, and reinvented it for today's players. (These controls seem as though they'd transfer to the Wii pretty effectively; wouldn't you like to see a more open-world version of Rez or Panzer Dragoon that used this mechanic?) I know that you're frustrated by the staleness you believe has set into the franchise, but I hope you're willing to acknowledge the genuine innovation on display here as well.
Stephen Totilo: Surprises and innovation abounded in Phantom Hourglass. There had been complaints about the bosses in Phantom Hourglass and in Nintendo games in general. Phantom Hourglass surprised me by actually offering a couple of fresh takes, including some of the best vertically-aligned boss fights since Kraid in Super Metroid. If you think about it, even though most bosses are taller than the player character, the battle strategies required to defeat them involve horizontal movement. This isn't the case in Hourglass. The game also has a boss that you fight while observing the battle from the perspective of that boss, seeing Link from the boss'-eye-view. And there's a boss that you can only beat by controlling two characters at the same time, something I haven't seen since the Gamecube game Geist.
To read the Final Round of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.
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