Published by Nintendo

Rated “E” for Everyone

Contains mild fantasy violence

For the first time in twenty-three years Link and Zelda have finally been given an adventure to share. She has always been kidnapped or tied up in her duties as a princess, he has always been left to journey alone and find friendship with others. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks finally breaks that tradition, discovering that if you let the princess accompany her hero, it opens up the opportunity for the two kids to share fears, thrills, fights, laughs, and memories making for a fun, refreshing change in what has been a very long-running series.

Not that the transition is as complete as it could be. Zelda has still been kidnapped, but this time in body alone. Her ghost, or rather her spirit, is free to roam the kingdom. She can’t touch anything and only a select few can even see or talk to her, meaning she’s still as helpless as ever, but free to follow alongside Link during his quest. This means she can carry on a conversation with him, not that Link has ever been much of a talker, and in select dungeons can possess the body of a guard to help fight and work co-operatively with Link to solve complex puzzles. It’s a half-measure, really, as if Nintendo is timidly trying things out. I hope they embrace it more as the moments featuring the two kids together are the game’s best.

Spirit Tracks features the young version of Link, an incarnation where he is once again a little boy being given the iconic green tunic and sword for the first time. Much like the other young adventures, including Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass, this one centres on themes of travel by vehicles and puzzles that require players to engage in music puzzles.

The vehicle this time is a train and what a wonderful new game mode it brings. Not only do you ride the train in order to explore new areas of Hyrule, fight monsters, and discover treasure, but as you progress you will expand the train with new additions. There’s a passenger car that allows you to transport characters from place to place and a cargo car to carry supplies for buying and trading resources from one town to the next.

There’s a great deal of romanticism in the way Nintendo has reproduced the train experience, the lines come with traffic signs that players must obey, blowing the whistle before entering a tunnel and slowing down as you pass through scenic routes. Learning how to handle the train on its tracks becomes key not only in making passengers happy, but in keeping cargo fresh and intact. If you carry fish you have to worry about birds stealing them, if you carry ice you have to worry about it sliding away during steep turns. The key here is that the train isn’t merely just a fun way to get from A to B quickly, but is its own little game in its own right.

The included music game involves a set of pan pipes called the Spirit Flute which Link must play in order to reveal hidden areas, awaken secret statues, and summon emergency help. Again, Nintendo has done a fantastic job developing a virtual instrument. You use the touchscreen to move the pipes back-and-forth while blowing into the microphone. It works well enough that as a separate application you could use it to play and even compose music. The main scenes where you need to pull it out involve you learning new songs to play from in-game characters. These are joyful scenes and they’re right on the edge of being moments where Nintendo is actually teaching their players how to play and instrument. As Nintendo game systems continue to develop with touch and movement-based controls, it’ll be interesting to see if they can take this concept all the way.

Outside of Zelda, the trains, and the flute, Spirit Tracks follows the very same formula that has made the Legend of Zelda series so successful these many years. Link travels from village to village, helping locals with their issues in order to access a temple where he will solve dungeon puzzles, gain a new weapon, earn a heart container, and unlock the next region where he must repeat the same process all over again until the climactic battle to save Hyrule at the end.

It’s astounding how Nintendo can take the same elements, repeat them, and somehow make them just as engaging as before. You won’t see any new weapons or magical abilities, the puzzles feature familiar bad guys, the villages familiar characters, and yet you never seem to know exactly what to do next or what exactly is waiting for you around the next corner.

It helps that Spirit Tracks has the graphics and presentation of a console game. The breadth and scope of the views displayed across the DS’ two screens are at times astonishing. The animation and special effects, including curling puffs of purple smoke and the nattering of goblins, are at a level I normally would associate with the Wii. Aside from having to charge my Nintendo DSi at the end of each day, I felt like I was playing Spirit Tracks on my television.

One of my favorite scenes in the game is when Zelda and Link step off the train and into a new village and she takes a moment to recall with him her memories of having been there as a little girl. It wasn’t so much her chatting, but that after all the grinding through dungeons and monsters, it was nice to have a personal moment, not from a story character who’s only sticking around for a few levels, but from someone who has journeyed alongside with you from the very beginning. That’s what I’d like to see Nintendo build upon for the next game in the series.