This game is the epitome of that one IGN review about SMT V but replace SMT V with this and Persona 5 with Wind Waker.

This game uses the native DS features in some of the best and most innovative ways I've seen, but it's brought down by a janky as shit basic control scheme and an incredibly uninteresting yet annoying to navigate world to explore. The items are some of the most fun in the series, but their utility is near non-existent outside of their debut dungeons and boss fights. Be that as it may, the boss fights themselves are incredible.

Just as the other DS entry, this game also fails to deliver a pleasant experience at the end. The comparisons to Spirit Tracks are inevitable; in my opinion, the music isn`t as enjoying in this one, the stylus controls are also present, which means that you not gonna have a good time controlling Link around the map, but thank god there`s not many microphone mechanic stuff - they are few of those, and the ones that shows up are fun and not near of a hassle, like those where you shout at the mic to stun enemies at one of the dungeons and when you have to ask for a discount for the cannons in the shipwright.

Storywise, this game makes more sense than Spirit Tracks, following after the end of Wind Waker, where Link and Petra must rebuild Hyrule after the flood; and let`s be honest, the whole story concept of Spirit Tracks, with the tracks around Hyrule and spirit trains and that whole stuff is kinda dumb and doesn`t make much sense. The low point for me is the Ocean King Temple, which has every piece of design universally hated by players: time limit, invisible enemies, and the fact that you have to do it like 4 or 5 times throughout the game, while repeting the stuff you have already done before, cause this dungeon is not sectioned off like the Spirit Tower in Spirit Tracks.

At the end, this is just one of those Nintendo games that feeds off gimmicks: stylus gimmicks, microphone gimmicks and other ones that just doesnt click well - the vibrant art style and cool sea exploration just gets buried underneath boring controlling and gameplay mechanics that looks cool on paper, but doesn`t work very well.

Beating every Zelda in timeline order 9/20:

It's been a decade since the last time I played Phantom Hourglass, and my memories of it were always pretty hazy. I went into this game hoping to be pleasantly surprised since its reputation is that of one of the "lesser" Zelda titles. Unfortunately, I was not pleasantly surprised, and the game is, in fact, one of the lesser Zeldas. It's still fun to play, of course, but it comes up short in pretty much every area. The dungeons all end up feeling quite bland, linear and uncreative. Most of the bosses I forget immediately after beating them. The overworld feels held back by its island concept rather than bolstered, like in Wind Waker. The story is a smaller one with your tasks feeling more like, well, tasks, than part of the progression of the story. Although Linebeck does get a shoutout for being one of my favorite characters in a Zelda game. Sometimes the DS is used in very creative and fun ways. Pretty much anytime the two screens are utilized is fun. I especially enjoy when you have to close the DS to imprint a marking onto the other screen. But most of the time, it feels held back by the touch screen being used for movement, attacking, item usage and menu naviation. (I especially hated when it made me yell into the microphone, I played most of this on a plane so people around me weren't very happy) It all verges on gimmicky and is a tad imprecise, especially during combat. But despite getting hit constantly because of this, I was able to breeze through the game easily. And the Temple of the Ocean King is pretty much as bad as everyone says it is. It's not particularly fun to play through the first time and there's not enough substantial sequence breaking with later items to make it interesting on multiple playthroughs.

It's pretty clear why my memories were foggy about the details of this game. It's a relatively forgettable Zelda experience. Much like the world of the Ocean King, now that I'm finished playing, it's already fading from memory.

Phantom Hourglass is a weird little game. But "weird" does not necessarily equate to "bad".

Phantom Hourglass is a sequel to The Wind Waker, but this time it's on the Nintendo DS. The story continues quite nicely, with Link, Tetra and the other pirates journeying to new seas in search of a ghost ship. It's right in line with it's predecessor's storytelling but still feels fresh.

This game, along with it's sequel, Spirit Tracks are controlled almost entirely using the touch screen on the DS. While that sounds like a nightmare, once you get used to it, it becomes a fun way to control Link, and it's definitely very accessible to the generation that has grown up with touch screens and mobile games.

The places where Phantom Hourglass falls short are its dungeons, soundtrack, and overall pacing.
The dungeons are laughably easy, and offer little to no challenge. The soundtrack reuses the same track for all it's town islands, as well as the same bland track for all of it's dungeons.

Pacing-wise, the game forces you to revisit the "Temple of the Ocean King" in between each dungeon, forcing you to complete the same floors repeatedly, and under a time limit. While it's a cool idea in concept, because you learn to clear the early floors faster and faster, it completely kills the pacing of the adventure, since you go back there 6 times throughout the game.

Even though these flaws definitely take away from the experience as a whole, I would recommend Phantom Hourglass to fans of The Wind Waker, and to anyone who wants to try Spirit Tracks, since they are basically two halves of a whole.

After hearing so many negative thoughts, this game surprised me with how much I enjoyed it. It's your typical but enjoyable Zelda adventure but just controlled in a different way. I wasn't sure how big of a fan I'd be of the touchscreen controls, but I rarely found them to be a nuisance, outside of trying to use or switch between items quickly. Instead, they actually allowed for some unique and satisfying puzzles. The Temple of the Ocean King was a little tedious due to how many times you visit it, but luckily you can speed up certain parts as you obtain more items. In the end this was a pleasant, but somewhat flawed, adventure that I'm glad I played.

the legend of zelda phantom hourglass is a direct sequel to wind waker. it basically starts right where wind waker finishes.
and boy, i had so much fun with this game. i do not really understand whats so wrong with the touchpen controls. to me they seemed really smooth once you got the hang of it. the dungeons are short but really fun to play through. they use each dungeon item in really cool ways and the boomerang in this game is easily one of my favorite items in a zelda game ever. (the statisfaction when putting all switches with one shoot is... mhhh 🤌)
the characters introduced in this game grow on you and make the ending so bittersweet and touching.
linebeck is probably one of the greatest written characters in any zelda game. his development and growth is absolutely human and makes you love him while playing the game. ciela, while re using navis "hey" in this game for her, is charming and cute, not even once annoying in my opinion.
this game is one if not the best 2d zelda there is.
i enjoyed it a lot.

Phantom Hourglass is a game that I think gets a lot more hate than it deserves. The touch controls and other gimmicky DS things in this game aren't great, it's not offensively terrible. The gameplay stays pretty simple throughout the entire thing, save except a few specific times in the game that the touch controls are extremely annoying.

The dialogue in the game is actually funny at times, and Linebeck is one of my favorite Zelda characters. I feel like if you can get past the DS gimmicks that there is a good game to enjoy here, but it's also nothing exceptional either, especially since Wind Waker did the same concept much better.

This is the dawn of the dark age of Zelda. And oh what a dark dawn it is.

In a parallel universe, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a normal Zelda game. It plays with button controls like a normal video game just like every Zelda game that came before it. And in that parallel universe, it is still one of the weakest Zelda games.

Unfortunately, we live in hell and we got the version of Phantom Hourglass that’s worse in every way. The Phantom Hourglass that was made to justify the existence of the Nintendo DS.

Even if Phantom Hourglass was the perfect Zelda game, with an emotional story, soaring music, and iconic boss battles, your enjoyment of it will be through the sickening malaise of the controls. Every action is performed with the touchscreen, making it at the very least abysmally annoying to play on anything but a DS, with which it is only mildly annoying to play on.

Since the DS has a stylus, a lot of actions and theming of the game are made with charting maps in mind. It’s a cute idea that elaborates on the sea chart of the game it’s a sequel of: The Wind Waker. Watching Link scribble on his little map at the same time as you is very cute and funny and also a great bit of synchronicity, further strengthening that he is the Link between You and The Game.

The map charting is a Cute premise but it backfires in a terrible way. There are two or three exceptions to this, but the vast majority of the “puzzles” in Phantom Hourglass involve writing the order in which you have to push a switch on your map.

This game made me question what a Zelda puzzle even is. You might find yourself wanting to write a quick note down about the hint you found (as though you possibly could forget “Dodongo Dislikes Smoke” or “23 is number 1”), but the puzzle isn’t the act of writing the hint down.

Having played it twice before my most recent playthrough, my memories of Phantom Hourglass were pretty positive, despite the controls. I remember Linebeck being a contender for the best Zelda Companion of all time. Imagine my shock when on my most recent playthrough, he wound up an abject disappointment. He’s alright, but he’s not making it past B Tier. He’s not nearly as funny or charming as I remember, and that’s probably because you’re rarely ever interacting with him. It’s mostly just him and your incessantly annoying fairy companion Ceila bickering with each other.

This is one of the meanest and most incorrect thing to say about a video game, but i had a moment of weakness and thought that maybe it’s a good thing that this game is hard to preserve, because it’s so bad. But the children must know of the past. They must learn from the mistakes of those who came before them. Phantom Hourglass deserves to be saved from time’s callous embrace just as much as Action 52 does.

I want to like Phantom Hourglass, and that’s very hard to do. Nevertheless, I am a man who rises to any challenge and I found something enjoyable here. It was not very hard to find.

The Temple of the Ocean King is the most interesting and thoughtful part of Phantom Hourglass. If Twilight Princess’ Snowpeak Ruins was the clever mix of the Zelda Dungeon and the Zelda Village, then The Temple of the Ocean King is a clever mix of the Zelda Dungeon and the Zelda Overworld.

The Temple of the Ocean King is your constant. For half of the game, every completed dungeon has you going back to the Temple to delve a little deeper. And each time you delve deeper, you’re finding shortcuts to make your next trip a quicker time. And you need every second you can get; the Temple is cursed and slowly kills you. The Temple is the most Metroid-like Zelda has gotten in a long time, and I think the two styles really work together, so I would love to see more refined attempts at combining them.

One other thing I like about Phantom Hourglass, and this is tenuous appreciation, is the customizability of your steamboat, the SS Linebeck. There are 72 different ship parts in the game, for 9 different unique ship styles, allowing for seemingly endless customization. This endless customization does come to an end though when you can't find enough matching parts to really do anything. It also doesn't help that certain ship styles award more defense for your already very frail ship, funneling you into searching for the rarer parts, rather than what you like your boat to look like.

It's also a shame that these ship parts are so hard to come across. It takes a lot of grinding in a game that is not fun or comfortable to play.

I have beaten The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass three times, but i haven't 100% completed it once. This game is sick, there's too many things wrong with it. Getting every ship part is a months-long grind. Getting every heart piece requires you to have a device that tells time properly, yet another difficulty of preserving this game or any game like it.

Phantom Hourglass is Fine. But I do not recommend this game to anyone, not even Zelda Freaks. The lovable adventure you expect from Zelda is buried under a pile of fetid gimmicks. Linebeck isn't worth it.

The dungeon that you to enter multiple times throughout the course of the game and have to rely on your notes from the previous times is absolute genius. All time best Zelda dungeon for sure.

There is a point in it where you meet a passive aggressive NPC who is like "imagine trying to do this with traditional controls huuurrr" but the game totally earns it imo. The controls work very well.

Bonus points for introducing the all time best Zelda character in Linebeck. Double bonus points because Toon Link owns.

Feel free to start the flame wars, cause I have an opinion hot enough to stoke the greatest of flames, burning from the deepest reaches of he-

Okay, maybe it’s not that controversial. I just enjoy this more than Wind Waker, honestly. The sea exploration feels more natural and less robotic, it’s not as big and more interesting…and I even enjoyed exploring the Temple of the Ocean King.

The story also happened to be very entertaining, and has the best character ever Linebeck, in top of just being super fun and memorable in the best ways. Call it nostalgia, but this game is still pretty damn good.