Phantom Hourglass Completed

I beat the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and my general impression was that it wasn't difficult and the overall game was enjoyable but they didn't do the best job with the back tracking, item switching was a pain, the combat system wasn't fully fleshed out and some parts of the game felt like filler. Filler I don't mind as long as it is side quest filler.


In the main temple where you spend like 30% of the game when you backtrack with new items its easier to get past certain floors or you can practically skip floors all together but in most cases, for me, because of the save system the risk of burning up your time in the temple to find an easier route didn't feel worth it. I'd spend 5mins in real life or 2mins on the clock in the game figuring out how to save 1min on the game clock and like 3 or 4 mins in real life and if I wasted too much time and reset the game I had to start from outside the temple which was just a pain.
When things did go right though it felt good.


The touch screen combat could've tended toward Ninja Gaiden type combat moving from enemy to enemy swiftly. Instead you mostly had to clumsily switch items and then have a fit on the touch screen to kill enemies and bosses alike. Speaking of the boss fights, they were brilliant. All of them were different, made good use of 1 item (which was essential to not going mad trying to switch) and had a big feel to them even if they were pretty easy after you figured out what was the trick.


The last boss fight however felt a lil disconnected; partially because you had little to no idea what really motivated this thing to be evil. I mean "it was born evil!" is all well and good but unless you are talking survival horror the creature coming from nowhere and having no logical weakness isn't really acceptable. That and having zero personality, the story of the true enemy could've been told through out the game but instead it was a few cut scenes. Still, finishing it it off was pretty satisfying. You can knock FF games but you can't help but something when you whack the person that has been tormenting you from the first time you selected attack.

As I said overall it was a good experience but they couldn't done alot better, you don't really expect good when you play a Zelda game you expect excellent.