Alright. I suppose I'll finally vent on the subject. I apologize in advance to people who enjoyed PH.
Warning: Wall of angry text.
One of the things that really irked me about Phantom Hourglass was its difficulty (or lack thereof). The puzzles were simple, but they reinforced their simplicity with an increased ability for you to find information in your surroundings, to a level that I personally found unnecessary and resulting in an overall transparency in the puzzles. It felt like I knew what I was supposed to do and when the entire game. I feel this detracts from the in-game atmosphere's immersion; in a real adventure, (or life, for that matter) you often have very little idea what you're doing and how you're going to do it. This is why when you succeed over these challenges, in real life or in-game, you feel a sense of accomplishment. I felt there was little of this in Phantom Hourglass.
I was initially brought in by the fact that they resurrected the exploration aspect from WW, but they defeated the purpose of it by blocking off certain areas. The whole point of WW was exploration and discovery, being given a boat and then the whole world becoming your oyster; in Phantom Hourglass, you're given a boat with the same expectation of exploration, but you're restricted by quadrants that aren't unlocked until later in the game. They removed the entire aspect of non-linearity that made me enjoy WW's overworld. On the notion of overworlds in general, Phantom Hourglass had little to none of an overworld. All of the overworld was the same enemies, over and over again, except without the possibility of discovery that was apparent in WW. What's worse is that they reduced the number of things to find in the game by having almost no weapon or item upgrades, and cutting the number of heart pieces by 75%. Not only was the overworld bland and repetitive, it was also empty. Even the non-quest based areas that taunted you with the possibility of containing something were also empty; it was just putting salt in the wound.
One problem that I felt was a plague on PH was the stylus controls. For the items, they worked great; but for the swordplay? The controls were set up such that your dodge and attack buttons were the same thing, making it impossible to be ready to dodge whenever the need arose. This could have been easily fixed by controlling Link's movement with the D-pad and making swordplay and weapons controlled by the stylus, which would have optimized both routes, yet this route was never taken.
I didn't exactly have any difficulty using these controls, it's just that I think they could have been designed to be more complex. And with more complex design, they could have made bosses more complex because the player has more complex movement options. It felt to me in the DS games that you couldn't really dodge and attack, and you could only do one or the other. You could sit there and wave your sword around in a spastic fashion, or you could run. As a result, I felt this really limited the game play. There was no bobbing and weaving fluidly in and out of combat like the kind present in any of the other 2D Zelda games, which limited almost every boss fight in PH to the exact same formula.
Because of the limiting controls, I thought the dungeons in PH were ultimately far too similar and repetitive. The lack of variety and fluidity in actions has a direct and blatant effect on the dungeons themselves. There is also an absence of "large" puzzles which are felt throughout the whole dungeon, for which the Zelda series has become famous. Let's take, for example, the water-based puzzles in Jabu-Jabu's Belly in OoA, or the whole thing with breaking the pillars in Eagle's Tower in LA. There aren't many of these puzzles in Phantom Hourglass, and each dungeon only seems to have one, maybe two things that separate them from other dungeons in the game, aside from enemies. One of the dungeons in PH separated itself by having rolling spiky poles, and the ice dungeon, had -- well, ice. But there are more or less the same puzzles in every dungeon, even with new items.
And drawing the shapes? What started out as an interesting novelty became the developer's crutch to rest on to cover up every other shoddily-designed game play aspect and subsequent lack of difficulty. Rather than use what I've learned from the rest of the game, use new items, skills, or knowledge, you'd rather I draw an eight? That's just downright frustrating and gimmicky; the final boss would have been obnoxiously easy if it weren't for drawing the hourglass. It really frustrates me that they would rather utilize a gimmicky mechanism to create the illusion of difficulty en lieu of actual game play mechanics that have been tried and true for nigh 20 years. Unfortunately, they decided to jettison half of those game play mechanics upon conceiving PH.
To make another successful hand-held Zelda (in my eyes) they really need to look at the formulas of their past hand-held successes --the Oracle games, Link's Awakening --that is the sort of progress that needs to be expanded on, not tossed away and instead starting from scratch just because new technology is available.
I'm not used to challenging games, so I need the walk through for basically all of TP. PH was a relive from the walk though. Younger children could also play PH without needing too much help too.
