Spirit Tracks: A Handheld Chore?

Over the last three months there has been dozens of Spirit Tracks reviews and the vast majority of them have been positive. However, now that the game has had time to settle in the minds of gamers, we can almost start looking back at Spirit Tracks in the past tense, rather than as a current game. Richard Poskozim of The Lantern has put together a recent review of Spirit Tracks and unlike most reviewers, he spends a heck of a lot more time focusing on the weaker points in Spirit Tracks, rather than its strong points. Below is a quick excerpt of his article.

Sadly, Link’s shiny new “spirit train” quickly becomes the game’s major frustration, easily trumping simplistic puzzles and ridiculous character design. Every traversable area of the game is only accessible by the tracks, and for the most part nothing happens on the not-so-scenic treks from one side of the huge world map to the other. There’s just enough annoying little enemies to blow away with a cannon to keep players from leaving their DSes on and getting a drink while they wait, but not nearly enough to keep things entertaining.

For me, I really did enjoy Spirit Tracks at release, but now that things have settled, there are numerous things that really bug me and I pointed some of them out in a video blog several weeks back. In general, I feel the dungeons and the music were just amazing, but much of the rest of the game fell short. It has its bright spots, but I think it has settled to where I think its placement on my favorite Zelda list is on par with that of its predecessor, Phantom Hourglass, if not lower.

What do you guys think of the review. Was it a fair look at Spirit Tracks? Did you enjoy the things that the writer was frustrated with? Where does Spirit Tracks fit on your lists of favorite Zelda titles?