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Wait, I mean Legend of ZEL-da. Because of, you know, the whole internet forums bitching about Link’s new cartoony look. Oh wait, that joke’s 3 years old? Review after the jump.

Every once in a while, you might come across a game that takes a tried-and-true control scheme to another level with the d-pad and newfangled motions such as “analog pressure sensitive controls” and whatnot. When you’re a developer being given the development kit of Nintendo’s touch-screen portable, you’re going to have to think outside the proverbial box. Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass takes a sledgehammer and smashes that box to itty-tiny bits, because controlling Link this time around is indeed a milestone for gaming as a whole. Of course, it does help that Nintendo has full access to the system’s secrets (seeing that they made the damn console in the first place), but whatever.

Phantom Hourglass takes place right after the acclaimed Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Tetra, your pirate companion, gets kidnapped by a ghost ship in the beginning, and as you try to rescue her, you fell into the ocean and get washed out onto an unknown island. You are then waken up by a fairy named Cera, who will act as your cursor in game-speak, and after a few plot expositions with the fairy’s grandfather and a twat of a pirate called Linebeck, you head off in search of the ghost ship, elemental-themed temples and a grand-spanning traditional adventure. Phantom Hourglass stays true thematically as the sequel to The Wind Waker. The whole sea and pirates theme, the cel-shaded graphics which comes with both praises and ire from the gaming community, the treasure hunting: it’s all there. It’s amazing how much power the little DS can crank out the cartoony goodness that is the graphics. Like Square-Enix, Nintendo spared no expense in presentation, both from the video and Kenta Nagata-composed audio.

No rambling of Phantom Hourglass, be it small or large, can be complete without mentioning the touch-screen mandatory controls, and by George, it works like a dream. Combat is handled with small slash strokes, tapping and circle strokes on the touch-screen, and items like the boomerang are used via drawing a path of flight for it. At first, having part of your hand and stylus might get in the way of your field of view, but give it time: there are things in this game that can only be pulled off with the touch-screen controls.

The whole package is essentially a Zelda game stripped down to its core element. And that’s the problem: it’s the by-the-numbers formula all over again, just with a fucking-A control scheme. Yes, there are STILL two types of bosses: one where you reflect their projectiles at them, and one where you use your newly-acquired item in a puzzle-like manner on them, be it a boomerang or a bomb-bag, or an amalgamation of the two . Yes, you still have “turn on the switches in the correct order” and ” press a switch and see how fast you can get to the door” puzzles. To be fair, the Palace of The Ocean King segments are new. Basically, wandering around the halls would sap your life unless you hang around the purple safe-zones littered in the corners of the dank place. Enter the Phantom Hourglass, a tool which protects you from the life-sucking dread of the palace for a limited amount of time. Add in dangerous phantom guards, limited purple spots, and a lot of backtracking puzzles, and you got yourself a formula for admiration/ irritation, depending on your end of the spectrum.

As much as they get props for sticking with a winning formula, it still feels a little like a game engine that begs to have new ideas strapped onto it. There’s a word for this kind of predicament: potential. Majora’s Mask had that 3-day limit with the time-traveling mechanics, Minish Cap had puzzles of Liliputian proportions; even Capcom’s Oracle Of Time/ Seasons had an interesting spin. Then again, that is a lot of awesome to live up to, which kind of makes Phantom Hourglass a slight step down in comparison.

But I digress: this is indeed the Link’s Awakening for 2007, without the dream-people genocide bits. Every generation needs a great portable Zelda game, and Phantom Hourglass is the one to fill that void. If you haven’t bought this a week ago, buy it now, doofus.

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