Nintendo reveals Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for DS
Live from GDC: Our first impressions of stylus-based Zelda adventuring point to a game brimming with DS-exploiting invention
A new Legend of Zelda adventure game for the Nintendo DS was the big surprise revealed by Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, in his keynote address to the Game Developers Conference this morning.
Judging from the short video that accompanied the announcement, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass appears to be a DS version of the GameCube's Wind Waker game.
Aside from a vague release date of "later this year", no specific details were given by Mr Iwata, so what follows are simply our first impressions, albeit gleaned from our position just three rows away from Mr Iwata and the video screen!
Link, the hero of the game, a sort of cute elfish adventurer (and one of Nintendo's oldest and most popular game characters) was shown exploring dungeons in most of the footage, as well as briefly captaining a sailing ship (as he does in The Wind Waker).
The view of the dungeon action was a 3D isometric one: a sort of semi-top-down view on the action that fixes the camera, enabling you to concentrate on exploring, fighting and so on, rather than working out where you're facing and moving.
As you'd expect from Nintendo, the stylus looks like being used in some interesting ways. For instance, in one shot Link was positioned on one side of the screen, armed with a boomerang. The player drew a yellow arc across the dungeon, indicating presumably the path he wanted the boomerang to take.
Similarly, in the sailing section, the player marked out on a nautical map where he wanted to steer his ship, seemingly leaving him free to concentrate on firing his ship's cannons.
In addition, mid-adventure puzzles (a mainstay of Zelda titles) were solved using the stylus and the second screen. One showed the player entering various numbers to solve a puzzle.
Drawing with the stylus also seemed to be used to open doors.
Fans of the Zelda series on older Nintendo consoles will be pleased to hear that we think we spotted Link following Navi the fairy for a brief moment. It also seems (and remember, we only had seconds to take this in) that Nintendo has made the islands that you sail between closer together for this DS title then in The Wind Waker. Moreover, the difficulty of steering the ship was one of the biggest complaints about that game, so the new stylus navigation method would seem a useful improvement. Link's vessel seemed more like a battleship then a simple sailing craft in Phantom Hourglass too.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many elements of Phantom Hourglass reminded us of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening – the first Zelda game to be playable on the move, way back on the original Game Boy handheld. As one of the best pocket gaming titles ever, that makes this new Zelda game very exciting indeed.
