In my mind, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has always been a bad Zelda game. That wasn’t based on my actual experience with it, though, because I barely had one. When I first got the DS game as a present back in 2010, I only booted it up once. I climbed onto Link’s locomotive, set out to reach Hyrule Castle, and then instantly got frustrated with the train-based gameplay after hitting my first game over. I set the game down and never bothered coming back to it.
Well, actually, a few years ago, I finally did, only to play about the same amount. This time I really meant to play more, but I didn’t have time for a lengthy session, and set it down with plans to return. I never did.
Getting In The Spirit (Tracks)
This Christmas break, I set things right. I always enjoy playing Zelda games on break. They’re the perfect games to play when you’re trying to be in the same room as your family but don’t actually want to do stuff together. This is how I played Phantom Hourglass, the 3DS versions of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, and portions of Breath of the Wild. Going into this break, I decided it was finally time to give Spirit Tracks a fair shake.
It turns out it’s a great game. I haven’t quite finished it yet — I just unlocked the fourth area of the map, the Fire Realm — but I’ve put a dozen or so hours in, and I’m getting exactly what I wanted from it. It turns out that what I’d been craving was something completely different from Echoes of Wisdom.
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That isn’t to say that the most recent Zelda release is bad, exactly. I had a pretty good time with it. But the mechanic that made it most exciting — Zelda’s ability to summon echoes of objects and enemies she had interacted with to accomplish goals or fight her battles — also led to the game petering out the further in you got.
In the beginning, finding new echoes that you could use in platforming or to steamroll enemies was exciting. But unless you actively chose to vary your strategy, it was easy to use the same handful of echoes to solve every problem, even in the second half. It was still an admirable attempt to fuse the BotW/TotK approach to systemic play with 2D Zelda’s dungeon-based structure, but those dungeons ended up feeling a bit trivial as a result of the greater mechanical freedom.
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Classic Zelda Is Still Classic
Going back to Spirit Tracks is a reminder that the classic 2D Zelda gameplay wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing. Each new dungeon is a fresh challenge because Link always has a new item to play with. For example, I recently finished a dungeon where you needed to use a whip to swing from the rafters and used it to solve puzzles by snatching swords out of the mouths of living statues. It was pretty cool, and felt quite different from earlier temples built around the Boomerang and the Whirlwind.
And unlike its predecessor Phantom Hourglass, the recurring section between dungeons is fun, too. In that game, Link repeatedly returned to a dungeon called the Ocean King Temple and had to replay all of the temple’s previous sections in order to progress to the new one. Spirit Tracks borrows the idea of a recurring location, but lets you skip straight to the fresh level each time.
After Echoes of Wisdom, Spirit Tracks just feels so designed. Each dungeon requires a specific solution using a specific item. You can’t just throw echoes at problems until they’re solved. That might make the game old school, but old school isn’t always a bad thing. The only part of its design that feels dated is that I need to use a stylus to do everything and it makes my hand cramp. But that’s more a problem of me aging poorly, not the game.
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