Zelda Phantom Hourglass: I picked this up a while ago (back in November...ish?) and just now beat it. It wasn't a long game, no. Why did it take me three months, then?
Because it sucked.
That's... not fair. It had it's moments, and it's certainly not a bad game, but it's easily the worst of them (CD-I ignored). It brought back sailing, but in a manner that should have allowed you to largely ignore it... except for the fact that you have to fight enemies with your poorly calibrated cannon every 5 seconds. The dungeons were overly simplistic. One of those dungeons is, until the end of the game, a stealthy hide-from-all-the-enemies dungeon and do it before time runs out. You have to do this dungeon a total of 6 times before you can beat the game. The controls are... irritating, to say the least, though I got used to them toward the end. The plot... oh, who cares, it's a Zelda game, you don't play it for that. Though it is jarring, going from the games that attempted plot (Wind Waker, Twilight Princess) to something that was as blissfully plot free as LttP. To make up for it, they throw the same cheesy dialog sequence at you over and over in an attempt to be funny. Oy. I get it, Linebeck is useless, stop beating me over the head with it.
There are some sidequests, but they're not easily found through the normal game and largely not worth it anyhow. Did I mention that you have a different health bar on your ship than you do Link? Not too bad, it sounds, until you realize you're stuck at 4 hearts the entire game unless you get lucky and get enough ship parts of the same set. Did I mention that when finding ship parts they're randomly generated, so there's no guarantee that by endgame you'll have enough of a set to raise your hearts by 1? And you have to fight part of the final boss as your ship, so you could easily be fighting him with 4 hearts? Grah.
So, yeah, the game largely sucked, but it did do some good things. Every single one of the boss fights was well done (particularly the golem boss), and it was mercifully short. It also used the DS's features far more than any other game I've played on it. This was both good and bad; good because for fuck's sake finally a game's taking advantage of the weird things you can do with the DS, and bad because 99% of the game was a gimmick. Seriously, almost every puzzle is "get clue, write it down on your map so you don't forget, move to next room, repeat ad nauseum. It also made playing in public irritating, since every once in a while I would have to yell at my console like a retard begging for a hug... at least until I figured out you could just blow really hard into the mic and get the same effect.
I said the controls were irritating, but I need to rant about them. They're more than just a little hard to get used to; they really just suck. Moving, attacking, throwing, etc. are all the same motion. If you tap the screen, you'll either attack or start heading in that direction. If you're holding something in your hands, occasionally you'll throw it before you mean to because you accidentally tapped far away instead of pressed down so Link would hurry his scrawny ass. The only times I ever died in the game were the direct result of Link running around like a moron instead of slicing with his sword.
The ship controls are worse. First, like on land you use the stylus and the other buttons act as shortcut keys. That's not too bad, until you realize that your touch screen is absolutely cluttered with buttons for you to accidentally hit when you're trying to turn the camera around to fight some irritating ass enemy. Second, instead of manually controlling the ship you open up the route menu and draw where you're going to go. This is both good and bad. Good because you can largely ignore sailing and just bash things with your cannon every once in a while, bad because in battle there is no other way to maneuver. Having to stop the action every 5 seconds so I can change course and not get hit by a fucking cannon ball is just bad design.
To sum up, an OK game with horrible controls, simplistic gameplay, awesome bosses, and... that's about it. Easily the worst non-CDI Zelda game made.
Also, too much Tetra tentacle rape.
