Yeah Nintendo they said its looks like phantom hourglass great cant wait for this game
"Yeah", "great"?
Phantom Hourglass's ridiculously blocky graphics weren't pretty, even Alundra 2 on the PSX looks way better (as well as pretty much
any of the 3D RPGs for the DS. )
I can't believe Nintendo is making another game based on the exact same half-assed engine Phantom Hourglass had, with virtually no changes...It literally looks JUST like Phantom Hourglass. Yay for monotony?
I really don't see what there's to praise, except for the fact that it's another game with the word "Zelda" in its title. Spirit Tracks is pretty much the absolute minimum of what Nintendo could've come up with as a successor of Phantom Hourglass.
They already have Phantom Hourglass engine ready.. why would they start over again!?
Look at it. Maybe because it sucks?
I'm not saying Nintendo should start the game from scratch, but obviously they didn't bother to improve the look of Spirit Tracks over Phantom Hourglass one bit, either. The blocky graphics of Phantom Hourglass already pissed me off quite a bit back then, because there never was any good reason why the game had to look like that in the first place. Yes, the game's supposed to have classic 2D gameplay like the other handheld Zeldas, but that doesn't mean everything has to look like it, too.
I wouldn't even mind the blocky levels when at least they had some other details that covered them or made up for them, but no. All is made from the same blocks and same textures over and over and over again, which makes the game look simply dull. The idea of building levels from pre-made objects wasn't exactly new when Phantom Hourglass was made, but it rarely was any more painfully obvious. For god's sake, the tiles in Phantom Hourglass appear like four times bigger than in any SNES game, it's just painful to look at. Even ALTTP looked more detailed, and I'm not even sure whether PH's 3D graphics are a pro or a con there.
The game actually looked good in a few spots, like when you enter a house or fight a boss, because those places are all "custom built", and not made from huge bulky blocks. If the whole game looked like that, I'd most likely even be on your side. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Another thing that comes along with Nintendo's decision to use some awkward pseudo-2D engine instead of a proper 3D engine (with full 3D action, rotating camera views, leveldesigns that expand into every direction, y'know, the essential stuff) is that everything looks so damn flat. Not only are all of the floors perfectly even, it also appears like none of the levels are more than three blocks tall. No such things as slopes or at least minor irregularities in the floors, just the same floor texture applied to large, flat fields which sometimes take up multiple screens.
Anyway, I really see no point in further explaining why the game looks bad when there's tons of games on the DS that
undeniably look much better. Just compare it to Final Fantasy III, that game was released way earlier and still manages to look way better.
The only thing that looks remotely good in Phantom Hourglass is the cel-shading, but sadly that alone doesn't make up for what makes the game looks bad.
QUOTEMajora's Mask was simply Ocarina of Time with a new mask gimmick and it was a great game, same to the Oracle games. In fact, that's the vibe I'm getting from this: a more alternative Zelda, like Majora's Mask was.