Phantom Hourglass was such a poorly-designed
Zelda game that it put me off
Zelda for a good while, skipping
Spirit Tracks entirely. After the horrible mechanics for guiding the boat around the overworld, I was thoroughly uninterested in doing anything less than run around an overworld on foot, so seeing an on-rails train be the means of getting around from area to area didn't fill me with enough enthusiasm to give Nintendo the benefit of the doubt.
I do mean it, the boat mechanics were a substantial downgrade from
Wind Waker's. I enjoy
Wind Waker's boat-sailing to a degree, you always feel like you're in total control of everything that's happening. Not so with
Phantom Hourglass, where you blindly draw your intended path in advance and pray nothing comes to intercept it, lest you be forced to hastily blindly draw up a
new path. In the interim, rail shooting! One of my least favorite genres! You can adjust your speed, I suppose, but I never felt like I could account for everything the game was throwing at me.
Not that I was thoroughly impressed with the game
outside of the boat-sailing, either. The islands were even smaller than
Wind Waker's, the music for the overworld was thoroughly unmemorable (
this is what you hear outside of towns; three chords, wow), I was annoyed that the only way to kill a Pol's Voice that I had on hand was to speak into the DS and get odd stares from everyone around me as to why I'd so abruptly start talking to an inanimate object (I know that's how it worked in the Famicom version of
Zelda, but it still sucks), and that dungeon where you have to do forced timed stealth segments against invincible enemies was annoying as
hell, especially since you're forced to return to it repeatedly throughout the entire game.
I will give it credit for a few things, though: the controls worked for being forcibly touch-only (even though they really didn't need to be touch-only,
Zelda's worked fine with the D-Pad in the past) and the art direction was quite good, especially given the DS hardware being worked with.
I am so glad they decided to go back to a formula I enjoy with the 3DS games. If portable
Zelda was to be like
Phantom Hourglass from then on, I'd probably have never bothered with portable
Zelda again. I really hope it'll be more like either
Ocarina of Time 3D or
A Link Between Worlds from here on...