I liked Phantom Hourglass. In fact, as much as I liked Twilight Princess, despite the disappointing ending, the bugs and bad music, I found Phantom Hourglass a much more satisfying Zelda experience. The problem I’m having is in wiping Phantom Hourglass‘ master dungeon from my mind. If you don’t remember, that’s the big dungeon at the heart of Phantom Hourglass, the one where the air is toxic and you need the hourglass to get through it alive. You do the stealth thing, the dealing with invincible enemies thing, the invisible enemies thing, the working against the clock thing… it’s terrible, just take my word. That issue didn’t make the game bad, but it kept it from greatness.

So here we have this first look at Spirit Tracks, which appears to be all about trains (see what they did there?) and now little Link is buzzing around creation on a locomotive instead of a steamship. The tracks are nothing new, we’ve done the mine car thing in just about every one of these games, right? And of course I love the Wind Waker subset and I think it works great on the limited DS hardware.

Still, after all this optimism and joy over seeing a new Zelda, I get this kind of weary feeling looking at Link’s face, and I connect it directly to that time spent in that master dungeon. You know what? I think I would have been happier to see a Twilight Princess sequel. How weird is that?