As a long-time Zelda fan, I was eager to get my hands on the newest installment in Nintendo’s legendary franchise. I finally finished the game earlier this week and, while the game was certainly good, I was left with the feeling that Nintendo lured me into its metaphorical van with promises of lollipops and cotton candy but instead crammed a foot-long, spiky dildo into my sweet, virgin asshole.

I would like to preamble this rant with the concession that I really did enjoy Spirit Tracks. Really, I did. The graphics were crisp and the writing was about as good as anybody could expect from a Zelda game. Plus, the six dungeons found in the game were challenging enough to satisfy me and had some truly unique and creative puzzles that integrated the new items and the phantom extremely well. I hope this admission will be enough to placate rabid Zelda fans, because the rest of this article will be dedicated to how utterly pissed off I am that Nintendo took a great idea and turned it into a marathon of engineering nonsense that should only serve as an example of just how stupid experienced game developers can be when they lose sight of the bigger picture when dealing with an established franchise.

My first complaint with Spirit Tracks is that it insists on using the same control scheme as Phantom Hourglass. While I thought that the touch screen-only approach was neat in its own way, it seems to me that Link is generally more satisfying to control when using the classic d-pad and face buttons. Let’s face it: Phantom Hourglass was experimental, and the experiment was only moderately successful. There’s no reason to continue using a flawed control scheme. None. It’s like how middle-aged wives keep trying to make a good fruit cake every Christmas and don’t realize that all the nice neighborhood folks she gives them to hate her now for forcing such an awful brick of inedible, brown mess down their throats year after year. She’s ruining Christmas by not learning from her mistakes, and that’s exactly what Nintendo did with Spirit Tracks. They ruined Christmas. Is there really any reason to not give Link a standard control scheme, even when a touch screen is available? Imagine how much better this game could have been if the only time the touch screen came into use was for certain items and minigames. Hell, it would be an improvement just because then we wouldn’t have to deal with a stylus obscuring a portion of the screen at all times. Imagine what Ocarina of Time would have been like if you had to play the whole thing with a stick taped to your TV. Ugh. It would be easy to forgive the touch screen controls if they seemed to add to the experience, but all it did for me was piss me off.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper rant about Spirit Tracks if I didn’t talk about that godforsaken train. Zelda is first and foremost a franchise based around exploration and adventure. The ability to go anywhere and check out Hyrule at your own pace has been a staple of the series since the original. So how does it make ANY sense that Link should be confined to pre-set tracks when he’s in the overworld? Insofar as explorative vehicles go, trains have to rank dead last. Instead of having the option to go in any direction, the only available directions are forward and backward. Sure, occasionally you might get the option to turn left or right, but really the options for exploration are so limited that I felt like Nintendo just didn’t trust me to explore this version of Hyrule. Maybe that’s for the better, since most of it was barren and poorly-textured, save a few roaming enemies and a pointless rabbit minigame. Everything about the train was boring and contrived, and the fact that the world around it was ugly only served to make things worse.

To be fair, Spirit Tracks was not a bad game. The problem I’m having is that I’ve come to expect a certain level of quality from the Zelda series and Spirit Tracks, quite frankly, could have been leaps and bounds better than it actually was. For example, nixing the archaic top-down viewpoint would have allowed for more scenery and bigger set pieces. It’s my understanding that the DS is at least as powerful as the N64, so it should have been able to handle the likes of Lake Hylia and Hyrule Field just fine. Forcing players to look down into a tiny box takes away the whole, “ooh, I’m in a big, pretty place!” factor that the other 3D Zeldas have. I would have also liked to see some new art direction just because I think Toon Link deserves a break. He’s been the star of (technically) six Zelda games, which is more than double the amount any other style Link has seen and, while Wind Waker remains one of my favorite games of all time, I think it’s time Nintendo hung up his little booties and created a new Link to take his place. I’m afraid this will never happen just because of brand recognition, though. There’s always the possibility that Nintendo is refusing to let Toon Link die because they think that having a familiar character associated with the series will boost sales. Regard

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