4/5 ★ – DarrensTrashBag's review of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

I have heard a lot of people say that this is the worst Zelda game, and after finally playing it I must say that I am surprised. Lets get the bad stuff out of the way: the controls, this was obviously the worst part of the game. It was fine for the first few hours but after a while it just made my hand sore. Sometimes I will do swing inputs or roll when I did not want to. The second biggest issue was The Temple of The Ocean King. Having to do the same puzzles over and over again, even though you get items to make it faster, it is still an idiotic inclusion. The third thing is Celia, the fairy companion, is just awful. Probably the worst Zelda character ever. She is a dick to everyone and just complains all the time. She doesn't have an arc and is just granted power because she is a main character. She is 20x worse than Navi. A small thing that I was disappointed with was Tetra's writing, they just made her a damsel in distress like Zelda, which I prefer what she was in Wind Waker. Now the good: The dungeons and bosses are actually top tier. The only dungeon I didn't like was the Temple of Ice and that is it. Linebeck is a great character with an actual arc. Speaking of, I really loved the cutscenes, they just had that Zelda charm that I like in every game but specifically Wind Waker's charm, it made the cutscenes entertaining even if the story wasn't very engaging. I like the aspect of customizing your ship and also sailing around. Here is my rankings for worst to best dungeons: Temple of the Ocean King: Like I said before, this is a awful stealth section that goes on for way too long. Having to repeat puzzles is stupid. The time for me wasn't an issue but it just adds unnecessary stress to the player. Temple of Ice: Mainly the ice physics was the bad part of this. There is also a part where you have to get on top of the grappling hook pole, which never occurred to me that you could do that given the 2D Zelda games having a jumping mechanic. The boss also was the worse with him attacking way too quickly for the player to draw the lines with the grappling hook. Ghost Ship: Below average dungeon that is just an escort mission where the characters you escort get scared at the most minor thing miles away and they walk so slow. Boss was ok. Temple of Fire: this is just a basic average dungeon, puzzles didn't floor me, boss was basic and forgettable. Temple of Wind: Great use of wind puzzles and also the boss was enjoyable to fight against, usually bomb bosses are tedious. Temple of Courage: what saves this temple is the boss fight, using the top screen as a pov camera was a very cool idea. Getting through the temple was kind of a slog. Mutoh's Temple: This is like a good OoT water temple. the boss was also basically shadow of the colossus which is very good. I like the hammer but wished it was used more often, because those rock puzzles were very great, Goron Temple: I didn't like how you get into the temple but I loved how they used the bombchus. The boss was also incredible, temple of courage had the best boss but this one was very good. The top five dungeons are very close in quality, which is very high. Overall it is underrated, if they remastered this game but with better controls, people will be talking more about this game. 78/100