The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks' dungeon design | Boss Keys

Hi. I'm Mark Brown and this is Boss Keys. Over the past few months, I've been taking an in-depth look at the dungeons in the Legend of Zelda games because I want to understand how these things work, and what separates a brilliant dungeon from a boring one. This time, I'm looking at the ocean-going Wind Waker sequel Phantom Hourglass, and the steam engine adventure Spirit Tracks - which were both released on Nintendo DS.

And these games both take full advantage of that console's technology. You control Link by dragging a stylus around the touchscreen. You blow into the microphone to play instruments and use certain items. And the second screen is used to show a detailed map of the current area. You can even bring that map down onto the touchscreen, and write scruffy notes on it. In the overworld, this works wonders. You can jot down the location of some treasure you can't yet reach, to remind yourself to come get it after you've unlocked a few more items. Because the overworlds are so big, and because you'll be exploring them over so many different play sessions, taking notes makes perfect sense.

In the dungeons, though, this stuff can feel a lot like cheating. You have constant access to a full and detailed map of the entire current floor, and you get it as soon as you step into the dungeon. Plus, many things are filled in for you, newly opened doors and revealed chests are highlighted, and you can jot down notes for anything that's missing. And here's the thing. Game designers are always thinking about how much information they should present to a player.

In a stealth game, should you tell the player if they're hidden, or is it more interesting to withhold some of that information? Do you need to show an enemy's health bar? Or the direction of an incoming attack? Or the location of nearby side missions? The point is, it's sometimes more enjoyable to keep the player in the dark on certain things. And I think Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks just turn on the gosh darn floodlights.

As I've talked about in previous episodes, part of the challenge of a Zelda dungeon is in trying to keep everything in your head at once. It's about building that mental map, and remembering the location of a locked door, or trying to visualise the current state of a water-logged dungeon. When all of the information is in front of you, it completely negates that internal stuff and the dungeon quickly becomes an exercise in simply moving from point to point. Got the key? Walk to the locked door you marked earlier. Hit a switch? Cross the bridge marked on your map. And so on. Solving the dungeon almost becomes an automated process - and it's just one step up from full-on waypoints.

Of course, all of the other Zelda games have maps. But they work very differently. You first need to actually find the map in a treasure chest, and then to access it you need to switch to a different screen. And it's often a very general map, lacking in any real detail. This will help you puzzle out the Great Bay Temple, but it won't solve it for you. I was playing another game recently, the indie Metroidvania Hollow Knight, and it does some interesting stuff with maps. When you first buy one, it's incomplete, lacking in detail, and doesn't even show your current location. But that's all part of the fun - you really have to pay attention and think about your position in the world. The map is a hint - not a solution.

Later in the game, when I bought a compass and the ability to make the map fill-in the blanks, it definitely lost some of the charm. Anyway, speaking of buying stuff, I do like how the compass works in these DS games. In other Zelda games, you find the compass and it then shows you the location of all the treasure chests. It can be a bit too much information, and I sometimes wish I could avoid picking it up so I could figure it out myself.

In Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, to get this same information you need to pay for it. These statues will reveal the location of all the chests on the current floor, for a few rupees. Anyone who is a bit lost or a bit stuck can get a helping hand. Those who would prefer to figure things out for themselves can just ignore these statues and keep their rupees. Which feels good. More hint systems like this would allow Nintendo to craft those complex and difficult dungeons I keep yapping about, but give those who don't enjoy this sort of spatial reasoning gameplay a chance to skip the most tricky bits.

Those maps do lead to some cool puzzles where you're asked to jot down notes that will be used later on. You might come across a panel that shows you the correct sequence to hit a bunch of switches - so you need to record that information, and then figure out the right place to use it. It's essentially like finding a key for a lock - but you have to do some extra puzzle solving to understand how the key even works. One of the best is in the Sand Temple, where you're told to find a key that is hidden in the spot between two switches. So you draw a line between them, note the middle point, go there, and dig up the key. That's pretty cool. I enjoyed that.

And drawing on the map really comes into its own, when you face the most infamous part of Phantom Hourglass: the Temple of the Ocean King. This is a dungeon that you must visit six times throughout the game - and not only that, but you're repeating the same rooms and puzzles almost every time, because you need to pass through them to access a new section That might sound a bit crap. But, the whole point of the Temple of the Ocean King is that you are supposed to write notes on the map, so that you can quickly re-do the rooms, each time you come back. You get this rather eery sensation of collaborating with a past version of yourself, and the better your notes, the faster you'll go.

Plus, the items you find in the other dungeons also open up new shortcuts in the Ocean King, which speed up the process. So, you get this cool feeling of becoming more efficient as you unlock more tools. Unfortunately, this dungeon also contains just about every annoying piece of design you could possibly imagine. There are invincible enemies. Invisible enemies. Visual stealth sections. Audible stealth sections. Slow walking bits. A time limit. And probably more stuff I've tried to forget.

What could have been a really interesting dungeon, and something that was truly innovative in the Zelda series, turned out to be a bit of a frustrating chore that runs right down the spine of the game. Which is a real shame. With Spirit Tracks, Nintendo tried to address these flaws. You have the Tower of Spirits, which you keep coming back to throughout the adventure. But you don't have to repeat any rooms, there's no time limit, and you can attack the phantom enemies and have a ghostly Princess Zelda inhabit their bodies.

But while the Tower of Spirits is certainly more enjoyable to play than the Ocean King, without the clever use of repeated content it just becomes this incredibly drawn-out dungeon that you finish in six discrete chunks. I think they fixed it too much, and lost what made the Phantom Hourglass dungeon so interesting. But what I wanted to say was, I personally think Phantom Hourglass would have been better if you could only write notes on the map for the Ocean King, and put all the cartography puzzles in that dungeon.

For the other dungeons, just give the player a blank sheet of paper on which to write down notes, clues, musical notations, and other reminders. That way you get the joy of writing on a map, without making every dungeon an absolute cakewalk. So what about those other 12 dungeons, then. I haven't said much about them. And that's for a reason - these dungeons are perfect examples of the super easy, straightforward, follow-the-path designs I've been moaning about for the past few episodes now and you just really don't need another repeat of that.

So there's a tiny bit of backtracking here. A tiny bit of non-linearity there. But for the most part, these dungeons are just not going to challenge you on a spatial reasoning level - and that's before they're completely spoiled by the map. The individual room puzzles might give you pause though. Well, I say individual rooms but this game actually has an open-plan design without discrete rooms. But yeah, Nintendo has gotten really good at making cute puzzles by this point - though, most are still pretty easy. The only ones that stumped me were when I didn't know I could perform certain actions. Oh, you can pick up those arrow shooters! I didn't know that...

More interesting are the puzzles where Link works with another character, like the Goron in Phantom Hourglass, or Zelda in Spirit Tracks. It's something I asked for in the episode on Wind Waker, where Makar or Medli always had to be in the same room as Link. The two characters can be on other sides of the dungeon and, yes, I'll admit that the detailed maps make perfect sense for this type of gameplay. I did want to note one thing about structure. In the desert temple, you go deep into the dungeon and pick up the sand wand. Then, you need to go back to the first floor to use it. And this is one of the only dungeons that doesn't just loop you around to your exact destination. Player directed backtracking, oh how I've missed you!

And not only that, but Nintendo smartly designed the dungeon so that going back is as much fun as going forward. On the way to the wand, you pass by enemies you can't kill, you have to dodge these big rolling spikes, and you have to bypass treasure chests you can't reach. But on the return journey, your new sand wand lets you get those chests, mess with those spikes, and defeat those enemies. It's both a tutorial for the sand wand's abilities, and it gives you proper backtracking but without the usual sameyness of going back through areas you've already finished. Nice.

Okay, lemme hit up some stray thoughts. This game is not very ambitious with the theming on the dungeons. You've got a ghost ship that's kinda cool, and a pyramid that's pretty neat. But for the most part you've got forest temple! Snow Temple! Water temple! Fire temple! Sand temple! Wind temple! Another fire temple! Ice temple! And so on. To add insult to injury, the music is the same in every single dungeon. Yeesh. The bosses are pretty cool. For some of them, the game uses both screens at once to reveal a towering great boss monster that you fight across both displays. I've always enjoyed Zelda's bosses for their sheer spectacle and scale, as much as anything else, and it's cool to see that on a handheld game.

And I suppose I should mention that these games do something interesting with the boss key, as this series is named after them. Here, the boss key is a big heavy object that Link must carry through the dungeon - and this can lead to some interesting events where you're racing a key in a mine cart, or avoiding floormasters who are trying to snatch it back. But... yeah. I suspected that I wouldn't have all that much to say about these games. Though, the length of this YouTube video does say otherwise...

It has given me some stuff to think about for future instalments, though, so it was well worth replaying them for Boss Keys. But it's time to move on - next time on the show, I'll be looking at one of the most polarising games in Zelda's history - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Eek.