Today's game is The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks. I was stuck in a car for a bit today and had my 3DS on hand, so i booted this up to play it. The 3DS is why these images are so pixelated (low screen resolution) and why there's so few of them (i had to connect to my 3DS as an FTP Server, extract the tar archive that the TwilightMenu++ saves them too, convert them too a PNG since the images are in bmp format, and then upscale the pictures one at a time with a pixel up scaling application (it has to be a specific one because a lot of generic image upscalers now use AI upscaling which will absolutely butcher a pixelart image in my experience, especially one so low resolution). And even with all this fancy stuff some of the pictures did not turn out well, such as this lovely one where everything is a little fuzzy still because of how pixelated it is:
I had this game on the DS Lite, though i never really understood what was going on until i played it again as an adult. I had one save i remember prominently that was at the Tower of Spirits. I'd just load into that as a child and dick around in there for a while and get scared by the Phantoms. That tower's lobby theme is forever ingrained in my head as what i associate as "DS Music" just because of how memorable it is for me. I'm literally listening to it as i type this now lol.
It's a short but fun Zelda game, controls take some getting used to though. One of my favorite parts is that Zelda takes on the role as the "companion character" and actually joins link for the game (she's also probably one of my favorites next to Navi). It's something i wish was done more often because i really like their friendship in this game. Being able to control Zelda and take over Phantoms makes her actually involved in the Gameplay and puzzle solving which i love.
The train being the primary method to get around is a fun compromise for me with the DS's limited power. I honestly have a lot of fun just driving the thing around from location to location and will try to park it perfectly and everything.
I desperately wish this game got a remake just so i could drive the train on more modern hardware (and obviously experience it all over again) and not have to break out the DS just to play. It's one of those Niche Zelda games that i feel like people forget about sometimes and it can be hard for people to get into with how many compromises it made, so i doubt it will ever get a remake. But i can dream. i feel like Minish Cap was also like that for a while until it became the Zelda "Deep Cut" i see a lot of people suggest it as, so who knows. Maybe Spirit Tracks will one day get it's chance.
