The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks' Dungeon Design

Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks both take clear advantage of the Nintendo DS. Link is controlled by dragging the stylus around the touchscreen. The microphone is used for instruments and certain items. The second screen can show a detailed map of the current area.

The best feature might be the ability to pull that map down to the touchscreen and write notes on it. In the overworld, this is a great fit. The ocean and rail maps are large, revisited over many sessions, and full of treasures or routes that may need to be remembered later.

In the dungeons, though, that same convenience changes the challenge in a more troublesome way.

In these DS dungeons, the player has constant access to a detailed map of the entire current floor as soon as they step inside. Newly opened doors and revealed chests are marked. Missing details can be filled in with handwritten notes.

That raises a broader design question: how much information should a game give the player? Should a stealth game show whether the player is hidden? Should enemies have health bars? Should side missions be marked automatically?

Sometimes it is more engaging to keep the player in the dark. Part of the pleasure of a Zelda dungeon is holding its state in your head: remembering a locked door, mentally mapping a route, or visualizing how a waterlogged dungeon has changed.

When all that information is already on the screen, the dungeon can become an exercise in moving from point to point. Get a key, walk to the marked door. Hit a switch, cross the newly marked bridge. The map begins to act like a soft waypoint system.

Other Zelda games have maps too, but they usually work differently. The player must first find the map in a chest, open a separate screen to view it, and interpret a version that is often broad rather than fully detailed.

That kind of map can help a player understand a place without solving it outright. It supports the mental model instead of replacing it.

Hollow Knight offers a useful comparison. Early maps are incomplete, lack detail, and do not initially show the player's current location. That forces the player to pay attention and think about their position in the world. The map is a hint, not a solution.

When later upgrades fill in more blanks and show exact position, the game becomes more convenient, but it also loses some of that exploratory charm.

The DS games do have one elegant information system: paid chest hints. In many Zelda games, a compass reveals all treasure chests once found. That can be too much information for players who would rather work things out themselves.

In Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, statues can reveal chest locations on the current floor for a few rupees. That turns extra information into an optional purchase.

Players who are lost or stuck can get a helping hand. Players who want to reason through the space can keep their money and ignore the statues.

More hint systems could work this way. A game can keep its dungeons complex and spatially demanding while giving players a clear, optional way to skip the hardest parts of that reasoning.

The map-writing feature is not a bad idea. It can create clever puzzles when players are asked to record information in one place and use it later somewhere else.

A panel might show the correct sequence for a set of switches, turning the note into something like a key. The player does not simply possess the answer. They must understand where and how to apply it.

One strong example appears in the Sand Temple, where a key is hidden at the midpoint between two switches. The player draws a line between them, finds the center, moves there, and digs up the key.

That is the map at its best: not a solved dungeon laid bare, but a tool the player uses to reason.

The map notes become most important in Phantom Hourglass's Temple of the Ocean King. This is a dungeon the player revisits six times throughout the adventure, repeating many of the same rooms and puzzles to reach new sections.

That sounds tedious, but the intended idea is strong. The player is supposed to leave notes on the map so future visits can be completed faster. The better the notes, the faster the route. It creates the strange feeling of collaborating with a past version of yourself.

New items from other dungeons also open shortcuts through the Temple, creating a satisfying sense of growing efficiency. The same space becomes quicker and more familiar as the player gains tools and knowledge.

As a concept, that is genuinely interesting for the Zelda series.

Unfortunately, the Temple of the Ocean King also piles on a lot of irritating friction. There are invincible enemies, invisible enemies, visual stealth sections, audible stealth sections, slow-walking moments, and a time limit.

What could have been a bold repeated-dungeon experiment becomes a frustrating chore running through the center of the game.

Spirit Tracks tries to fix the problem with the Tower of Spirits. The player returns throughout the adventure, but does not repeat rooms in the same way. There is no time limit, and phantom enemies can be attacked and possessed by Princess Zelda.

The Tower is more enjoyable to play, but the fix goes too far. Without the repeated-content idea, it becomes a long dungeon completed in six separate chunks. It loses some of what made the Temple of the Ocean King interesting in the first place.

Phantom Hourglass might have worked better if map drawing were reserved for the Temple of the Ocean King, with the cartography puzzles concentrated there too.

For the other dungeons, the player could have been given a blank note sheet for clues, musical notation, reminders, and sketches. That would preserve the pleasure of writing things down without making every dungeon feel like an already solved diagram.

The distinction matters. Writing notes can deepen a puzzle when the player decides what information is important. A fully filled-in dungeon map can weaken the puzzle by deciding too much on the player's behalf.

Outside the repeated central dungeons, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks mostly offer simple follow-the-path structures. There is a little backtracking here and a little non-linearity there, but not much that strongly challenges spatial reasoning.

The individual puzzles are often cute, and by this point Nintendo is very good at making compact room-scale puzzle ideas. The hardest moments can come from not realizing a particular action is possible, such as picking up arrow shooters.

Some of the more interesting puzzles involve Link working with another character, such as the Goron in Phantom Hourglass or Zelda in Spirit Tracks. In those moments, the detailed maps make more sense because the two characters can operate on opposite sides of the dungeon.

One standout structural moment appears in Spirit Tracks' Sand Temple. The player goes deep into the dungeon, finds the sand wand, and then must return to the first floor to use it.

This works because going back is not just walking through completed space. On the way in, the player passes enemies they cannot kill, rolling spikes they must dodge, and chests they cannot reach.

On the return journey, the new sand wand lets them reach those chests, manipulate those spikes, and defeat those enemies. The route back becomes a tutorial for the item's abilities and a more satisfying form of backtracking.

It shows how a dungeon can ask the player to revisit space without making the second trip feel identical to the first.

The DS dungeons are not especially ambitious in theme. There is a ghost ship and a pyramid, but many temples fall into familiar forest, snow, water, fire, sand, wind, ice, and repeat-fire categories. The repeated dungeon music does not help them feel distinct.

The bosses are stronger. Some use both screens at once to show huge monsters that span the handheld display, preserving some of Zelda's usual scale and spectacle.

The boss keys are also more interactive than usual. Instead of a small inventory item, the boss key is a heavy object Link must carry through the dungeon. That can create interesting moments, such as racing a key in a mine cart or avoiding enemies that try to steal it back.

Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are full of clever DS-specific ideas. Their main weakness is that they often reveal too much of the dungeon too early, turning spaces that could ask for memory and spatial reasoning into routes that are already drawn out for the player.