Thanks to a certain somebody( <3<3), I got Spirit Tracks to work, and I've been playing that for hours every day. The game is a huge improvement over Phantom Hourglass. It has much better music and it really listened to the fans complaints about different annoyances such as having to revisit the same damn dungeon over and over again. I thought I'd have to do the same thing again with the multiple trips to the Spirit Tower, but actually you can just skip over all that since you climb the stairs to the appropriate level, so while you technically are visiting the same dungeon over and over, actually you're not.
One thing I find annoying is that you spend a huge chunk of the game transporting people and items around. You actually don't have to do any of this to progress the game, but the only thing you get for doing this are these spirit shards that unlock more tracks. The tracks usually lead to a warp point or a shortcut to another land, but once you open up enough of these, you have trouble keeping track of which warps lead where as there are usually several warp points on each map.
I find the dungeons shorter than typical Zelda games, but actually I like this. I remember that goddamn water temple in Twilight Princess that I spent hours and hours on. HATE THE WATER TEMPLE!! The boss fights are a little more challenging than in Phantom Hourglass and I've already become enraged while fighting that Fire/Ice battle.
The game introduced something new this time where the treasures collected can either get you rupees or parts to your train. I'm not sure what to think of that yet, but because of that, I've hung on to a lot of my treasure, and it's kind of hard to find multiple pieces of treasure because there are some that you get a lot and some that are really rare, even though they're supposed to be common.
All in all: great Zelda experience!! Not to be missed. I hope they continue the wind waker style for the hand held games from now on. I love the colorful art and wind waker has always been my favorite zelda game.
