If playing through the main story, a 15 hour jaunt without any of the extraneous islands, doesn’t sate your inner Zelda fanatic, there’s an online portion to the game. Players switch off between being Link and trying to navigate a maze, pick up force gems and deposit them back to their base, and ordering Phantoms to follow a drawn path to whack Link and keep him from nabbing gems. It’s a fun diversion, and lag free over the DS’s Wi-Fi connection, but it’s nothing that’s going to set the world on fire.

There is a ton of stuff to do in this game, and all of it carries the top notch production values that gamers have come to expect from Nintendo. The writing is very well done, and makes this, hands down, the funniest Zelda title made. Cut scenes frequently make fun of some of the Zelda games and use slapstick humor and lots of little background touches to make the game laugh out loud funny on a number of occasions. Even the audio sparkles with the usual Zelda music combined with new music for each temple and an impressive use of the DS’s surround sound mode to provide spooky floating sound effects as you tackle the Temple of the Ocean King.

It would be easy to go on and on about the level of quality of this game. From the temple design, to the innovative and elegant control scheme to the well written and well animated cut scenes, this game is truly a joy to play. It’s not often that a game comes about to justify the purchase, or even the existence of a particular console, but with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Nintendo has delivered a game that every DS owner should experience. In this case, touching isn’t just good, it’s downright fantastic.