It’s hard to start a review about a Zelda game without reflecting on the franchise’s legacy. A staple of the gaming scene since the NES days, while gaming has evolved Zelda has stayed largely the same. Graphics and controls have evolved, but Zelda’s core elements of classic action/adventure gameplay, intricate dungeon design and beautiful story-telling remain.

Spirit Tracks is the fifteenth official Zelda title and the second to be released on the Nintendo DS. As is now tradition, we have a hero, a princess and a world in peril. This time around though, there are many twists in the traditional formula which only raises excitement levels for further changes for the next Wii adventure.

Before we tackle Spirit Tracks, lets take a quick look back at the previous DS Zelda adventure Phantom Hourglass. Phantom Hourglass was a game which offered a mix of new ideas with familiar gameplay elements and fused them together in one new, brightly coloured experience. Some bits clearly worked, other bits didn’t and then there were those which split people right down the middle – I am pretty sure I’m in the minority when I say I loved the timed, stealth-focused Temple of the Ocean King though.

Phantom Hourglass teased us with glimpses of brilliance. The touch-screen controls were precise and easy to grasp, the cel-shaded style, frowned upon by many for The WindWaker, had found its true home and the narrative was fresh and entertaining. Ultimately, however, it was a game with many flaws. Puzzles had been dumbed down for the new audience, bosses fell all too easily and though I loved the Temple of the Ocean King, I can understand why it frustrated many.

A hearty “Hallelujah” then for Spirit Tracks which steps onto our DSes boldly and corrects all of Phantom Hourglass’s faults and stands out as the best handheld Zelda title in recent years – and even pushes Link’s Awakening for the overall top spot!

Spirit Tracks takes place 100 years after Phantom Hourglass with the descendants of Link and Zelda now in the leading roles. And it is indeed both characters who take a lead part in this adventure as during the first expedition to the continent’s central Tower of Spirits, Princess Zelda becomes as important to the adventure as Link himself. With her spirit trapped outside its body and Link one of the few people who can see her, the once-damsel-in-distress must take control of Phantoms (mystical suits of armour) to help reunite her two halves.

The Phantom mechanic opens up a wealth of new puzzling possibilities as the player must work both Link and Zelda into the solutions of numerous challenges found in the Tower of Spirits. Link must go it alone in the game’s five other temples, but the Tower of Spirits is a 30-level labyrinth of truly epic proportions. Zelda is incredibly versatile thanks to a variety of Phantoms to possess, and it’s allowed the development team to crank the difficulty up a gear – a much welcomed improvement.

The Tower of Spirits takes on the central dungeon position held by the Temple of the Ocean King in Phantom Hourglass, but does away with the much-loathed time limit and repetition. You can power through as fast or as slow as you like, and it’s entirely up to you whether or not you return to earlier floors to find a few hidden treasures when you’ve built up your inventory.

The other major addition in Phantom Hourglass’s arsenal of gameplay mechanics is the Spirit Train. When originally unveiled to shocked gasps and cries of “What the hell?” at the start of the year, all fears should be laid to one side as the train is actually a sound addition to Link’s growing forms of transport. As well as getting Link from Point A to Point B, you will find that points C through Z are waiting for you, though many require extra sidequests be dealt with to unlock more tracks to those locations (and we’ll get back to those sidequests shortly).

Those tracks which the train runs on are also pivotal to the game’s storyline as they have been used for the past hundred years to lock away a powerful evil – the dark lord Malladus (that’s right, it isn’t Ganon, honest). Link must restore the power of the Spirit Tracks, open the portal to the dark world to confront Malladus and help return Zelda to her body. Easy peasy, you may think. You fought evil in Phantom Hourglass with no trouble at all.

But it isn’t easy. It’s by no means the most difficult Zelda you’ve played but Spirit Tracks does come with a difficulty curve that steadily builds as the game goes on and there is a good chance you will see the game over screen more than once. The first temple is unfortunately very short, very dull and very easy but it’s clearly there to ease the newcomers in, and as their experience builds over time so too does the difficulty until they’re tackling the last few levels of the Tower of Spirits and bouncing between multiple floors, hitting different switches with a combination of Phantom powers.

The main quest is roughly the same length as Phantom Hourglass – a seasoned Zelda player could rattle through this in around 20 hours. Spirit Tracks however offers a wealth of sidequests that have been badly missing from the series since Majora’s Mask almost a decade ago. There’s still work to be done on getting them back up to that exceedingly high standard, but a broad range of fetch quests, collect-em-ups, passenger and cargo transport quests and mini-games are on offer, far surpassing the slim pickings of its predecessor.

Spirit Tracks isn’t without it’s flaws (the frame rate occasionally drags on congested tracks and  enemies are going to have to start dealing out more damage than half a heart one day), but it is a significant step in the right direction for handheld Zelda games and the series as a whole. Aonuma and his team have talked about changing the structure of the Zelda series with the next Wii adventure and the DS games have both showed little hints of what could happen. Taking the title of DS Game of the Year, ladies and gentlemen a round of applause please for Spirit Tracks.