I finally finished The Legend of Zelda - Spirit Tracks
and have to say, that it was the worst Zelda game ver made by Nintendo.
In the end I was just relieved to finally have gotten through it.
Besides the horrible style of the NDS Zeldas (which I can overlook) the whole railsystem is really screwed.
Most of the time ingame you are driving from point A to point B on rails but although you cannot control much of it, you have to stay at the screen because now and then annoying critters attacky you.
If qou want to have all the hearts and abilities you have to do this nearly ALL THE TIME.
Finally after having all stamps, hearts and abilities I read somewhere, that in order to get the full ending you need the golden train. Well, I thought "no problem" because I already had half of it because I found every treasure chest in the game and didn't need much more treasure for the last two.
It can't be this hard to get 3 white pearl necklaces and 3 palace dishes, right?`how wrong I was. I spent weeks buying those lucky cards, checking every day for the prize to be what I need or to have the traders including Terri to have the items in their shops but nope. No way to get white pearls or Palace Dishes at all.
In between I played those annoying mini games over and over again and in the end had DOZENS of rare items but not nearly enough of the f***ing "Palace Dish". I ended up with 25x golden coin, 20x mystic jade, even 4x alchemy stone in addition to the ones I actually needed and 5x regal ring but still short of 2 palace dishes! I finished the whip minigame 25 times in under 1:10 without getting the damned thing.
One evening I even started screwing with my DSs date setting to get the item changes and prizes faster but it made no difference, still over about 20000 rupies worth of stuff I didn't need.
And that, my dear folks, is why Nintendos random generators are shit, I had similar problems with finding the sould in the castlevania games like Dawn of Sorrow, which at least was a great game nonetheless.
But the horror didn't end there!
After having the blasted gloden train I had no problem at all finishing the demon train and all the stages of the last boss until the point where you have to protect Zelda to let her cast her spell, but after some slight frustration I finally made that too.
The worst part was still to come.
Nearly before the end you have to play the damned flute/microphone once again and although every song before in the game was no problem I needed two dozen tries to let her recognize it, because the microphone made a stuttering out of some blows. Graaarr. No near to ragequitting right before the end.... then I made it and the ending was lame.
End of Story.
