Khuutra said:
Helios said:
With Spirit Tracks, the essence of the concept that made the original so great is gone; just what is the point of a central dungeon if the player never treads a section of said dungeon more than once? Its purpose is reduced to a narrative convenience - a structural component that does nothing in-and-of-itself to further the story or game play.
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I have no objections in particular to the rest of your post, save what would amount to subjective bickering. This segment gets to me, though.
The only quantifiable difference between the Tower of Spirits vs. The Temple of the Ocean King is a lack of (necessary) retreading; this I will freely grant. More, there are some aspects in which I prefered the TotOK (it is maybe the best dungeon ever, taken as a cohesive whole), which has to be acknowledged. However, I don't see how the lack of retreading subtracts from its value as a dungeon, nor how it reduces the status of the temple to a "narrative convenience" in a way that any other temple in the series is not. I mean, the distinction here can't be down to the integration of disparate gameplay concepts, because the ToS has that in spades.
What do you mean, here?
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You're correct; and that's just the thing.
The TotOK built upon the fact that you did re-tread its floors, and it incorporated this effectively - on multiple levels (items, sand, player experience, narrative) - into the game structure. It could not have been segmented into multiple dungeons and still have retained its essential qualities.
The Tower of Spirits is essentially a hub containing many mini-dungeons. It's a structural component of the game/narrative, and a convenient way of accommodating the Phantom Zelda segments. It's economic in its design, no doubt - but it isn't what the TotOK was. Ultimately, there is no reason why the Phantom segments are allocated to the ToS - they could just as easily have functioned as separate dungeons. That's what I meant when I said it was a narrative convenience.
In and of itself, that's not a bad thing - as you said, it is no different from any other dungeon - but it also fails to capture the essence of the TotOK, doesn't it?
For the record, while I may have been hard on Spirit Tracks, I still don't consider it a poor game. It's deeply flawed, at times, but still enjoyable. Some things were improved upon, like the music (I enjoyed the leitmotifs used throughout the game, like the town themes) and it didn't have the plot holes associated with the sea charts. The world was also made to be better realized and more "alive" which was probably the most damning of PH's flaws, in my opinion.
