Update Time!

Spirit Tracks: Aye Carumba! and I thought the fight against Ganondorf in Twilight Princess was dragged out, Malladus has been a total chore to take down. When you first enter the Dark Realm, you have to play Train Pac-Man where you collect Seeds of Life to power up your train and need to use that short invincibility time to take out all of the minor demon trains. On the one hand, it's easier than Pac-Man cause the Seeds of Light regenerate across the map when your invulnerability wears off. On the other hand, your mobility is much more restricted because of the train mechanics and I kept getting nailed thanks to trying to redirect my movement and dealing with enemies that move faster than me once my super mode is gone. After this, I had to fight the Ganon Train as fans call it, which was a much more interesting fight. He changes tracks a lot and tries to ram you but his cable cars also have weapons to hit you with. I died a few times in this phase because the final phase changes the rules a little. First off, you don't realize this phase is timed, basically you only have so much track and once you reach the end, its game over. What really perplexed me was that once you're down to just fighting the engine, the engine generates energy beam attacks which you can destroy, so like taking out the passenger cars, you think the idea of the fight is to destroy all of them. This turns out to be wrong, your actual goal is to speed past the train and directly attack the Ganon face in order to stop the train once and for all. The beam weapon will constantly regenerate and kill time until you lose room to go.

The actual fight with Malladus begins and the goal is to get Phantom Zelda to reach the boss in order to grab them because they'll use a shield otherwise to block all your attacks. Malladus also fires a beam that requires Zelda to work as a shield for Link. What makes this phase a pain in the ass, is that Malladus' servant Cole is floating around the stage and summon phantom mice which scares Zelda until Link can kill them all except, if one of the mice touches Zelda, she loses control of her body and Cole takes control of her until you cut off the strings which becomes increasingly harder the closer you are to Malladus because he'll snipe you if you move out of the cover of Zelda's body. The other issue is that the train floors shift, forcing you to readjust Zelda's pathway, which takes just enough time for Cole to launch a successful mouse attack. In the phase I have now, Zelda is trying to channel power to stop Malladus who is coughing up lava balls at her that Link much deflect with his sword. This here is the phase that sadly brings attention to my biggest gripe with the DS Zelda titles, mainly that I felt it was stupid to tie both moving and attacking to the stylus controls. Especially since a strike and a roll are almost the same input, so I'm taking way more damage than I feel I should cause Link is rolling into these lava balls instead of slashing at them. I finally ran out of potions and died, so I may end up redoing the Demon train portion again. *sigh* I vaguely remember Phantom Hourglass also pulling some counter-intuitive game change for its final boss fight as well.