Zelda Informer's latest "Themes in Motion" article series delves surprisingly deeply into the story themes of the light-hearted handheld Phantom Hourglass

Phantom Hourglass has one of the weirdest endings of any Zelda game to date. After Link restores power to the legendary Ocean King, he gives this cryptic message: "The time for you to return to your world is near. The door to your world is about to open." There wasn't really anything in the game prior to this that suggested any kind of crossing between worlds. For example, the beginning of the game had you enter the Ocean King's sea just as if it were an ordinary region of the ocean.

Players the world over collectively scratched their heads, and as one can imagine, endless debate issued between various interpretations of this quote. Is the world of the Ocean King a dream world like Koholint Island from which Link and Tetra awaken in the ending? Or is it a different world spatially speaking, rather like Termina from Majora's Mask? Are we even to take this delineation literally at all? This edition of Themes in Motion analyzes Phantom Hourglass in part through the eyes of literary criticism but also from a theorist's perspective in order to answer this puzzling question once and for all.

ZeldaInformer via zeldainformer.com »