Let us all rejoice, for today is a beautiful day. The next game in the long line of Zelda games has been announced today at GDC. It will be for the DS and is called Phantom Hourglass.

But that’s not all!

We also got a short trailer which can be viewed by clicking this link

The most immediate thing one notices is that this game will incorporate cell-shaded graphics, just like The Wind Waker did. But the view has changed, we now see things in a Link to the Past “top-down” style.

But the clincher is that because the game is gonna be played on the DS, the top screen will be used mainly for maps and the touch screen the action. The touch screen will incorporate functions such as drawing a path for the boomerang, directing the ship and drawing symbols to unlock doors.

This is exactly how cell-shaded graphics were meant to be seen - on a handheld system. Why? Well if you ask me, cell-shaded graphics are not meant to be presented in a grandiose manner like they would be on a big screen TV. It just doesn’t seem right. Twilight Princess represents the style that you would like to see on bigscreen TV. But putting it on small screen with an underpowered graphics chip is how it should be. In fact I think I’d be much less satisfied if they chose to give the game more of an Ocarina of Time style presentation. Right now I am actually more excited for this game than I am Twilight Princess.

Oh yeah and it is supposed to be released this year.