This Is About As Close To Zelda As Your Phone Can Get

Unless you’ve hacked your iPhone and turned it into a jailbroken, SNES-rockin pirating party, you probably can’t use it to play Zelda.

Good thing there’s My Little Hero, a lovely top-down action-adventure that channels the spirit of Link in almost everything it does, from its spammy one-button hack-n-slash combat to its top-left-corner heart gauge.

But while My Little Hero certainly feels like a Zelda game, it sure doesn’t look like one: its aesthetics are more reminiscent of a Tim Burton film than any of Miyamoto’s cartoony (or even his less cartoony) masterpieces.

The premise: you’re a little dude. A boogeyman comes to your room and steals all of your belongings. You have to go into a dream world (entrance: your closet) to get them back. You can walk around with the virtual button on the bottom-left corner of your touchscreen and attack enemies with the virtual button on the bottom-right corner of your touchscreen.

The downside to all this: there are few ways to comfortably hold your left thumb on the virtual joystick without bothering your thumb (at least on an iPad—I haven’t tested the game out on an iPhone). My Little Hero, like many iPhone and iPad games before it, would be far more suited for a good old-fashioned controller.

Still, it’s a fun romp through imaginative dreamworlds that are well-suited for short blasts of gaming pleasure. And since Nintendo ain’t releasing Zelda: iPad Edition anytime soon, this is as close as you’re gonna get.

My Little Hero HD [NCSoft, $4.99]