Zelda Spirit Tracks: Harder Than Before

"Development team members, including (senior Nintendo developer) Mr. Takashi Tezuka and myself, actually got stuck in several places" Eiji Aonuma reveals to Kotaku in a recent interview. Whilst dropping a few hinters to how the game will play, he also states that the controls have been refined to make it more accessible for the end user:

One of our lead planners for the game is a programmer, so he has a different, more scientific or mathematical approach, so to say, to creating puzzles.
Dungeons and puzzles pose a different type of challenge than what we have utilized in previous games, I believe that the latter half of the Tower of Spirits dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, has puzzles which require a different type of approach from those of previous games”

Aonuma explains the revamped controls: The one consistent piece of feedback we received about the controls in Phantom Hourglass was that it was too challenging to execute the roll move. You had to draw little circles at the edge of the screen to make Link roll. This is actually something we felt similarly about during development, but ended up not having enough time left in the schedule to implement another solution. In Spirit Tracks, this move is done by tapping anywhere on the screen, so hopefully players get more use out of it

Aonuma also explains why Zelda has a much more prominent role in this instalment as opposed to the tried and (safely) tested Damsel-in-Distress Formula:

We recently received information from a survey conducted in the US that indicated that, among our female characters, users had a preference for those that were more on the independent side, such as Shiek and Tetra.
Making Zelda a more integral part of the game was also a goal for our Director, Mr. [Daiki] Iwamoto, so we set out with this element in mind when we started making the game

With veteran gamers always looking for more challenge in their gaming lives, can Zelda: Spirit Tracks quell their thirst? And will this new approach with Zelda being more prominent in game be a good one?

Thanks to Kotaku and GoNintendo