If your friends are fun enough people, even the worst multiplayer game could be a good time. Better hope your friends are fun, then.

As a bonus game paired with the Game Boy Advance port of A Link to the Past, the Legend of Zelda: Four Swords is the stumbling, fumbling, humble beginnings of what I call the Four Sword Saga. On paper, it’s the first on screen appearance of the lovable and expressive Toon Link, coming out a whole year before his most well known outing, Wind Waker. Not only that, but there’s four of him, one for each possible player. These players would of course need their own Game Boy Advances, their own copies of the game, and their own link cables. As someone who struggled to find more than one person at a time to play this game with wirelessly on my 3DS, I can pretty easily see why Wind Waker is the one everyone knows Toon Link for, and not Four Swords.

To make matters worse, you can’t even start Four Swords without at least one other GBA, so even though I had the cart and my pre-owned GBA I got at GameStop for $25 of chores money, I couldn’t play it. I mean, sure I still had A Link to the Past to play for hours on end, but I really loved Wind Waker and Four Swords Adventures, I wanted to see what Four Swords was all about. It doesn’t help that this version of A Link to the Past has an extra dungeon that only lets you enter if you’ve played Four Swords. Four Swords taunted me for years.

Until one day, Nintendo rereleased a single-player capable version of Four Swords as a free digital download for the 3DS, in celebration of Zelda’s 25th anniversary (at the time of writing this, that was over a decade ago, the ceaseless march of time will trample us all).

After downloading the game as soon as I could, I eagerly began the Zelda game that eluded me.

And it turns out it’s basically if Zelda gameplay and a drawn out Mario Party minigame had a baby.

Like a Mario Party minigame, the conceit of Four Swords’ gameplay is a chaotic and greedy mad dash to the end of a randomly generated, excessively sprawling “dungeon”, while gathering as many rupees as you can get your grubby little hands on. The winner is the Link with the most cash, so even though everyone is more or less working together to get through the “dungeon”, they gotta do what they can to screw each other out of rupees.

Conceptually, it’s a cool and fun idea to have a Zelda party game, and the idea of turning the classic zelda gameplay into a party game is even cooler.

In execution, Four Swords has a critical flaw that makes the foundation shaky. And it’s not the simplistic puzzles or the spongey enemies. The flaw is the upgrade charms you can randomly find. There’s a green, blue, and red charm and collecting up to three of each gradually increases your Link’s walking speed, defense, and damage output, respectively. Now this would be a great idea…if you didn’t start every match slow, frail, and weak. Collecting the charms doesn’t make you better, it makes you good. Three red charms doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you strong. Movement is a big thing for me in games, so my Link’s speed being a steady crawl right at the start is infuriating.

But I pressed on, determined to experience the story of the game, and how it connects to the rest of the Four Sword Saga.

Imagine my shock when the party game that introduces the newest (at the time) non-Ganon villain (to keep the stakes low), has very little of interest to say about him.

Vaati the Wind Sorcerer wreaked havoc in the past, and then he was sealed by some unnamed hero kid with The Four Sword. The seal that trapped him weakened and he is once again terrorizing the countryside, capturing young girls. Your mission, should you, and you, and you, and you choose to accept it, is to get three keys to access his palace and stop him. Pretty simple stuff. No time travel, no cross-dressing disguised princesses, no towns. Just Zelda action with up to four players. And it’s alright.

I have completed this game one time, and 90% of it was done solo. It was not all that fun. The other 10% was (stupidly) during senior year French class with a friend who also miraculously had the game. It was Pretty Fun.

I don’t know if I could recommend Four Swords to anyone who isn’t a die hard Zelda Freak who wants to experience everything the series has to offer. Even then I’m not sure you’d be missing much. There are at least two games that use the same assets and ideas that are far and away more accessible, and do a better job at being a fun time.

Um this was interesting. This really is just a side mode but Nintendo counts it as a main entry so I included it in my marathon. I played the single player mode and it was fine. Nothing particularly clever or fun to be frank. I could see this being a little more enjoyable if I had played it with someone else but not THAT much more enjoyable to be honest.

I’m happy to see the return to the Oracle of Seasons items like Roc’s Cape and the Magnetic Glove, that was a nice surprise! The Magnetic Glove definitely needs to be in more Zelda games. I’m mostly baffled that Four Swords is the first entry that features Toon Link, Vaati, the Minish Cap art style, and the Minish Cap shrinking mechanic most of all!!

Overall, Four Swords is an okay time as a single player experience. I’m thankful that it’s pretty short. Good foundation for the concept of a multiplayer Zelda, I wonder where Four Swords Adventures is going to go with that concept..

     ‘Surely you must be some noble maiden.’

Played with BertKnot, in preparation for our Zelda Marathon podcast.

Capcom's The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords is a title caught in a peculiar situation: it is located between the development of the Oracle games (2001) and that of The Minish Cap (2004). So much so that efforts on the latter had to be suspended to free up resources on Four Swords – and the porting of A Link to the Past (1991), contained in the same cartridge. This state of affairs let the game feel like the addition of a still immature multiplayer concept for the GBA version, under the pretext of using the Link Cable. This is certainly the reason why some thematics and objects are shared between Four Swords and The Minish Cap, as Hidemaro Fujibayashi was working on both games' designs simultaneously. The result is a disparate gathering of elements, which struggle to find a general coherence: if the Zelda games have always been carried by pairs of antagonistic concepts (Light/Chaos, Past/Future), Four Swords, in that it blends cooperation and competition, never really manages to shine in one or the other.

Players embody reflections of Link, created from the Four Sword, in which Vaati was imprisoned. Vaati captures Princess Zelda and the various Link shards must then go to her rescue. To do so, they have to successfully collect three Silver Keys, which unlock the final dungeon, where Vaati is hiding. Each dungeon is a mostly linear succession of puzzles, with no interconnection between them. To progress, players need to reach a pressure plate on which everyone must stand, or obtain a Small Key from the room's challenge. This unusually linear progression hardly emphasises cooperation. The most players have to do is to pull two levers at the same time or throw their partner over a chasm. While it is possible to switch items, there is no reason to have an eclectic combination – one player keeping a bow and the other taking the Roc's Cape, for example. Given that the game can be played with two or four players, it might have been too difficult to create organic challenges, requiring emergent methods of solving. Only the mechanics around colours allow some freedom, but are still disappointingly unpolished.

With little cooperation allowed, competition prevails. Throughout the rooms, players can accumulate astronomical quantities of rubies. These are used to pay for a player's resurrection or to rank players at the end of a dungeon. Thus, the title creates a pseudo-incentive to play aggressively to collect as many Rupees as possible. This would not be a concern if the game were not, at its core, a cooperative adventure. Since there's no point in pushing one's partner around, the ranking is meaningless, a sort of award for being luckier than one's companion. Halfway between the two concepts, the title doesn't know where to stand: when one player sets out to solve a bonus room, filled only with Rupees, the other just has to watch them without doing anything. This asynchrony in the progression completely breaks the rhythm of the adventure, although it is still brief enough to allow fatigue to set in. While there are three variants for every dungeon, it takes just over an hour to complete the game in a straightforward fashion.

Beyond these elements, Four Swords displays the iconic grammar of Zelda games, yet without understanding its construction. The game provides items, but makes no effort to highlight them. The Gnat Hat is present, but it's more of a cameo prefiguration to The Minish Cap, as it is barely used. The Bow, the Bombs or the Boomerang remain too gimmicky and disjointed from any exploration to seem really useful. Moreover, some parts of the game don't really work with the gameplay of a 2D Zelda. The Rupees-giving bumpers cause unpleasant chaos, while the combat action is very weak, especially when it involves striking back an orb of one's own colour: the poor readability of the GBA screen prevents players from being effective. It's a real communication failure that permeates Four Swords, the game being bound to explain through text bubbles how each boss must be fought, since the visual design is insufficient to guide organically towards the solution.

Admittedly, the game has some rather cute ideas and some of the animations are joyfully playful, with a very endearing cartoon touch. But they still clash with the reality of the gameplay, which doesn't quite mesh with them. Having the screen go black when a player throws a pot at another's head is amusing, but does very little for the game. Similarly, when a Link catches fire, he runs very quickly, but the stunlock lasts far too long. These missteps illustrate the general lack of care and remind that Four Swords was only a minor addition to a cartridge that already contained A Link to the Past. If the dream of a multiplayer Zelda was a rich idea, Capcom's execution here is a disappointment. At best, the game is a forgettable title; at worst, it points to the structural issues of transposing an inherently single-player experience to a multiplayer environment, without a radical change to the gameplay philosophy.

After YEARS of waiting to get my hands on and complete, I banged this motherfucker out in an hour tops.

I originally had my hands on the original original cartridge that came packaged with A Link to the Past on the Game Boy Advanced but I had no way to play it because I was the only kid I knew with the cartridge, and because none of my friends had GBA's or DS Lites. Before knowing that I had a whole nother Zelda game underneath ALttP, I had just assumed this was some mini game that I was unable to play. Try as I might, and as much as I really really wanted to, I just couldn't do it.

Eventually I learned that this was Four Swords, and I grew an interest in the premise and concept. I read the manga based on it, I watched YouTube videos, and I soon discovered that this was the only Zelda game I've yet to properly play! (with the exception of one other game.) I also learned that it was remade in 2011 for the DSi and 3DS, but I missed the deadline to download it, and never got the chance again. I did play the Anniversary Edition once, that was with my grandma's old neighbor who brought his DSi over, I played the game for five seconds.

Up until recently I just wallowed in self pity, thinking I had no way to ever play the game by myself, but then hazah! Ideas struck me! I've been emulating and playing Pokémon games for years now, how come I never thought to do it with Zelda?!!?

Obviously emulating the original Four Swords game on the GBA was a no-go, because I'd need other people to play with, so I opted to download the ROM for the Anniversary Edition, which I ended up discovering was fucking pointless. Took me a fucking painstaking week and a half, but long story short, no emulators exist that can run DSiWare games...

I had lost hope... until! I realized I can play the original GBA Four Swords using multiple tabs. So I did just that! I hooked up VBA Link, wired up a controller, and Nadia and I beat the game in one go! For my first time playing and beating it, it was a blast.