dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Link to the Past Comic M)
[personal profile] dorchadas
Originally I wasn't even going to play this on my chrono-gaming march toward Breath of the Wild. It's not a mainline Zelda game, after all. Then I happened to be reading an old interview with Aonuma Eiji that mentioned that there used to be a lot more story in the game about the Imprisoning War before Miyamoto came in, pulled a ちゃぶ台返し and most of the story was thrown out. I saw elsewhere that Four Sword Adventures featured Gufū (Eng: Vaati) as the villain, making it a good lead-in to The Minish Cap. And when I posted about it on Facebook, several people said they had a great time with it, so on the list it went.

I remember reading about it when Four Swords Adventures came out, but while I did have my sister's GameCube, I didn't have a Game Boy Advance, and I certainly didn't have four of them. Of my friends at the time, I think only [livejournal.com profile] sephimb had one. Four Swords Adventures sounded like a great game, but even at the time I remember people complaining about the high investment cost, and I lost interest and never actually realized that it doesn't require multiplayer. Dolphin does allow for multiplayer with Four Swords Adventures, but from the minimal research I did, it's a giant headache and anyway I don't have three other people to play with. The game is still plenty of fun by oneself.

The Japanese name just means "four swords" (yottsu no tsurugi +), though it's a little odd. Japanese uses counters for specific objects, like 人 for people, 冊 for printed or bound books, and so on. Long, thin objects, including swords, usually take 本, so I would expect the title to be yonhon no tsurugi. There may be some subtlety in the title that escapes me.

Legend of Zelda Four Swords Waterfall and Rainbow
This is probably my favorite screenshot I took.

The first thing I noticed about the game was the graphics. I am not immune to nostalgia, and when the game started with Link walking toward the castle in the rain while the music from the beginning of A Link to the Past played, using the same sprites as A Link to the Past, it was like hearts launching out of the screen right into my eyes. And once I started playing it, it was obivous that Nintendo put more effort into Four Swords Adventures than just reusing a bunch of sprites. In addition to the extra transparencies, like drifting fog, there were cel-shaded effects straight out of Wind Waker. The water ripples when Link jumps into it, the bombs have cel-shaded fiery explosions and drifting clouds of smoke, flames kindle grasses and torches into flicking lights, and monsters disappear in a cloud of black vapor. It looks beautiful and it really makes me wish that Nintendo had redone the entirety of A Link to the Past in that style.

Most of the music is taken from A Link to the Past as well, with slightly different instruments. I'm not complaining. It sounds great. Emoji Link smilie

Legend of Zelda Four Swords Knights of Hyrule
"That valor, it's just like one of the Knights of Hyrule."

Miyamoto's tea-table upending was a request that the story serve to drive the gameplay, not exist for its own sake, and the remnants of the plot are clearly bent toward that end. Link is summoned to Hyrule Castle to watch over a ceremony conducted by the six miko (Eng: "shrine maidens") and Princess Zelda to reinforce the bindings on Gufū's prison, since they think the inclement weather is his doing. Once the ritual begins, Shadow Link leaps out of portal, captures the six miko and Zelda, and Link is forced to draw forth the Four Sword in order to gain the power to fight Shadow Link. The Four Sword is the keystone of the binding on Gufū, but needs must. That splits him into four, and the four Links go forth to save the miko and Princess Zelda, collect enough Force (Eng: "Force Gems") to empower the Four Sword with the ability to defeat evil, and defeat Gufū in a climactic battle.

Or so you think. It's a Legend of Zelda game. You know who the real enemy is.

Despite dumping the rest of the story of Ganon's entering the Sacred Realm and corrupting the world with the Triforce, and the Knights of Hyrule who came to stop him, there are a lot of fun self-contained story moments in Four Swords Adventures. My favorite is probably the Gerudo village guarding the path into the desert, whose elder asks Link, "旅の者、こんな辺境の地へ一体何の用でまいられたのか?" ("Traveler, what could possibly have brought you all the way out here?") before mentioning the man who had walked through the desert toward the pyramid from which no one had ever returned, but the section in Kakariko Village was nearly as good. When Link arrives the village is in chaos, with fire everywhere and thieves stealing everything not nailed down, and the quest is to track down all the thieves and throw them into a pen so that Link can go perform a rain dance. The Village of the Blue Maiden's children are missing, and Link has to help the investigation to find them. Along with everyone else in the town, all lined up outside the investigators' office, requiring Link to find an alternate entrance. Dampe has a cameo in a graveyard, where he mentions how agitated all the ghosts are, and when entering the Dark World near his house you find it absolutely swarming with ghinis. There's a goron whose cave has a house built over it, and Link's response is to help by shoving the house out of the way.

It's charming, even as disconnected fragments.

Legend of Zelda Four Swords Links in the swamp
Teamwork.

I was less enamored of the gameplay than the graphics and story bits, unfortunately. Four Swords Adventures does a lot to make the game playable by one person, but it's clearly inferior to multiplayer.

The player can only control one of the four Link's at a time, but there's an option to set a formation--square, horizontal line, vertical line, and outward-facing cross--that allows all Links to attack simultaneously, pick up items, or pull levers. For puzzles that require the Links to be in separate places, there's a toggle button that cycles through them. Normally the blue, red, and violet Links follow behind the ordinary green Link, but when the toggle is active, only the currently active Link can be harmed. The other Links are insubstantial except when the main Link picks them up and throws them. Toggle is also used for enemies who can only be harmed by a certain color Link, in one of the more frustrating aspects in single-player. I can see how this would be fun in multiplayer, with the other Links running interferance or trying to distract enemies so the correct Link can get into position, but in single-player it just involved swapping to the right color and attacking with my sword in exactly the way I'd normally attack. And then against enemies with a rotating weakness, it added even more swapping. My tactics in battle didn't change, I just had to press a button a few more times and spend more time running into place.Emoji Link swirly eyes

A reasonable counterargument is that the game is best played with four people, and that is probably true. I certainly would have had more fun if I had played with three friends. But I didn't, and the game explicitly has a singleplayer mode, so I can only talk about the game as I played it.

Legend of Zelda Four Swords flame rods
In multiplayer I'm pretty sure we'd be incinerating each other here.

I think the biggest thing I lost out on was the emergent chaos. One of the best parts of playing Magicka with multiple players is the way that wizard spells interact with each other and sometimes lead to hilarious consequences, like miscasting a healing spell and accidentally blowing up another wizard just before they cast a fire wall and then having to run in terror from pursuing enemies. Four Swords Adventures has a lot of potential for madcap hijinks, like throwing bombs at other Links, accidentally picking up Links instead of rocks and throwing them into strange places, setting fire to grass that Links are in to collect extra Force, but none of that is realized in single player. The only time all four Links are vulnerable is when they're in a formation, and since one player is controlling all of them, any situation like the above isn't chaos. It's just a mistake.


When you are tired or injured, give up.

So really, I should have listened more carefully to my friends' recommendations. The ones who said it was a great game all mentioned how much fun they had in the multiplayer mode, and that's really a key to the game. Played singleplayer, it's just a middling action game involving a lot of annoying puzzles and swapping back and forth between players. The sections with Gufū weren't as informative as I expected, and having never seen him before, I didn't even realize the winged eyeball at the end was Gufū until I beat him and Zelda came out to thank Link.

Four Swords Adventures looks and sounds great, but it's really not designed for singleplayer despite the option being available. Unless you have three friends around and the proper equipment, give this one a miss.

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