Game Review: ゼルダの伝説：トライフォース３銃士
2018-Aug-12, Sunday 17:51![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
The Legend of Zelda series has gone through several strange shifts in its history. It started with Zelda 2, where the question was what Zelda would be like as a side-scrolling action RPG. Wind Waker asked what Zelda would be like if most of the land was replaced with a shining sea, and Spirit Tracks wondered what Zelda would be like if most of it involved trains. But admit, I never expected that the Legend of Zelda series would become a fashion simulator.
I had started to pay a bit more attention to games discourse when this game came out, and much like Four Swords Adventures, a lot of the talk was about how it was multiplayer. And not just multiplayer, it required exactly three people to play. Still, there was a lot of goodwill toward Nintendo after the success of A Link Between Worlds, so people were willing to give it a try. And while I didn't hear that much about it, I heard mostly that it was okay. Fun with the right people, extremely frustrating with random people, and not worth playing solo. That's pretty much correct.
The Japanese title is Toraifо̄su sanjūshi, "The Three Triforce Musketeers." Honestly, what a great title. I guess they couldn't resist the "tri" reference in the English.
Solving problems through T pose.
So, the main they-say-selling-point-you-say-gimmick of Tri Force Heroes is three player co-op. The Dress Kingdom (Eng: Hytopia) is cursed, its formerly ultra-stylish princess forced to wear a shapeless grey body stocking due to the actions of the witch Lady. But there is a prophecy in the kingdom that three heroes who bear pointed ears, sideburns, and parted hair will come together with the power to form a totem that will give them victory over the Lady and restore style back to the kingdom.
It's really just an excuse, though. The story is even less a part of the game than it was in Four Swords Adventures. Unlike that game, there is no one to talk to in any of the levels that the Links visit. They're bare of everything other than enemies and a single set of three tools that are used to solve the puzzles. And again unlike Four Swords Adventures, there's no tool choice. The only tools in each level are the tools used for that level and the only choice is who gets what. Tri Force Heroes knows what it wants to be, and that is a multiplayer puzzle and collecting game.
This took three tries and a lot of frustration.
The puzzles are generally not particularly hard to figure out, relying more on proper placement of Links and movement timing than on brainpower. This is in keeping with the series where "find the eye and shoot it" counts as a puzzle. However, the timing...there's the rub.
If I were playing with two friends all in the same room, I think this would have been a fantastic game. All of us shouting commands at each other, arguing over what order to stack Links in, running in different directions, and otherwise engaged in the kind of chaos that makes games like Magicka so fun. And in the case of those timing puzzles, or during boss fights, we could have coordinated our efforts to make sure that we hit all the switches without much effort or run across the disappearing platforms at the right time.
Alone I couldn't do that. Tri Force Heroes as a solo experience is in some ways less difficult than played multiplayer, since the Links all share a health pool, but while playing solo only the currently-active Link takes damage. However, any puzzle that relies on multiple Links all acting in quick succession is a nightmare. Puzzles involving throwing Links onto temporary water rod platforms, or a sequence of throws and precision hookshot attacks to hit switches close to each other, or boss battles where only a particular Link could inflict damage at a time, or the ghosts that would grab one Link and try to throw him off a cliff unless they were stopped by another Link, all of those nearly made me throw the controller at least once.
It's not that they were necessarily difficult except through circumstances. I did get through them, and I never ran out of lives (well, fairies) on any level. However, they were all supremely frustrating and not fun. Changing them would require separate levels for single and multiplayer, though, and this is clearly a multiplayer game that you can play solo if you really want to. If you have no friends. Loser.
"If you're so skilled with the blade, are you also skilled with the ladies?"
The second main part of the game other than puzzles is the collectathon. Conquering all eight worlds and defeating Lady isn't really the point, it's just the beginning. The first time any world boss dies, the king of Dress Kingdom explains that he has additional quests for the Totem Heroes. These take place on the same level geometry but involve additional requirements like finishing under a time limit, or when all the enemies do double damage, or without using the sword but still defeating all enemies. And the reason why you want to do this crafting mats.
As befits the Dress Kingdom, the Links can wear various outfits in the course of their quest. The most basic one is the soldier's clothes, but by taking the materials found at the end of each stage and bringing them to Madam Tailor (Eng: Madam Couture), you can get new outfits that provide additional powers. The swordsman's clothes allow Link to do double damage and hurl beams of force when the heart gauge is full, the goron's clothes prevent damage from lava, the kokiri clothes turn every arrow fired from the bow into three arrows, the zora clothes allow faster swimming, and so on. There are dozens of these outfits, with greater and lesser powers, and the real way to beat Tri Force Heroes is, like Pokémon, to collect them all.
Each level has two common and one rare material, placed randomly in three chests at the end. I don't know who it works in multiplayer, but in singleplayer I could only take one chest and get one item. To get all the outfits would have required a huge amount of grinding and I wasn't having nearly enough fun to want to do that.
Pretty sure I never did anything with this.
The Zelda games have mostly been free from grind, and those that had grinding are rightly looked down on for it. Zelda 2 experience system and auto-leveling after temples required careful management to prevent unnecessary grinding at the endgame, though the American version was much worse about this than the Japanese version, probably as a legacy of the rental market. Most people acknowledge that the worst part of Wind Waker was the Triforce chart hunt, which required grinding rupees to pay Tingle to decipher the charts. And now there's a Selda game where grinding is literally the entire point. Beat the levels to get the materials to make the outfits to more easily beat the levels to get better materials to
I mean, I get it. I played World of Warcraft for six years. I got Argent Dawn rep to Exalted through runecloth turn-ins, which is absolutely a more pointless and more tedious grind than anything in Tri Force Heroes. But of course, I was playing WoW with friends. When I was walking back and forth between Chillwind Point and the plague cauldrons, I could talk with my guild members and we could plan instance runs, discuss questing, or even chat about our days. It didn't make the grind easier but it meant I was still having fun with the social aspect of the game.
Playing Tri Force Heroes alone didn't have any of those additional factors. It would have just been me hurling myself into the same levels over and over again, doing the same puzzles over and over again, with the goal of...doing them again. Alone.
Or, I could play Breath of the Wild.
The Triforce and the heroes.
Both Four Swords Adventures and Tri Force Heroes were clearly designed as multiplayer games first with the singleplayer as a concession to those who couldn't arrange a multiplayer game. Four Swords Adventures has a much more robust singleplayer mode, though, which makes sense for the time. It was harder to get three other friends with GameBoy Advances all together to play than it is to do net play through Tri Force Heroes, and the solo mode in the latter game comes off as tacked on. It exists, and you can do it, but it's not really the game.
The game comes out in the interactions with other players, the same way it did in World of Warcraft. Running the same dungeon for the twentieth time was still fun when I did it with people I'd played together with for years, and I'm pretty sure that if I played Tri Force Heroes with two friends, I would have been happy to do the challenge modes and try to scrape together the pieces for the robot clothes or the Lady's outfit. Or Princess Zelda's outfit, the closest Nintendo will come to letting us play as Zelda in a series called "The Legend of Zelda."
But I played solo, and it just wasn't that much fun. I'm confident in placing Tri Force Heroes on the multiplayer-only pile with games like DotA. You technically can play it alone, but really, you shouldn't. Play something better instead.
⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index
I had started to pay a bit more attention to games discourse when this game came out, and much like Four Swords Adventures, a lot of the talk was about how it was multiplayer. And not just multiplayer, it required exactly three people to play. Still, there was a lot of goodwill toward Nintendo after the success of A Link Between Worlds, so people were willing to give it a try. And while I didn't hear that much about it, I heard mostly that it was okay. Fun with the right people, extremely frustrating with random people, and not worth playing solo. That's pretty much correct.
The Japanese title is Toraifо̄su sanjūshi, "The Three Triforce Musketeers." Honestly, what a great title. I guess they couldn't resist the "tri" reference in the English.
Solving problems through T pose.
So, the main they-say-selling-point-you-say-gimmick of Tri Force Heroes is three player co-op. The Dress Kingdom (Eng: Hytopia) is cursed, its formerly ultra-stylish princess forced to wear a shapeless grey body stocking due to the actions of the witch Lady. But there is a prophecy in the kingdom that three heroes who bear pointed ears, sideburns, and parted hair will come together with the power to form a totem that will give them victory over the Lady and restore style back to the kingdom.
It's really just an excuse, though. The story is even less a part of the game than it was in Four Swords Adventures. Unlike that game, there is no one to talk to in any of the levels that the Links visit. They're bare of everything other than enemies and a single set of three tools that are used to solve the puzzles. And again unlike Four Swords Adventures, there's no tool choice. The only tools in each level are the tools used for that level and the only choice is who gets what. Tri Force Heroes knows what it wants to be, and that is a multiplayer puzzle and collecting game.
This took three tries and a lot of frustration.
The puzzles are generally not particularly hard to figure out, relying more on proper placement of Links and movement timing than on brainpower. This is in keeping with the series where "find the eye and shoot it" counts as a puzzle. However, the timing...there's the rub.
If I were playing with two friends all in the same room, I think this would have been a fantastic game. All of us shouting commands at each other, arguing over what order to stack Links in, running in different directions, and otherwise engaged in the kind of chaos that makes games like Magicka so fun. And in the case of those timing puzzles, or during boss fights, we could have coordinated our efforts to make sure that we hit all the switches without much effort or run across the disappearing platforms at the right time.
Alone I couldn't do that. Tri Force Heroes as a solo experience is in some ways less difficult than played multiplayer, since the Links all share a health pool, but while playing solo only the currently-active Link takes damage. However, any puzzle that relies on multiple Links all acting in quick succession is a nightmare. Puzzles involving throwing Links onto temporary water rod platforms, or a sequence of throws and precision hookshot attacks to hit switches close to each other, or boss battles where only a particular Link could inflict damage at a time, or the ghosts that would grab one Link and try to throw him off a cliff unless they were stopped by another Link, all of those nearly made me throw the controller at least once.
It's not that they were necessarily difficult except through circumstances. I did get through them, and I never ran out of lives (well, fairies) on any level. However, they were all supremely frustrating and not fun. Changing them would require separate levels for single and multiplayer, though, and this is clearly a multiplayer game that you can play solo if you really want to. If you have no friends. Loser.
"If you're so skilled with the blade, are you also skilled with the ladies?"
The second main part of the game other than puzzles is the collectathon. Conquering all eight worlds and defeating Lady isn't really the point, it's just the beginning. The first time any world boss dies, the king of Dress Kingdom explains that he has additional quests for the Totem Heroes. These take place on the same level geometry but involve additional requirements like finishing under a time limit, or when all the enemies do double damage, or without using the sword but still defeating all enemies. And the reason why you want to do this crafting mats.
As befits the Dress Kingdom, the Links can wear various outfits in the course of their quest. The most basic one is the soldier's clothes, but by taking the materials found at the end of each stage and bringing them to Madam Tailor (Eng: Madam Couture), you can get new outfits that provide additional powers. The swordsman's clothes allow Link to do double damage and hurl beams of force when the heart gauge is full, the goron's clothes prevent damage from lava, the kokiri clothes turn every arrow fired from the bow into three arrows, the zora clothes allow faster swimming, and so on. There are dozens of these outfits, with greater and lesser powers, and the real way to beat Tri Force Heroes is, like Pokémon, to collect them all.
Each level has two common and one rare material, placed randomly in three chests at the end. I don't know who it works in multiplayer, but in singleplayer I could only take one chest and get one item. To get all the outfits would have required a huge amount of grinding and I wasn't having nearly enough fun to want to do that.
Pretty sure I never did anything with this.
The Zelda games have mostly been free from grind, and those that had grinding are rightly looked down on for it. Zelda 2 experience system and auto-leveling after temples required careful management to prevent unnecessary grinding at the endgame, though the American version was much worse about this than the Japanese version, probably as a legacy of the rental market. Most people acknowledge that the worst part of Wind Waker was the Triforce chart hunt, which required grinding rupees to pay Tingle to decipher the charts. And now there's a Selda game where grinding is literally the entire point. Beat the levels to get the materials to make the outfits to more easily beat the levels to get better materials to
I mean, I get it. I played World of Warcraft for six years. I got Argent Dawn rep to Exalted through runecloth turn-ins, which is absolutely a more pointless and more tedious grind than anything in Tri Force Heroes. But of course, I was playing WoW with friends. When I was walking back and forth between Chillwind Point and the plague cauldrons, I could talk with my guild members and we could plan instance runs, discuss questing, or even chat about our days. It didn't make the grind easier but it meant I was still having fun with the social aspect of the game.
Playing Tri Force Heroes alone didn't have any of those additional factors. It would have just been me hurling myself into the same levels over and over again, doing the same puzzles over and over again, with the goal of...doing them again. Alone.
Or, I could play Breath of the Wild.
The Triforce and the heroes.
Both Four Swords Adventures and Tri Force Heroes were clearly designed as multiplayer games first with the singleplayer as a concession to those who couldn't arrange a multiplayer game. Four Swords Adventures has a much more robust singleplayer mode, though, which makes sense for the time. It was harder to get three other friends with GameBoy Advances all together to play than it is to do net play through Tri Force Heroes, and the solo mode in the latter game comes off as tacked on. It exists, and you can do it, but it's not really the game.
The game comes out in the interactions with other players, the same way it did in World of Warcraft. Running the same dungeon for the twentieth time was still fun when I did it with people I'd played together with for years, and I'm pretty sure that if I played Tri Force Heroes with two friends, I would have been happy to do the challenge modes and try to scrape together the pieces for the robot clothes or the Lady's outfit. Or Princess Zelda's outfit, the closest Nintendo will come to letting us play as Zelda in a series called "The Legend of Zelda."
But I played solo, and it just wasn't that much fun. I'm confident in placing Tri Force Heroes on the multiplayer-only pile with games like DotA. You technically can play it alone, but really, you shouldn't. Play something better instead.
⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index
