The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures

"Imagine a Kuribo's Shoe, stomping on a gamer's face - for ever."

It's difficult not to scoff as Mario's dignity is spread thin over genres, and it's difficult not to scowl at the paedocidal marketing apparently behind Pokemon, but the Legend(s) of Zelda always makes it easy to be a Nintendo fan. Link always stays true to his dungeon-cracking, puzzle-solving, mini-gaming roots; his adventures are timeless, and successive quests impress the generation they enter with surface twists rather than fundamental overhauls. Those cartridges weren't gilded - Zelda is always solid gold.

There's really little grounds for naysaying with Zelda.

Until now! Because Four Swords Adventures is just asking for trouble.

Not with its hook - four-player Zelda is a concept that even he already on the flight to Kyoto with explosives in his cavities could not snub. Similar kneejerk vendettas might be fuelled by the execution, though, even in the Nintendo faithful. Like incredulous rhetorical questions waiting to be asked by disgusted fans and smug dicks alike, the changes FSA introduces seem contrary to everything the series is adored for.

Carving the one-Hylian-army Link into four colour-coded clones?

Regressing to A Link to the Past-style top-down 2D?

Abandoning the free-flowing adventure for linear levels?

Demanding a Game Boy Advance and GBA-GC cable per player?

They all raise the eyebrows, but none more so that that last one.

It's often difficult to enjoy the fruits of Nintendo's clear commitment to creative design when, just out of the corner of your eye, beloved properties are being ruthlessly pimped on the gaming street corners. FSA could be seen as something born of either discipline. Using the GBA screens to track individual players when they leave the main overworld shown on the TV, it's a game that couldn't work and can't be enjoyed without its expensive hardware setup.

The conservative player - as well as the stubborn loner - is humoured, but in no way rewarded. The game allows you to play the multiplayer quest alone, with a controller; even emulating the GBA on the TV whenever you wander into a house or cave, allowing you to control or order the three always-present non-player Links into formations as you like.

A polite gesture, certainly, but one that can't quite disguise the fact that the quest is configured for the four and not the one. Playing alone, every puzzle, brawl, and boss battle you storm hopefully into inevitably underwhelms; simply because you can only imagine how much more fun you'd have with a pal or three to help you stomp those four switches, hack at those four octoroks, and cripple that giant revolving crab's four colour-coded claws. The all-too-obvious untapped potential soon makes the whole thing feel futile.

And so, the only way to have fun is to dance to Nintendo's premium tune!

So you buy your GBAs, your cables, your friends (if necessary), some NES Classics while you're there, you join the Nintendo Fun Club today, you hook it all up, you slot back into your single-player savegame in multiplayer mode, and then - and only then - are you playing Four Swords Adventures.

The level-select world map - once just a reminder that you weren't playing a real Zelda - is now filled with convenient promise; the stirring remix of the Fairy Fountain theme that backs it now drives you and yours ever onwards, until the levels are soaring past in a blaze of cheeky teamwork (as fostered by the efficient one-subweapon-per-player setup) and questionable camaraderie (as fostered by the Force Gems).

Force Gems! Good Christ.

To the single player, they're forgettable collectibles, Rupees you can't spend. In multiplayer, they're the score, an indisputable mark of your place in the chain, set in stone in your corner of the HUD. They're also everywhere; practically everything you do, from killing a monster to pulling a lever to smashing a boulder over a comrade's head proffers gems (in the last case, his). Finish the level with more than your friends, and you win absolutely nothing, other than indisputable evidence that you're simply the best human present.

These perfect little triangles are the core of Nintendo's backhanded gift. The entire trick lies with them: at the regularly-crossed line between cooperation and competition; where childhood friends become lifetime enemies; where men stab and shoot and blow each other up in pursuit of a number; where allies draw the simplest of tasks out forever so as to be best poised to reach rewards; where heroes are reduced to desperate dogs at the sight of a big green triangle.

A fresh spring of untapped gameplay, one based in human rather than videogame trappings. One that can only work if players are allowed to wander and work alone, to conspire and co-opt as they like, free to roam away from the pack.

Hence:
One GBA per player.
One LCD hideaway per sneaky, manipulative bastard.

FSA is not to be disliked, because its gameplay justifies its cost.

FSA is to be liked, not only for the genius connectivity, but because it's superb quite outside that. The multiplayer monkeyshines are based upon (or are perhaps the base of, considering all the fresh puzzle miles wrought from the hardware) a quest that, while not being quite wide enough to keep the solo player's attention for more than a level or two at a time, is as fresh and as structurally solid as that of any other Zelda title.

The engine is stunning, often giving the impression that a 2D generation or two has slipped past while we were gawping at Ocarina of Time, giving rise to a spectacular adventure that is brilliantly novel and toe-curlingly nostalgic at the same time.

It can be difficult getting to grips with a game that takes place on so many different planes and screens - TV to GBA, top-down to side-scrolling - but the problem is handled admirably. First by the sheer organic beauty of the forests and snowfields and dungeons that your four lively Links tackle, and the astounding images the game creates in the processing gap left by the simple technology - it's difficult not to coo as your party falls through the pretty rainbow cast by a magnificent waterfall, or gasp as they're surrounded by literally hundreds of bustling enemies.

Second, by the clever puzzles it fosters. The levels are undeniably more straightforward than the broad dungeons Link usually delves into, but they're also a great deal more intricate; the multiple layers held by most areas allow for conundrums with genuine depth, and not just literally. Likewise, the compact arenas are pleasantly, surprisingly coherent; being able to carry objects from screen to screen is one thing, but when the GBA enters the equation - when, say, a arrow flies from TV to GBA to TV again in one swift flight - it's enough to prompt awed gasps from even the most stubbornly contemptuous onlookers.

That's about when the final, fatal affront to your anti-Nintendo sentiment comes; when the connectivity playtime meets the hero work, and you find that the solution to a puzzle or boss battle is a genuine first. Try being bitter when you're using your GBA as a personal metal detector; try burning your Miyamoto effigies when you're climbing inside a giant phantom to steer it away from your comrades on the TV; try hating Nintendo when you're trapped in the Dark World of swirling LCD, reduced to a lingering shadow on the main screen.

It's so much easier to just let go and feed the Nintendo happiness machine.

Four Swords Adventures may not be cheap, and it may not be conventional, but it is a unique pleasure, one quite disconnected from the usual esoteric, artificial comforts offered by videogames. It may be the only game to draw out the bastards inside of its players and turn their acts of evil into pure riotous entertainment, and frankly that's a gaming conceit worth paying out the arse for.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/02/05