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..