I just kind of have to wonder about the world in the Zelda universe. From what I’ve played the landscape is literally stuffed to the gills with dungeons full of monsters and treasures. It’s really kind of a mystery to me how Link manages to live in that world before your game starts without tripping over enough items to arm him to the teeth.
Like the Four Sword. Link has to go find it to vanquish the latest non-Ganon threat to the land, some joker named Vaati. But the when Link finds the thing (it’s not hidden very well) and yanks it out of its pedestal it splits him into four Links, and they all have to work together to solve all the puzzles.
You might remember that the GameCube has four controller ports, and that in each port you can plug in a cable to connect up a Game Boy Advance to use as a controller. And getting four people, each with their own Game Boy is the ideal way to play.
The game takes place in a world that looks a lot like the world in the Link to the Past but with a few tweaks to take advantage of the ‘Cube’s hardware. But, when you go underground into the various tunnels and dungeons the action goes into your Game Boy. Which, for some reason I thought was completely awesome.
Throughout your adventuring you have to both work with and compete with up to three of your buddies to solve the puzzles and to collect ‘force gems’. Force gems don’t really do much other than let you finish the stage and buy some continues, but the Link that collects the most wins the level. Which, really doesn’t do much… except for giving the player who got it bragging rights. And I really like to have bragging rights. Of course, you could play this game with one player, control all the Links, and have the GBA screen pop up on your TV when you go into some cave, but that’s not nearly as much fun.
I played this game one time with three other people, and had an absolute load of fun playing it. I didn’t really find anything too tough about it, but I just really liked the ‘everyone has to work together while engaging in friendly competition’ aspect to it. But the guy that owned the game decided to take it back with him when he went home to the next state.
Jerk.
So I’d actually kind of forget about for a couple of years until I was at my local Gamestop and saw that they had the package (complete with link cable) for $20. Of course, by that time most of the folks that I knew with GameBoys had traded them in for the new-fangled DS units, so I couldn’t really round up four people at the same time to play this game with me.
But what I did do was charge up my GBA, hooked up the link cable, and dove into this game with both feet. I had expected the game to take maybe 5 or so hours to complete, to be on par with the Super NES offering (you know, since they looked similar). But I instead managed to lose over a dozen into the thing. And that was actually pretty awesome. Instead of occupying one weekend, it took two!
Now I just need to play it again with the full compliment of equipment.