I Played: The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures

I don't have screenshots from this game,
but it was pretty much like this.
Except we weren't this coordinated.
And we died a lot.

I haven't been able to finish a game since February. Seriously. But this past weekend I put aside time to play through The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures with some friends. We played the whole game from start to finish over two days and it took us a little over 25 hours according to the in-game clock.

It's a unique title in the Zelda franchise because it depends largely on a hardware gimmick. In order to play with four players, you need to have a Gamecube to play the game on, four Gameboy Advance units and four GBA-GCN cables for hooking everything up. If you want to go the extra mile, you can substitute the Gameboy Advance units for four more Gamecubes with Gameboy Player attachments, though each of those will need their own TV, of course. When all was said and done, we had two Gameboy Advance systems and two Gamecubes with Gameboy Players. For what it's worth, the Gameboy Players were way better for our marathon sessions and for coordination between players. Having hidden information on your own screen was rarely better than everyone being able to direct you when you got lost in a cave.

The game itself holds up fairly well, despite its age and hardware gimmick. At its best solving puzzles as a group was a lot of fun in a way that single-player entries can't pull off. On the downside, the Zelda combat system works much better as a 1 on 1 duel, where the player carefully measures his opponent and waits for an opening. In Four Swords Adventures, giant mobs of enemies are often thrown at your group and they just barrel straight towards you for the most part, encouraging button mashing and desperate hope. For my part, the game thoroughly made up for stumbling on combat with two levels that take place entirely inside towns with few if any enemies to fight; they were levels of pure puzzle solving bliss.

If you can surmount the hardware issues, I'd highly recommend grabbing one or more of your friends and playing though this game (though preferably not all in one weekend). You can get a copy of your own on Amazon starting at $32.99 as of this writing.