The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past: Four Swords

GBA review by Philip Morton, published on Sunday 24th August 2003

I was recently in a supermarket, deciding which of a selection of GBA games to buy. One in particular caught my eye. Called Hamtaro: Ham Ham Heartbreak, it told the story of a group of hamsters who had to resolve the heartbreak of a fellow rodent. Its quirky storyline and colourful graphics appealed to me, but then something dawned on me as I read through the blurb on the back of the box, “for ages 3+, the ability to read is needed to enjoy the whole game”. Ah crap.

A game for toddlers is hardly going to have deep gameplay and amazing replay value is it? Best to go for a title that I know is going to be up to standards, I thought. There lay Splinter Cell, Nightfire, Zelda, Driver 2 and Medal Of Honor all tempting me to purchase them. Tom Clancy’s sneak-em-up looked like it would involve too much side scrolling, whilst I didn’t think Driver 2 would be any good on the GBA hardware given the nature of the game. Nightfire and Medal Of Honor were first person shooters and I already had a few of them, so Zelda was left. A reassuring label on the front boasted high scores from several magazines, “95%, 96%, 97%”. What could possibly go wrong?

On the whole, I enjoy adventure games which don’t over emphasise their role playing qualities. Zelda doesn’t even masquerade as a RPG, it’s just pure adventuring. My sort of game. That’s what I thought anyway. Why all this negativity towards such a critically acclaimed game? Well, gameplay is the most crutial part of any game, more important than graphics, lifespan or sound. Zelda trips up in this department though, landing with it’s face in an inconveniently placed pile of horse manure.

Zelda is simply repetitive, tedious and boring. Hang on though, aren’t all games repetitive? All you do in PES is play football, all you do in Halo is drive around and shoot stuff. The difference between those stellar titles and A Link To The Past is that they’re exciting to play, grabbing you like no others can. The player is absorbed into the game world or environment and will spend hours engrossed, determined to complete the game. Zelda’s gameplay is flawed to the point where you just want it all to end. The power button is only a few centimetres away, just begging to be switched to ‘off’.

The GBA’s d-pad allows eight way movement, but this hasn’t been used at all well here. When prompted to move up and right, your character will move up and shuffle right at the same time instead of walking in a straight line diagonally. This may sound extremely petty, but when it comes to fighting, it’s infuriating. You see, your little guy on screen can only swing his sword in four directions, not in eight. So you can move diagonally (kind of) towards an enemy but can only swing your weapon when you are directly adjacent to them. Some weapons such as the boomerang can be used in all eight directions, but you can’t combine that with your main offensive force - your sword - because it only works in four. You’ll end up spending more time lining up your attacks than you will actually killing anything.

The A.I. also needs some serious reworking as well. You see, your generic opponents are plainly stupid. You watch in disbelief as yet another guard runs relentlessly into a wall, trying to get you. What he doesn’t realise, is that you are upstairs, peering down on him. Surely it doesn’t take a genius to work out that you can’t run up walls? You’d think that they would use the stairs that litter the levels, but their brainpower can’t cope with this either. Not Mensa members, that’s for sure. They should also book appointments at the local optician, since their sight is very questionable. You can kill their colleague in the same area as them in broad daylight and they will fail to notice. I know that the GBA isn’t up to complex A.I., but Nintendo really should’ve done better here.

Another annoyance are the enemy who seem to reappear when you go back to a previously visited room, just like in Metal Gear Solid 2. You could take a wrong turning and have to double back, only to find the guards that you killed only a minute ago have respawned. Even some bosses have this trick up their sleeve, reappearing just when you don’t expect them to. You’ll often find yourself confronted with the same enemies, in the same room as before, having to fight the same battles again and again.

This systematic respawning is undoubtedly irritating, but it’s then amplified by the way game saves are handled. Pressing Start at any time brings up the option to save, giving you the impression that it would remember your exact location. However, it actually saves using checkpoints instead. The following example shows just how annoying it becomes: fight through dungeon past several guards. Defeat a boss and rescue the princess from cell. Once in cell, save game, and turn off GBA. Power it up again, load the game and realise that the cell is a checkpoint. Discover that you are stuck in it with the boss you killed last time outside the cell. Exclaim “Sod it” and run straight past boss, revealing the dim-witted A.I. yet again.

That boss has either:

A) had a friend travel back in time, preventing his own death, thus putting your own character’s existence in question.

B) become a victim of poor programming.

C) been reincarnated extremely quickly and has been born in the same place where he died. Oh, and then grew up at an alarming rate, learned to fight in seconds and acquired some armour from, um, nowhere.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going with option B. So you see that most of the time, your work may be completely fruitless. Why fight a boss when you know that he’ll just respawn when you go back in the room or load your game? There’s no incentive to explore because if you find a dead end, then you know that the enemy in the previous room will be back again.

Yet another problem is apparent within the collision detection code. Enemies may injure you with a sword through a stone wall, or even worse, kill you when their weapon clearly didn’t make contact with your character. Other NPCs who follow you may end up in the same physical space as you, bringing up the question of multiple dimensions. Or maybe that was just poor programming. Again.

All of these gameplay flaws make for an extremely frustrating time. You’ll eventually battle through hordes of enemy after multiple attempts, realising that your weapon only works in four directions. After trying to explore a bit, you’ll give up after the idiotic A.I. and constantly respawning enemies become too much. You save your game in a room just after a particularly hard battle. On loading you’ll find yourself in a previously conquered room, so you struggle on to fight through again, only to get killed by a sword which came through a solid stone wall. And someone gave it “97%”? Give me a break.

Two areas where Zelda does shine in are the graphics and sound. The visuals are crisp and detailed with energetic animations and a decent camera angle. Although the same landscape and character models are often used, creating a feel of excessive cloning, this is excusable due to the hardware limitations of the system. Audio is on par with Advance Wars, with orchestral melodies playing while you struggle onwards. The presentation may be good, but it can’t hide the fact that the gameplay is undeniably poor.

The Four Swords mode allows up two to four players to progress through a separate adventure, but I strongly suspect that is suffers from the same gameplay problems as its single player counterpart. Other than this, there’s not much in the way of replay value, as it fails to excite and absorb the player, but succeeds in frustrating them instead. how long you play Zelda really depends on how much you’re willing to endure its flaws.

The Legend Of Zelda; A Link To The Past: Four Swords may win the competition for the longest game name, but it certainly doesn’t get my recommendation. It’s a SNES game that seems to have been ported straight to the Gameboy Advance without any real consideration in the gameplay department. It may have fancy graphics and the new Four Swords mode, but this certainly doesn’t warrant a purchase. You know, maybe I should have bought that hamster game after all.