Four Swords Online, Round 1

We are live! Quite literally. Today I had the pleasure of playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords with four people at the same time, for the first time in my life. Best I was able to do before was three, usually just two, so this was interesting.

You can actually watch the whole thing on Twitch, but it's in German. A friend of mine, KarlderHeinz, streams there regularly, just for the fun of it and to stay in contact. Mostly this is singleplayer, but from time to time he plays multiplayer games with people from his small, but great community, usually on Sundays. In the past two years this was almost exclusively Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, where we've checked out the new courses...

Now I had made the suggestion that we should give Four Swords a try via Nintendo Switch Online, because I had a feeling that this could be a lot of fun in this round. And it was. I went in with the expectation that we would play this until the credits roll and then be done with it, but we've actually got two Golden Keys already and are planning to complete the game eventually. There was a spark there. Getting the Silver Keys is too easy, so there was the ambition to play this a bit more seriously, as far as this was possible...

But let's start from the beginning. This was the first time that I've played any of the classic games online and it's about as bumpy as you would expect. It's peer-to-peer, as most Nintendo games with online multiplayer, so there can be some lag with four players. For the most part it went well, but you want to make sure to play this with people who live in the same state or country as you. It probably also helps to only play this with one other person, but that wasn't the goal here.

There can also be some visual glitches, like flickering shadows, which is notable in the stream. However, I personally didn't have such issues on my TV. But what I really dislike with the Nintendo Switch Online emulators in general is that it shows you part of the controls at the bottom and there is no way to hide this information. It's just wasting space and looks ugly. (Update: you can turn this off in the options, but you'll need to do this before you go into a game.)

Well, I was the group's overachiever, because I'm the only one who is bothering to also play A Link to the Past, where I had obtained the Master Sword beforehand. This unlocks sword beams in Four Swords, which was giving me a bit of an edge, but for the most part it didn't matter, because you only get them at full health. Still, you want to be at full health for the Rupee Fever, where for the Golden Keys we already had to be a bit more strategic and make sure that everyone gets enough health.

Now, I should be the only one in this groups who cares about earning the Medals of Courage, but I still have to fight for them. One guy in particular (he was the blue Link) has this mindset of "I don't care what Rupees will do for me, I just don't want any of the other players to get them." It's absolutely infuriating, but believe it or not, this is also exactly what I was hoping for...

In the past I was either playing this game alone, thanks to the added singleplayer mode in the Anniversary Edition, or I had someone who helped me out to finish the original Game Boy Advance version. So, I've rarely played this in an environment where the people would fight for Rupees.

Four Swords has this mix of cooperation and competition what makes it so unique. You have to work together to make it, but you also want to snatch all those Rupees for yourself, where this encourages toxic behavior. You may, for example, let two other players do the work and then harvest the fruits of their labor. And you can always carry and throw other players, where once their fate is in your hands, they can't do anything about it. In German we say "Kameradenschwein", someone who betrays their comrades. And you sometimes have to be the Kameradenschwein in this game if you want to score first place.

Or maybe you are just lucky. That also helps a lot, but I've ran out of luck at some point in my life, where today's session was proof of that. Whenever there are two treasure chests, usually one of them has a big Rupee and the other has a small one. And I always got the small one, every single time, so that didn't help.

We've finished half of the game by now and I only got three medals out of ten, so I certainly won't be able to complete everything in this round. But the requirement of ten Medals of Courage is way too much in any case. If nothing goes wrong, you will be playing twelve stages in total. And if you keep things even, then every player will end up with only three medals... Even if you're only playing two-by-two, you won't get enough. The Anniversary Edition was a lot fairer here, where either you needed five medals or 30,000 Rupees in total.

But I will try to play with some other people as well. And once I get all ten medals, I will keep playing A Link to the Past some more. It's actually a great choice for replaying right now, before Echoes of Wisdom returns to the same Hyrule. And it's been a while since I have played the GBA version with its extras. In case you don't know, here's a summery of how the two games interact with each other:

• Obtaining the Master Sword in A Link to the Past unlocks Sword Beams in Four Swords.
• Scoring ten Medals of Courage in Four Swords unlocks the Riddle Quest in A Link to the Past.
• Solving the Riddle Quest unlocks the Hurricane Spin Attack in both games.
• Beating both games opens the Palace of the Four Sword in A Link to the Past.
  

Most of this was impossible (or very hard) to do on the Game Boy Advance if you didn't know anyone else with the game. So, it's really nice that after all these years this title has become a bit more accessible.