I guess, for Nintendo, it’s easy to slap the “Legend of Zelda” title on a game if you want to move units. It doesn’t matter the quality of the game, or if it even fits into the Zelda universe. Call it “The Legend of Zelda” and you are sure to sell a bunch of copies. This has never been more evident than in Triforce Heroes for the Nintendo 3DS.
Triforce Heroes isn’t the first game to distill the elements that make up a true Zelda game out and focus on multiplayer shenanigans with multiple “Links,” but it may very well be one of the worst. Silly design choices and hamstrung mechanics makes playing the game as much of a chore than it is a fun time. Sure, if you have two friends sitting next to you, maybe there is value here, but all in all, Triforce Heroes fails to rate higher than what should have been a DLC for the last Zelda 3DS game, A Link Between Worlds, which serves as the basis for the art design here, and not a full fledged (and full-priced) holiday title.
The story of Triforce Heroes centers around the Kingdom of Hytopia. The princess there loves fashion, and a powerful witch curses her for it, forcing her to forego style in favor of a drab onesie. Now, the king has put a call out for a hero to come and defeat the witch so his daughter can go back to wearing pretty dresses. Seriously.
As you can expect, the player character is the “hero” who will save that day, and he and two others set out into the Drablands to conquer puzzle-like levels, fight monsters and bosses, and unlock new outfits to defeat the witch and remove the curse.
Hytopia is small for a “Kingdom” with only four or five shops/areas to utilize — including the dressmaker/seamstress, who creates outfits for the hero to wear as he collects materials in each level. Grinding for these materials plays a part, as certain levels will have to be conquered again and again to acquire enough components to make the new outfits.
The rub in all of this is the use of three. The hero cannot do this alone and needs two companions. For solo play, the hero gets the use of two “dolls” and the player has to switch out constantly between the three to solve the levels. The heroes can choose different secondary weapons, and have to work together, as the hero in control can pick up and toss his companions, and even build into a three-person-tall totem to reach new heights, topple tall foes, and hit hidden switches.
Nintendo’s goal here was for multiplayer, and they have created a typical Nintendo Online experience, which is to say that it’s overly complicated, nonsensical most times, and barely works. The player can have two friends join via the archaic “friend code” option, or they can opt to go out into the world and collect two strangers from an in-game lobby. And with this comes a whole new headache: assholes.
These assholes like to throw people off ledges, and cause havoc instead of actually trying to solve the puzzle and defeat the level. And again, since Nintendo has no clue how to utilize on online experience, there is ZERO communication available, only emojis. Bad players can be reported to be blacklisted, but in all seriousness, the assholes outnumber the true players, and online play suffers for it. Maybe Nintendo thought that the constant hero-tossing shenanigans would be fun and laughter inducing, but some of us take our Zelda games seriously, and the level of sheer frustration that Nintendo has created here ruins the experience and leaves Triforce Heroes an absolute mess of a game to play with others.
If there is one saving grace to Triforce Heroes, it’s in the boss fights. In typical Zelda fashion, the boss fights task the player(s) with using the level’s special weapons, and each battle (there’s a boss at the end of each “level,” or after four rooms of a location), is relatively unique, even if the battle does just shake down to hitting the boss’ glowing eye. Of course, every battle also seems to incorporate the totem mechanic (stacking Links) to reach the ever-elevating glowing eye, but these battles do satisfy and give a good reason to keep playing the game’s many level. And with almost 40 core levels — with additional objectives for each level in replay, bringing the total number of levels to 128, there are a ton of boss battles to play.
The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes is not a great game. It’s barely even a good game, one that gets tedious and repetitive as the player is forced to play alone, controlling three different characters, unless they have two dedicated friends. The boss battles save it, for the most part, but this feels like a hastily thrown together game to bridge the gap until the next core Zelda game, presumably for the Wii U (or the NX, which is the new hot rumor).
The requisites here to even enjoy Triforce Heroes far outweigh the rewards: new outfits, to save a fashion-forward princess that no one cares about, and the end result is a far cry from even the worst “Legend of Zelda” game. Without the “Zelda” themes, enemies, and terminology, this game would still be a mess, and that is the best way to look at it and its place in the big picture.
The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes is available now for the Nintendo 3DS system. This review is based off a copy of the game purchased at retail.
