Been playing a little bit of one of my Christmas acquisitions recently: the intriguing The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes. This isn’t a “mainline” Zelda game in that it’s not particularly narrative focused and is instead a largely cooperative multiplayer affair, but I’ve been very pleasantly surprised quite how playable it is — and how it very recognisably has that Nintendo “magic” about it.
Triforce Heroes casts you in the role of a Toon Link who may or may not actually be Link and throws you into the town of Hytopia, which is currently undergoing something of a crisis: the local evil witch is apparently cursing everyone who is getting a bit too fashionable, and thus it’s up to the local heroes (for whom the populace have very specific requirements) to sort things out once and for all.
It’s an eminently stupid premise, obviously, but in a way that works in the game’s favour, because the lack of focus on a coherent narrative allows the game to instead concentrate on gameplay, and in a multiplayer-centric affair, this is by far the best approach.
Triforce Heroes unfolds over a series of discrete levels, each of which makes up a number of different regions in the Drablands, the area the witch calls home. As you complete the various levels, you’ll acquire materials and Rupees, both of which can be used to create new costumes for maybe-Link and confer special abilities and bonuses — or, in some cases, penalties. You then repeat the process, gradually increasing your completion and/or grinding levels you’ve already done for more materials. That is, so far as I can determine, it. But rather than being a throwaway affair, it’s actually rather compelling.
It helps that the levels are well designed to necessitate cooperation. Unlike, say, Super Mario 3D World, where additional players were more of a distraction than anything else, Triforce Heroes’ levels are specifically designed with three players in mind. Most of the cooperation involves picking up and throwing around the other two players to reach out-of-reach platforms — not-Link, as ever, can’t jump — but also making use of the “totem” ability to create a stack of up to three people in order to shoot at/smack/bomb/collect things that are too high off the ground for a single player.
One particularly charming aspect of the game is that as with most Nintendo online games, Triforce Heroes has no means of directly chatting with other players. Instead, you’re given a set of endearing emotes ranging from “Over here!” to “Noooo!” that you can spam at will. Most players have already developed a means of “communicating” using these emotes creatively — and, indeed, it’s a heartwarming moment when you come together with two strangers all spamming the “cheerleader” emote to signal your joy at having completed a particularly difficult area of the dungeon you’re in.
Perhaps best of all for those who have friends with 3DSes, though, is the fact that the game supports Download Play, meaning that only one person needs to actually own a game cartridge for a group of three to be able to enjoy some cooperative fun. Obviously this doesn’t apply when it comes to online play, but for local multiplayer sessions I can see it being a riot — I’m looking forward to trying it sometime.
It’s not the sort of game I see being a thing you’d spend hours on at a time. But as something to while away a few minutes with at a time, Triforce Heroes is an impressive achievement: a cooperative game where yelling at each other is kept to a minimum, and where the whole experience just feels so delightfully wholesome that you can’t help but enjoy it with a big smile on your face.
