GOTY 2015 – Number 6 – The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes

(Song is “Mother of a Girl” by Violent Femmes)


There’s something of an awkward stigma following Tri Force Heroes. It’s a spin-off. And a handheld game. And it’s multiplayer focused. There’s a category for those kind of Zelda games. It ranges from Four Swords Adventures, to Phantom Hourglass and Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland. They’re the Zelda games you don’t really care about, and you never finished. Tri Force Heroes doesn’t belong there.

One of the biggest things Tri Force Heroes does is demonstrate just how brilliantly A Link Between Worlds redesigned the top-down Zelda game. This game is built upon its gameplay, and makes exploration much more fluid and enjoyable, and giving locations a three-dimensional sense of structure. The totem mechanic plays on this sense of height, allowing players to pick each other up to hit tall targets or reach suspended platforms. One of the best things you can do with puzzles in a game is make them feel physical. To give them a real-world logic, and make the solutions relatable. Tri Force Heroes does this by playing with height and shape, and that kind of foundation makes an entirely dungeon-focused Zelda game work well.

Free from the constraints of lore and tradition, Tri Force Heroes has fun with its tone, making the game feel lighter and sillier as a result. Tone and setting have a bigger impact on gameplay than many realise. It’s why survival horror counts as a genre. A game designed to be scary and a game designed to be exciting can have an entirely different affect on the player’s patience and willingness to experiment, even with the same fundamental gameplay. Silliness makes Tri Force Heroes feel remarkably different from the grand home console adventures, and that’s no bad thing. Silliness makes mistakes seem funny, rather than a frustrating barrier between you and progress. It’s what makes a success of three people with limited communication trying to play a Zelda game together.

Tri Force Heroes should gain more attention for its focus on dungeons. Things are simplified with each character only using one major dungeon-specific item each time, but the switch in focus has allowed Nintendo to design quite unique and satisfying levels. The sheer number of unique dungeons in the game has pushed the designers to make each one feel more unique. Every dungeon has a different focus, and it’s teaching a different lesson, or building on a different idea. It’s what makes Tri Force Heroes fun to keep coming back to.

For something so many people have written off as “just another Zelda game”, there’s a lot that’s different with Tri Force Heroes. It’s built on a terrific foundation, but it pushes out in entirely different directions. The 3DS has quickly become the best format for Zelda games, and if that’s why you own one, that should be enough of a reason for you to own this.