On paper, Four Swords Adventures sounded like a dream come true for me. It was a top-down Zelda title that featured an art style similar to A Link to the Past, and it allowed for four-player cooperative play. I knew it wouldn’t feature a full-length quest like the SNES classic, but the idea of taking on bosses and enemies with three friends still sounded incredible. However, I quickly realized in the weeks leading up to its release that this was a game that would be very difficult to experience to its full potential.

To play four-player, each player had to have a Game Boy Advance as well as the cable that allowed it to connect to the GameCube. I was in my junior year of college when Four Swords Adventures released, and most of my gamer friends were more interested in finishing their degree than keeping up to date with portable gaming consoles and their peripherals (what the hell was the matter with them?). I knew one friend with the required components, so I had him come over the night the game came out. We played for a couple of hours and had a blast fighting over rupees and throwing each other into pits of lava. We had so much fun that we decided to halt our playthrough so we could experience the rest with the full four-player line-up. We tried to wrangle up friends with GBAs for a few weeks, but things never panned out. Our two-player game was never finished, and I found single-player to be a shadow of what the game was supposed to be.

I assumed my history with the game was over at that point, but getting hired at Game Informer meant four-player was finally a possibility. Several months ago, I grabbed four GBAs from the office and bought four used link cables. Tim Turi, Ben Reeves, and Ben Hanson were on board as we went to my apartment and finally booted up four-player Four Swords Adventures. We enjoyed it for a few hours, but eventually agreed that the puzzles weren’t quite up to Zelda’s high level of quality, and the game as a whole wasn’t worth the seven-year wait to play. Four Swords Adventures isn’t a bad game by any means, it just requires an awkwardly complicated setup that doesn’t feel quite worth it in the end.

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This essay originally appeared in Game Informer issue #222