The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes

Zelda Wii U was, as promised, absent from this year's E3, but there was a Zelda surprise in the form of a new cooperative Zelda for 3DS that already seems like it may fare better than Four Swords Adventures.

The main issue with Four Swords, whether you're referring to the GameCube or Game Boy Advance game, was the hardware and party planning inherent in actually playing the game. Alongside needing multiple consoles and connecting wires, you also had to track down three friends and gather them in one location. Triforce Heroes immediately alleviates these multiple hurdles by knocking the player count down to three, requiring only a 3DS, and adding an online multiplayer option.

For our session, myself, Tim Turi, and Brian Shea all jumped into a game together. Given a choice of outfits, we all independently picked the Zelda dress. The outfits you choose before jumping into the game all have different abilities and Zelda's dress offered the appearance of more hearts, but we were all just excited to see a familiar outfit among the options like one fashioned like a wearable bomb.

For our session, one of use had bow and arrows, and the rest of us had bombs. The first puzzle we encountered required all of us to get on each others' shoulders and fire an arrow through a tall flame to light an out-of-reach unlit torch. The organization of getting on each other's shoulders was a little complicated. We had to make sure the right person got on top and only the person on the bottom can toss everyone back down. If you're on top or in the middle, you are at the whim of the lowest man in the totem.

Despite my uncertainty about the difficulty of reorganizing the totem with speed when the going got tough, taking on a boss (Margoma, who was featured in the trailer) was not too difficult. The first step was to get a bomb thrower on top of the totem to throw a bomb at eye of the boss. Once that was complete, switching out the totem to get an archer on top to fire arrows at the beast eyeballs worked out quickly. As long as you're willing to work as a team, which the game obviously encourages, even complicated actions were fairly easy to pull off.

Some smart touches to the game include the sharing of hearts so no one is fighting over health, the ability to touch the icon of the other players on the lower screen to see exactly where they are, and the collection of emoticon-style icons you can use to communicate and cheer on your friends. I found great joy in jamming on the cheer icon and watching it grow and take up more of the screen at the most inopportune times.

We didn't get a chance to try it ourselves, but the game will offer a single-player mode where Link can rent two paper dolls to act as A.I. as you make your way through dungeons.

Upon announcement, I felt little excitement for Triforce Heroes. I have a lot of love for Zelda (like most who enjoy video games) and really enjoyed a Link Between Words (Triforce Heroes uses that game's aesthetic and in some cases exact models) but, it wasn't until I actually got to play the game that I got excited about it. It seems to be structured as a series of levels as opposed to an open area, but it feels like a cooperative Zelda game and I am excited to play more and discover more of its unlockable outfits.