Why not just use normal controllers? Nintendo set it up rather ingeniously. If you walk into a building on the screen, why should the rest of your friends have to walk in with you just to show what's inside? What happens instead is your friends can play as they please outside the building, while you look at your own Gameboy Advance screen which shows you inside the building. Going downstairs, inside caves, buildings, dungeons, or into the dark world puts you in your own GBA screen. Of course, if someone's down there with you, you'll seen them in your screen and they'll see you too. This all reminds me a lot of the Dreamcast controller's memory cards that had LCD screens, which also reminds how Dreamcast was just a little too ahead of its time...

Using this system of GBA screens is both good and bad. The good is that it's really fun and individual, and you can't tell what your friends are getting while they're inside buildings, besides the sounds you hear coming from their GBA. The bad news is that, if you don't have a GBA SP, the lighting really sucks and it's often a struggle to aim your GBA with the lights correctly. It's just a tad bit annoying. Let's move on though; I've elaborated too much on this.

Four Swords takes place after Minish Cap (for gba) and starts out by Zelda asking you to pull out the legendary Four Sword to strike down the sinister Wind Sorcerer Vaati. Taking the Four Sword splits Link into four seperate people, green, blue, red, and purple. If you're a normal Zelda fan, and you first start playing this game, I guarantee you're going to get irritated at the game real fast. It starts doing things against the rules of normal Zelda games. For instance:

1. You can't hold on to two items at once. So if you have the boomerang, and try to pick up a bow and arrow, you'll end up trading the items.
2. Rupees are gone. It's all about the Force Gems.
3. Nothing's persistent, Link's always restarting at his basic skills every level.
4. The game is no longer a free roaming world, it's made up of blocks of levels and boss battles.

Yeah, you'll get really angry. But after about the third level, you start to understand why they did all this. It's all because the game's made for multi-player. The reason why they don't want you to collect every type of weapon is because they want your friends to have different items then you. Coming upon a certain type of puzzle may have you using your weapon, but requiring your buddy to help out with his weapon. One person blows up a wall, and the other carries the key to the door. It really makes a lot of sense, and also makes it more fun since you work as a team, instead of doing it by yourself. After all, there's no "I" in "TEAM". (but there is in "win")

In single player mode, you can assign your team into a couple formations that multiplayer mode can't.
(click for a slightly larger image)

Playing this game isn't as much fun as single player. Multiplayer is certainly the way to go on this one. I played this game with Matt Rose, and he and I are both Zelda fans (him more than me). When we started, it was all about working together, but just in the way the game set things up, it really made us competitive against each other. Suddenly we found ourselves making sure we raced to treasure chests before the other, go separate ways in the hopes of collecting more than the other, and even picking up each other and tossing them into enemies that would suck out our Force Gems. (sigh.. those precious force gems...) I could quickly tell that I would have cried a lot if I would have been playing this game with my older brother when I was younger.

Going inside buildings or into caves takes your game to your Gameboy Advance, or to this mini screen if you don't have one to connect.
(click for a slightly larger image)

Four Swords really succeeds in making some brilliant four player puzzles. But at the same time, almost too brilliant. In the middle portion of the game, after very exciting levels and fun little puzzles, Matt and I would find ourselves walking all over the map trying to figure out where something was, most of which was made even longer because we had to wait for the other to meet up with us at certain areas that would end up not being the right way to go. Sometimes I wished the game would have been a little bit easier on how hard we'd have to think, because this game was made for multiplayer fun, not sluggishly walking around a world map trying to figure out what we were missing.

The game also has an interesting battle mode where you fight against each another and try to stay alive longer than your friends. Although it's fun, it never really made us want to come back to it very much at all.

Overall, this is a solid game. It's very good, but nothing overly spectacular. Single player mode isn't as much fun as doing it with a friend, but still just as worthwhile. If you've got a lot of friends, and a lot of Gameboys, go for it. A multi-player Zelda game has been pulled off amazingly well.