The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes asks three players to share one heart meter, one set of items and one very small screen. It is a cooperative game built on the assumption that cooperation is hard, and that assumption turns out to be correct.
Nintendo released Tri Force Heroes worldwide in October 2015 for the Nintendo 3DS. Grezzo and Nintendo EPD developed it, and it arrived as the second original Zelda entry built for the 3DS, following A Link Between Worlds. It is also the third Zelda game to put a multiplayer campaign up front, after Four Swords and Four Swords Adventures.
The difference is the number. Where those earlier games took four Links, Tri Force Heroes takes three, and it leans harder on working together than on beating each other. That single change shapes everything good and everything thin about the game.
Trailer, via Gaming Reinvented.
Three Links and a Totem Pole
Each player controls a differently colored Link. At the start of every level, the trio picks up items, and progress depends on using them on each other’s behalf rather than alone. The signature move is the totem pole: all three characters stack vertically, and the player on top reaches higher ledges, attacks from above, gets thrown across gaps and performs actions the bottom two cannot.
The mechanic is clever because it is a negotiation. Somebody has to be on the bottom, somebody has to be thrown, and the game gives you only touch-screen icons to sort out who does what. Communication becomes part of the puzzle.
Costumes carry the other half of the design. Players collect items to craft outfits, and those outfits grant special and hidden abilities, including upgrades to an item’s power, health capacity or stamina limit. The three Links share a single heart meter, and if it empties, every player loses a life fairy. There is no carrying a weak link quietly.
Hytopia and the Cursed Jumpsuit
Tri Force Heroes opens with Link arriving in Hytopia, a kingdom whose citizens are obsessed with fashion. Princess Styla is adored by everyone except the witch Lady Maud, who despises the princess’s sense of style. Maud curses Styla to wear a hideous brown jumpsuit at all times.
The curse spreads as fear. Hytopia’s citizens stop dressing the way they want, afraid the witch will do the same to them. King Tuft, Styla’s father, issues a call for a hero based on a prophecy’s characteristics. Link fits, and he is sent with two teammates across the Drablands to reach the witch’s lair, defeat her and lift the curse.
The game is set several years after A Link Between Worlds, and it follows the same incarnation of Link. That is worth stating plainly, because the art style suggests otherwise.
Why Link Looks Different
Tri Force Heroes mixes the visual style of A Link Between Worlds with The Wind Waker’s. The protagonist was originally planned to appear with the same design as the hero of A Link Between Worlds, but the developers replaced it with the “Toon Link” design in the final version. Their reason was practical: the models were easier to see on the 3DS’s smaller screens.
So the hero looks like a different Link while remaining the same one. In the series’ official timeline, the game sits on the branch created by the Hero of Time’s potential failure in Ocarina of Time, the branch that leads to A Link to the Past. Tri Force Heroes is the fifth title on that branch, counting Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages as a joint entry, and it lands between A Link Between Worlds and the start of the “Era of Decline.” It is the eighteenth title in the Zelda chronology.
None of that timeline work is visible while you play. It is scaffolding, and the game does not ask you to notice it.
The Single-Player Problem
A solo player can finish Tri Force Heroes by controlling doll-like companions called “Doppels” in place of other people. The Doppels can be swapped out during play, and the game’s on-screen notifications supply clues about what to do next.
This is where the design thins out. The totem pole, the shared heart meter and the touch-screen icons exist to make three people talk to each other. Swap two of them for dolls and the conversation disappears, leaving the puzzles without the friction that made them interesting. The main mode also refuses two players outright. You bring three, or you bring one.
Multiplayer itself holds up better. Local and online play both work, and the competitive Coliseum mode gives the same three-Link structure a different job. Reviews at launch were generally mixed. The presentation, soundtrack and multiplayer drew praise; the single-player mode, online functionality and matchmaking drew criticism.
What Tri Force Heroes Gets Right
Strip away the timeline and the marketing and the game’s real idea is small and sharp.
- The totem pole turns three characters into one climbing tool, and every use of it requires a decision about who stands where.
- The shared heart meter makes every player’s mistakes everyone’s problem, which is a harsher and better design than separate health bars.
- The costumes hide abilities rather than advertising them, so experimentation pays off.
- The Coliseum gives the same three-Link structure a competitive outlet when cooperation runs out.
That list is the case for the game. It is also short, and the weaknesses are not incidental.
Where It Falls Short
Ranking the game’s failures is not close.
- The single-player mode is the biggest problem. Doppels remove the coordination the entire design was built around, and the notifications that replace human teammates flatten the puzzles into instructions.
- Online functionality and matchmaking drew criticism at launch, and a cooperative game lives or dies on whether it can put three people together reliably.
- The two-player restriction is a needless wall. If three Links are the point, two Links plus a Doppel is an obvious compromise the game declines to make.
Tri Force Heroes sold over 1.36 million copies worldwide. That is a real audience, and it is a modest one for a mainline Zelda release.
What the Coliseum Proves
Tri Force Heroes is a cooperative game that means it. The totem pole, the shared heart meter and the hidden costume abilities are not decoration; they are the argument, and when three people are actually playing, the argument holds. The Coliseum proves the same structure can carry competition without collapsing.
The problem is that the game’s best idea is also its most fragile. Take away the other two players and what remains is a competent Zelda dungeon crawler with dolls standing in for the thing that made it worth playing. The two-player restriction makes that fragility worse, and the matchmaking complaints from 2015 suggest the game struggled to deliver its own premise even when players wanted it.
This is not a forgotten classic and it is not a misfire. It is a focused experiment that Nintendo never repeated in quite this form, and the mixed reception was fair: the multiplayer earns its place, the solo mode does not, and the whole thing sits on a timeline branch most players will never think about.
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