When I reviewed the anniversary edition of Four Swords, my quip was "Everything is better with friends." That game presents an "OK" solo experience, but to truly take advantage of what it has to offer, you need to bring some people in with you. Four Swords Adventures, its much bigger GameCube follow-up, is much the same. Despite the more intricate levels, expanded palette of mechanics and unique dual-screen gimmicks, this is a multiplayer game at its core.

Four Swords was never truly meant to be considered a stand-alone game, and as such it benefits from its brevity. You can experience what it has to offer rather quickly, and be done with it in just a handful of hours. Four Swords Adventures is not so. It's a far more ambitious game, and as such, it stretches for much longer, encompassing eight unique worlds full of sprawling levels. Because of that, Four Swords Adventures became the most agonizing Zelda experience thus far for me, and single-handedly kneecapped my desire to revisit Zelda for several months.

On paper, Four Swords Adventures is definitely an improved experience. The randomly generated levels of Four Swords give way to massive hand-crafted zones, each giving you a unique slice of Hyrule to explore. The levels encompass much of what one expects from a full Zelda game, such as outdoor areas, caverns, dungeons and even towns. The progression is linear and level-based, and your objective is to explore and solve puzzles in order to reach the level's exit. There is more story than in the original game, and you will find many NPCs to give additional flavor to the world.

Visually, the game is a strange mishmash of A Link to the Past's environments and Four Swords/Minish Cap style sprites, with Wind Waker's UI design thrown in for good measure. While it can look beautiful at times, I think the presentation is a bit incoherent. The soundtrack fares much better with plenty of wonderful references to classic themes from throughout the series. The combat is much improved, and the selection of items is used decently well, though I wish you could equip different items for each Link in your control.

The most notable conceit of Four Swords Adventures is in its use of a special link cable to use your Game Boy Advance as a second screen--a sort of proto-Wii U GamePad. Most outdoor environments are rendered on the TV, while interior areas often send Link to the GameBoy Advance. This gimmick does have the benefit of allowing a certain degree of freedom for each player, as the jump to a console typically meant that players have to share a screen. However, it also increases the barrier of entry for the game. In order to play with four people, not only do you need a GameCube, but you also need four GameBoy Advances and four link cables. This makes it highly difficult to play the game as it was originally envisioned.

Foreseeing this issue, the developers opted to include a single-player mode from the start. You are able to play the game solo, which puts you in simultaneous control of all four Links. You are given a few formation options to make it easier to tackle the content that was so clearly made for multiplayer. It works fairly well, and while there are a few puzzles that feel a bit clunky to tackle as a solo player, it's clear that a lot of attention went into making this a fully playable solo experience.

But no matter how many improvements or strengths I list, it doesn't make a difference. This is a multiplayer game, and a "playable" solo experience does not mean it is a "fun" solo experience. The fact is, controlling four Links simultaneously only serves to add tedium to the experience, and this is compounded as the game becomes more complex and difficult in its later levels. After only a few worlds, I was unbelievably bored with the experience. I could only tackle a few levels at a time before everything in me was screaming to stop. This is why it's taken me more than 3 months to fully complete the game and reach the end credits.

I want so badly to avoid classifying Four Swords Adventures as a "bad" game, because I know it isn't. I have great memories of its multiplayer, and I know for a fact that when you play it as intended, it's a blast. But the multiplayer is so inaccessible today that I could never recommend this game to anyone, and I can't place it at three stars in good conscience after the awful time I had trying to finish it. This is a very straightforward "skip," and I don't see myself revisiting it ever again, unless Nintendo remasters it to make the multiplayer more playable today.