Attempting to fill the void until the beautiful open-world Legend of Zelda Wii U game is done, Nintendo will launch The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes this October 23rd exclusively for Nintendo 3DS.
For those who forgot about it or missed its E3 reveal altogether, Tri Force Heroes is Nintendo’s latest attempt at a Legend of Zelda multiplayer romp akin to Four Swords Adventures. Only this game is more of a dungeon crawler, and it’s built to be played either cooperatively by a team of three players, or by a single person (with a pair of touchscreen-controlled AI paper dolls as companions). Only have one friend around to play with? Sorry, you’re screwed. Co-op won’t work with only two players.
The good thing about the co-op, though, is that it’ll be functional in local offline mode, via Download Play with only one copy of the game, and online. Voice chat won’t be built in for online play, but the game will feature an icon-based communication system intuitively mapped to the touchscreen.
I’m still a bit iffy on this one until I get to see how well suited it is to solo play (I personally don’t have any interest in a three-player Zelda game). However, I am willing to keep an open mind as the core gameplay does look like good fun. The video below shows a brief gameplay session with the developers if you’re interested in seeing the co-op in action.