Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past & Four Swords (USA)
Game Boy Advance
🇬🇧
Reviewed in 2002
94
✪ Reviewed on December 24, 2024
90
Zelda A Link to the Past & Four Swords on GBA, ALTTP in portable form with a new multiplayer mode. ALTTP remains an absolute masterpiece. Four Swords mode is a delightful bonus.
Your verdict
Category
Action Adventure1 player7+
Co-op
Description
Compilation published by Nintendo in the United States in March 2003 bringing together The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords on a single GBA cartridge. A Link to the Past is the 1991 Super Nintendo classic with Link exploring Ganon's dark Hyrule. Four Swords is an exclusive new mode requiring two to four players via link cable where Link splits into four colored clones to solve cooperative dungeons.
Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past & Four Swords review
MAX
Art direction
★★★★★
"Iconic"
MAX
Music
★★★★★
"Legendary"
4/5
Story
★★★★★
"Captivating"
The legendary Hyrule restored in all its 16-bit splendour: shimmering colours, parallel worlds and dungeons of perfect readability. The care of the sprites and the inventiveness of the settings make every screen a small tableau. This classic elegance, timeless, has lost none of its power of evocation.
Re-orchestrating the immortal themes of A Link to the Past, Koji Kondo's music regains all its heroic splendour on GBA. From the Hyrule field to the Dark World, each melody embraces the adventure with an intact nobility, extended by the jousts of the Four Swords mode. This legendary score remains a peak of the saga.
The story opens in the rain, on a telepathic call and an uncle who dies handing over his sword. What follows hinges on a reversal: the expected rescue fails, the princess vanishes, and the world doubles into a corrupted reflection where every familiar place returns deformed. That Dark World turns the quest into an exploration of one's own failures.
Gameplay
"Masterful"
Rediscovering Hyrule and its tangle of dungeons reminds you why this 16-bit adventure is a touchstone: exploration, ingenious items and puzzles mesh to perfection. The handling stays exemplary in its precision, and the co-op addition of Four Swords extends the fun. Few classics cross the decades with this much ease.
Fun
"From the very first minutes"
Addictiveness
"Obsessive"
Exploring a doubled Hyrule, solving the dungeons' puzzles and uncovering the item that reopens the map chains discovery and progress without a dull moment. Hidden hearts and secrets reward the slightest search, and the Four Swords mode adds snappy co-op. A few back-and-forths weigh on it, but this density of adventure stays a peak of efficiency, ever captivating.
Difficulty
"Difficult"
Lifespan
"Massive"
Bundling two Zelda games on one cartridge already promises full hours: the solo quest of A Link to the Past, with its dual parallel worlds, devious dungeons and secrets tucked across Hyrule, fills long sessions on its own. Four Swords layers on cooperative challenges that play differently every run as treasures and layouts shuffle. That generosity is why the compilation still delights patient explorers seeking to uncover everything.
Nintendo compilation pairing the GBA port of A Link to the Past with the multiplayer Four Swords novelty, distributed as a PAL edition with the Link cable compatibility called out clearly. Four Swords remains to this day one of the rare strictly multiplayer Zelda adventures, and the cartridge release is the only physical way into it outside the limited 2011 offer. European cardboard box is fragile, and a PAL identified clean complete copy with intact manual keeps a particularly firm price.
Is Legend of Zelda, The - A Link to the Past & Four Swords still worth playing in 2026?
This cartridge bundles two Zelda games, namely A Link to the Past, one of the absolute peaks of 2D adventure design, and Four Swords, an exclusive cooperative mode built around the GBA link cable. The portable A Link to the Past includes minor tweaks and a bonus palace accessible after the main quest. Four Swords is largely an artifact today without connected partners, yet the base game remains absolutely essential. Probably the best physical way to keep A Link to the Past on hand.
