TW is what happens when you remove story progression, adventuring, and exploring some a Zelda game and demand people to play online and and do nothing but grind out MMO crafting ingredients.
It's yet another squeal to the failing four swords line. You remember those right? No? Let me refresh your memory, you needed to buy a $60 GameCube disk, four $15 DS-to-GameCube cables, four $200+ DSs, and since you're so fucking rich another three "friends" in order to play. Yep, I've never actually played it either but I've read the box which appears at the bottom of the discount bins at the worst game selling company ever: Gamestop.
Well it appears Nintendo finally caught up to the online age that started up over twenty years ago and now you're able to connect to other players over the Internet. So in order to shit out the lost profits by not having you by a crapton of hardware they decided to cut their development crew down to -1. True to their style, the game engine is copypasta from their last successful game (LbW) except you have four buildings to explore which are in no particular order: the screenshot menu, addiction chests, TF2's hats for sale, and would you like to play a game?
The screen shot menu is pretty much exactly what you'd think it is. Help promote TH online by spamming shots of you doing nothing important or fascinating to other people online who never really care to look. Addiction chests is like the button that feeds the hamster in a cage, they are a direct attempt to get you to play the game at least once per day and if you don't compulsively check it you'll lose a chance to snag a reward. TF2's hat's for sale is a buy a costume room that in all honestly is the only form of actual progression in the game.
When you enter the main castle to play a game you can choose to play online or solo-it, and by solo it I mean you have to tediously control all three Links one at a time with a very annoying delay with a repetitive sound that gets old very fast each time you attempt to switch between them. The delay becomes even more noticeable later, like FUCK YOU annoying noticeable, on because you're forced to play dead-man's volley with an ever increasing speed against a semi-randomized color order. But if you play online prepare to be stressed out by what you hope to be small children spending hours solving simple puzzles, the guys that have homework to get down and can't spare a second without filling you're screen with icons, and the ragequiters who will shut your entire game down kicking you back to the party forming room (after a fucking long waiting period) just because the randomized map selection didn't pick what they wanted.
Each stage, if you can fucking call them that, starts out by having the three Links pick up an item and showing a 3~4 second Triforce light up. Then everyone runs over and stands on it. Rooms 2 & 3, present some minor puzzle or encounter with enemies that upon solving shows a 3~4 second Triforce light up. Then everyone runs over and stands on it. The 4th room is the subboss/boss fight which when beaten shows a 3~4 second Triforce light up. Then everyone runs over and stands on it.
Each area has four stages and the game has six areas. You can also replay each area under a challenge mode that limits you in some way. There are three challenge types per stage giving you a grand total of ninety six rooms reused two hundred and eighty eight times and you'll watch that fucking triforce light up almost four hundred goddamn times (almost thirty fucking minutes of your life to put that into prospective). Just imagine how many times you'd hear the Link-swap sound if you tried playing through it solo.
Bells and repetition whistles aside. It is first and foremost an MMO ingredient grind. You can pretty much beat the entire story mode in about five minutes outside of cutscenes and dialog. And no I'm not exaggerating here. You can do the final stage in each area immediately after unlocking the area and in solo-play you can use your lives to skip a room allowing you to skip all three rooms (including the boss fight) after the first. The only real penalty for skipping is at the end of a run 1 rare ingredient ant 2 common ingredients are randomized in three chests and if you skip the rare is gone and replaced by twenty rupees.
Because, and I cannot stress this enough, it's an MMO ingredient grind. You can wear one outfit at a time that upgrades pretty much one aspect (more life, LbW item upgrade, sword beams, great spin, specific item drop rates) and many of these things require the rare items from all four stages in a given area on challenge mode. So when I said 30 minutes of watching the triforce light up, I actually meant an hour and a half if you wanted to grind out one of each rare item in the game, and you'll need more than that if you want to collect all the outfits.
If you're fed up recycling the same areas pedaling your feet going nowhere you can try your luck in the Coliseum. Join in the lobby and fight two other Links, the winner gets a common/uncommon ingredient. Winning is based on how much damage you dealt, but also exactly how much life you have when the timer expires so purposely getting killed two seconds from then end gives you a 100% score in that area. Like all other PvP games, it's horribly unfair too. The shiny gold sword suit allows a player to stand on one side of any given arena and fire wide beams of death at his opponents, which thanks to icons highlight where you're at and it's unlimited range are pretty much undodgeable. So prepare to run head on at them in frustration only for your Link to stop every few feet from being hit allowing you to get hit even more times as you come to the painful realization that your opponent's sword is literally fucking longer than yours inflicting damage and knockback to you before you even have a goddam change of hitting them allowing one player to continually dominate and murderfuck the entire arena until you realize that spawnlife's random bullshit is the only reason they are capable of losing.
If you like a good Zelda game, this isn't for you. But if you like to grind away several hours of your life doing nothing it's the perfect game to pick up this holiday season. And if you're anywhere in between, well there is a reason Gamestop makes to much money reselling games. It's called user disappointment.
