galateus (galateus) wrote in scans_daily, @ 2009-05-21 14:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | franchise: legend of zelda, in-joke: crack, medium: manga, title: four swords plus |
Four Swords+ part two: "Four's A Crowd" (and other unoriginal headlines)
One Link was not enough. (And Zelda was kidnapped, but that's not important. Yet.) So meet the Links!
The reason I called this series crack is that its biggest draw seems to be based entirely on the premise that Link just rubs himself the wrong way:
...Leading to wacky doppelganger infighting. Just seeing the great naming debate pretty strongly establishes the different attitudes on the team, only begrudgingly cooperating to save Zelda. But just to be crystal clear, Violet Link has an explanation anyway:
(Tangent: I don't entirely believe him about Green. He seems just like the straightforward Original Flavor Link to me, or at least he doesn't seem especially aggressive, being the balanced leader of the group.)
That's the thing about these Links: they have a lot of personality (compared to every other manga!Link in existence), so they clash a lot, particularly in the never-ending Green vs. Blue struggle for dominance. I swear the inter-Link dynamic is what all the other sucky Zelda manga have been lacking all this time. There's only so many conversations he can have with just a useless fairy companion for an ally.
It's all fun and games on the road: sparring, studying, and making Red do all the cooking. But then they discover something that threatens to tear their young group apart: They discover girls.
Or three of them do, anyway:
They get a place to stay in town to help out with the local "disappearing children" problem. As heroes do. Still, there are... distractions:
Blue's jealousy-sense is tingling, so he hunts down the absent Green to see what he's up to. And discovers he's been getting closer to Elne behind their backs!
Tale as old as time, really: Identical-copies-of-boy meet girl; boys fight over girl; girl... gets kidnapped.
But never fear, they rescue her and all the other children from the creepy dolls and cement-weeping eyeball monsters in the shadow world, in the process bringing the Four Sword one step closer to being strong enough to kill the bad guys, Gufuu and Shadow Link.
Which means that now it's time for Link to say goodbye.
(Violet Link's careful strategy of completely ignoring everything the lovestruck idiots around him say has apparently failed him, trampled underfoot as he is by the others' insanity.)
Of course, as much fighting as they do, they still always make up afterwards.
(And then they do a group leap-in-the-air fist-pump like at the end of every Power Rangers episode. It is awesomely cheesy.)
It's been a straightforward video game quest so far: Go to new area, solve new area's problem, defeat local boss-monster to empower magic sword. So they pick out their next destination: Death Mountain.
They find a canoe just lying around by the river, and...basically steal it, because they are Video Game Heroes and everything not nailed down is legally up for grabs.
Then they all take an oar and start paddling (Because it's still a little confusing, they're sitting in this order: Green up front/on the left, then Red, Blue, and Violet.):
(Trombone SFX: Wuh-wuh-waaah.)
(Green channels Homer Simpson. Who knew.)
The canoe is utterly destroyed. What will become of our heroes? Find out...