What was Navi Trackers?

The Japanese version of Four Swords Adventures, released as Four Swords Plus on March 18, 2004, contains three games where the West received two: Hyrulean Adventure, Shadow Battle, and Navi Trackers, a multiplayer stamp rally that has never been released in North America or Europe.

Nintendo first showed it at E3 2003 as a standalone title, Tetra's Trackers. In the finished mode, players hunt Tetra's pirate crew across a map on their own Game Boy Advance screens, collecting stamps, while the television narrates the race and shows the standings.

The narration is the marvel and the problem. Tetra and her crew are fully voice acted, and Tetra's voice synthesises each player's name from the two characters they enter at the start. That trick works gracefully in Japanese and badly in English spelling: the Western demo reduced names to letters read aloud. The name synthesis is the likeliest reason the mode was cut overseas, where no data for it survives in the localised discs.

A single player mode against Tingle exists, and the Korean release kept the mode, being built from the Japanese version. For everyone else, Navi Trackers remains the series' most substantial locked room: an entire voiced Zelda game inside a game many collectors already own in its lesser form.