Navi Trackers
from Zeldapedia, the Legend of Zelda wiki
| Navi Trackers | |
|---|---|
 A screenshot of Navi Trackers | |
| Developer(s) | Nintendo |
| Engine | Four Swords Adventure |
| Platform(s) | Game Boy Advance Nintendo GameCube |
| System requirements | Own the Japanese version of the game Four Swords Adventures |
Navi Trackers (formerly planned as a stand alone game titled Tetra's Trackers) is only on the Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (Four Swords +). In this game, multiple players, using a combination of the television screen and Game Boy Advances, search for members of Tetra's pirate gang to gain stamps from them, as many as possible within a given time limit. All action takes place on the Game Boy Advance used by each player, with the television screen showing a basic map and Tetra narrating the action.
Unlike most other Zelda games, players can enter their name as well as choose their gender; however, they play as one of the Links regardless of this choice.
Unique in the Zelda series (except, to an extent, Kodai no Sekiban), Tetra and her pirate crew have full voiceovers in place of text-only dialogue, with Tetra also synthesizing the two-character name that each player inputs at the beginning of the session; possibly why this game was not localized for the English release. In an early version of the game showed to review sites Tetra apparently spoke English; reportedly, one line was something like "Let's hear it for Mrs. A!"; and was able to pronounce at least some synthesized phonetic letters, A, B, C, and D, as shown in screenshots (it is to be assumed the full alphabet was available).
However, while the two-symbol rule worked fine for Japanese players, English is written with the Latin alphabet and has much more complex spelling and phonetical constraints. For example, if a player's name was Sarah, that is two syllables, so if a soundalike equivalent of that name was entered via Japanese characters, Tetra could easily pronounce "Sar-ahh" as a fairly realistic representation of the player's name. However, this would not work with the Japanese version's implementation of English characters. Each of the two permissible characters being pronounced, the aforementioned player's name could only be "SA". Since the English voice had already been added, this technical barrier is the likeliest reason for its omission.
A single-player mode is also available, either collecting alone or in competition with Tingle.
