The developers have a stupid reason to not include voice chat.

They should have claimed they were trying to uphold the sanctity of the franchise by keeping Link mute.

And I was afraid Link would sound like a 19 year old basement dwelling, neckbeard, mouth breather. Thanks Nintendo.

As someone that tried the demo on the show floor, I can attest that my team and I would not have been able to complete the dungeon stage - much less defeat the boss - had we not been able to talk directly with each other. Lack of voice chat in Splatoon may be simply annoying since you can't coordinate attack strategies, but lack of voice chat in this game will actually impede your progress significantly. Communication is crucial here since many of the puzzles required extensive amounts of careful, coordinated team work. It's a shame, because the game was a blast when everyone on my team was communicating and working together. The game will still be fun without voice chat, but expect it to also be an order of magnitude more difficult to play.

I had a Best Buy demo today and despite being able to speak at a normal voice and be heard, that didn't stop me from Game Overing twice because one of the people decided to completely ignore me at all turns and keep running off into the pits.

So basically, you're only as good as your most effective troll.

If it's like Splatoon, I'm sure there's already a boatload of people elsewhere saying "who cares there's no voice chat-- everyone has Skype on their computer."

I obviously haven't played this, but it seems like it's something that needs voice chat a lot more than Splatoon does. Splatoon should have had it simply because it's the industry standard, but I don't think the lack of it really hurts the game in a practical way.

Don't worry, NX will have voice chat and Nintendo will act like they invented the shit.

If anything, I'm hoping the lack of voice chat weeds out all the people who are terrible, impulsive players.

After thinking about this for a while, I can definitely see the counter-argument to having voice or text chat in this game (Although I don't agree that it should cause the removal of the feature entirely). Suppose you were playing through a dungeon in a normal, 1-player Zelda game, and your friend who has already completed that dungeon on his own copy of the game watches you play and shouts out the solutions to all of the puzzles before you have even had a chance to explore the room you just entered. That would be incredibly frustrating, and I don't see any obvious way Nintendo would be able to design around that in Triforce Heroes unless the dungeon levels were randomly generated somehow.

Not having voice chat in games that clearly need it these days is just dumb, no matter what reason Nintendo gives. People get hit by cars every day due to terrible drivers. Does that mean that cars should be outlawed and nobody should have them? Nope. They're helpful when people are given the means to use them correctly, JUST LIKE VOICE CHAT.

Has anyone played this in either single or two-player?  With download play I can rope my wife into it so just wondering if it works as well.

Recent news says yes.

The proper snark is "Nintendo's outsourcing their voice chat because they can't do it themselves."

Sadly, it'll make terrible players worse since you can't tell them off.

Let's imply the same logic with the internet. A small majority of people use the internet for nefarious purposes. Let's outlaw the internet and nobody should use it.

That line of thinking is stupid and recent news can shove it.

Doesn't matter if you could. They just ignore you anyways. Bad players are very rarely willing to get better.