The Navi Trackers mode in The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures started life as a remake of Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima, a Japan-only RPG for the Super Famicom. In a 2004 interview with Nintendo Online Magazine, director Yoshinori Tsuchiyama stated that its rebranding as a Zelda game was the result of "the desire to make a complete departure from Hyrulean Adventure, and to incorporate a sense of realism produced by having the game talk to the players through the screen." Tsuchiyama, co-director Toshiaki Suzuki, and series producer Eiji Aonuma previously worked on Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima. Because of these circumstances, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures contains unused assets for the Marvelous remake in its code, including icons, backgrounds, cursors, and a 3D model for Gina (whose role is filled by Tetra in the final game).

Navi Trackers (originally planned as a standalone game titled Tetra's Trackers) is only included in the Japanese and Korean versions of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. The game was inspired by Marvelous: Another Treasure Island, a SNES game directed by Eiji Aonuma. 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. Unlike most other entries in the series, players can select their gender as well their name; however, they play as one of the Links regardless of this choice. 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.