Review: The Legend of Zelda - Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages
If I had to describe the Oracle sub-series of the Zelda franchise in one word, it would be "baffling." Developed by a team at Capcom and released on a soon-to-be-obsolete handheld, Oracles has against all odds been a fairly high-selling entry in the series and both are rated pretty highly among fans and critics alike. A Zelda Universe poll reveals the games are more or less middling in the grand scheme of things, but consider the implication: even while considered average when compared to the rest of the Zelda series, Oracles reviewed well and sold millions of units on a handheld console which was a month away from being replaced entirely.
It should go without saying, but Ocarina of Time helped to usher in a resurgence of Zelda popularity; if the series before had been renowned, then 1998 would mark the series as legendary. The formula had been conceivably perfected in its first attempt, but even still this was all a distillation of the original Zelda on the NES: explore the world, conquer dungeons, find items to keep exploring the world, rinse and repeat. A Link to the Past polished the first game to perfection, and Link's Awakening took many of those improvements and deconstructed them. Link's Awakening served an important, albeit understated, role in the series progression: if you can't innovate, deconstruct. You could argue Adventure of Link started this trend, but Link's Awakening actually did it right where the prior game fell on its face.
I hate to admit it, but Oracles is an extremely safe series. Many of the innovative items found in Link's Awakening return in different forms; for instance, Roc's Feather is upgraded to Roc's Cape in Oracle of Seasons, which grants players the ability to glide for a brief time. The Zora Flippers are upgraded into the Mermaid Suit in Oracle of Ages, allowing Link to swim freely underwater--this item handles like trash and is extremely frustrating to use, and I hate it. The games reuse a few sprites, but thankfully new and fairly detailed sprites for the Goron, Deku and Zora races have been implemented. The games look great, but in terms of game feel they're identical to Link's Awakening.
For seemingly no reason, many of the iconic items in the series have been replaced with cheap imitations: the bow and arrow are completely absent, but players can use a three-pronged slingshot in Oracle of Seasons to shoot seeds for no reason. Speaking of seeds, more than a number of classic items were replaced by these generic items; the Pegasus Boots are replaced with Pegasus Seeds, the Lantern is replaced with Fire Seeds, and the fast-travel Ocarina or Flute is replaced with Wind Seeds. It's a needless change and to make matters worse, Link needs to replenish his stock of seeds from trees scattered around the world. Having the slingshot as well as a stupid multi-aiming seed shooter feel like meaningless additions, especially when players have to waste a resource used for other purposes just to use them.
Aside from implementing bizarre new items for the sake of being unique, both of the Oracle games focus fairly heavily on narrative. In both games, the Triforce throws Link into a quest in either the lands of Holodrum or Labrynna, for Seasons and Ages respectively. The Triforce being some sort of entity throwing out quests to heroes is kind of a stupid set-up, but I guess the developers needed to get Link out of Hyrule somehow. Majora's Mask handled this much better, but given how much longer Oracles was in development I guess the team didn't have much time to take inspiration from that game. It definitely feels like a step backward, but since the Game Boy hardware was so ancient by this time (twelve years, with the Color being only a minor upgrade) I don't doubt Oracles pushed the hardware to its near breaking point.
The games can be played in any order, but because I played Seasons first I'm going to just pretend I'm right and say that's the correct order. Both games have a distinct quality, where Oracle of Seasons is combat-oriented and Oracle of Ages is puzzle-oriented. Because the series has always leaned toward puzzle solving it feels like a steady difficulty scale, especially since puzzles are my mortal foe. That also creates a bizarre problem in that no matter which game is played first, some elements will seem out of place; combat will be easier if Oracle of Ages is played first as the player is given better weapons and starts with more health in a linked game, but if Oracle of Seasons is played first the combat of Oracle of Ages will be trivialized since the more difficult monsters appearing all over Holodrum will only start to appear at the later stages of Oracle of Ages.
There's no equivalent to this when it comes to puzzles, so if Oracle of Ages is played first then the puzzles in Oracle of Seasons will be far easier even by the end of the game. I'd have preferred the difficulty to scale a bit more smoothly, and since there's no easy answer it makes more sense to simply play Oracle of Ages last. Since many of the bosses in Oracle of Ages are puzzle-oriented, it can feel like the game is increasing in difficulty even when the player is dying less. Difficulty can be subjective and I feel much more pressure when I'm asked to think critically to solve a problem, because swinging a sword wildly doesn't take as much effort.
In Oracle of Seasons Onox, probably the most generic villain video games have ever seen, captures Din, the titular Oracle of Seasons, and as a result Holodrum's Temple of Seasons descends into the subterranean world of Subrosa. The seasons of Holodrum are thrown into disarray, and only Link can find and wield the Rod of Seasons to save the land. The game's narrative takes a step back after this and like Link's Awakening, players need to conquer eight dungeons across the land before tackling the final boss.
The number of dungeons feels appropriate individually, but when playing both of these games back-to-back it can come across as extremely cumbersome. The bosses range from nostalgic throwbacks to the original--likely a holdover from the planned Game Boy Color remake of the original Zelda--to completely forgettable monsters like a fish or an octopus. In fact, I'd say the biggest flaw of the Oracle series is the mere fact that these are supposed to be played as one long game broken into two parts rather than two distinct games with a few similarities. Holodrum and Labrynna both feel unique, but because the narrative and characters of Oracle of Seasons are so forgettable and generic I felt like it was kind of a waste of time.
Oracle of Seasons is not as difficult as its supposed combat-oriented approach would seem, and the season-changing mechanic simply comes off as obtrusive. Players might need to restock on seeds, but those seeds might only grow in one season--to remedy this, players need to walk all the way to a stump to change seasons and walk all the way back to the tree they were harvesting. This problem exists all over Oracle of Seasons and unlike Oracle of Ages, there's never an upgrade which mitigates the problem of stumbling around an area just to find a stump to use the game's main gimmick. To make matters worse, players have to enter the small and restricted area of Subrosa, essentially a lava pit, in order to upgrade their Rod of Seasons to access more of the game. It's an extra step in a game with too many extra steps.
The game ends as awkward and boring as it began, too: Onox is just a big guy in armor, and the final boss is a fight with a dragon. In general I'd say Oracle of Seasons does very little to set itself apart, but players need to play both games if they want to access the true ending to Oracles. After defeating Onox, a brief cutscene plays to show the Gerudo priestesses Koume and Kotake, or Twinrova, attempting to summon Ganon. At this point I was starting to get irritated at the enormous volume of Ocarina of Time callbacks--Link's Awakening was already set after A Link to the Past and at that point the Goron, Zora and Deku races had yet to be created. The introduction of these races in the Link to the Past era is just anachronistic, but shoving Twinrova into the story as an excuse to set up another encounter with Ganon seriously damaged my already-growing dislike of this sub-series. Oracle of Seasons starts weak and ends with a heavy thud, so by the time I started Oracle of Ages I had pretty much given up hope.
While Oracle of Ages starts in much the same way with a villain capturing an Oracle, the presentation of this game is leagues better than Oracle of Seasons. Veran, the villain of Oracle of Ages, possesses the body of Nayru, the Oracle of Ages, and travels into the past to instruct the queen of Labrynna to turn her nearly-finished lighthouse into a menacing tower celebrating her opulence. Like Onox, Veran's goals seem fairly generic but the presentation is good enough that it doesn't really matter. Ganondorf is a fairly generic villain as well, but as long as the villain gives the player a decent motivation I'm okay with it. Instead of juggling multiple seasons, players are given an item to travel back and forth through time, eventually being allowed to do so at will. Labrynna is smaller overall than Holodrum, but both the present and past have their own unique maps; Holodrum had a bigger map but the difference in seasons is usually confined to progression blocking stones and a different color palette. There's also Subrosa, but it's so small that it's typically only visited when necessary.
To go along with the theme of warping between ages, the Black Tower grows in size over the course of the game which gives the plot a feeling of progression, unlike Oracle of Seasons. The player has to stop their quest at one point to save Nayru from Veran in a small and interesting boss battle, and the tower is shown to be nearing completion as the player beats each dungeon. Linked games pointlessly shove Princess Zelda into the story, but as with the Veran subplots it gives the story a feeling of time passing throughout the game much like the roaming NPCs of Link's Awakening.
Speaking of the roaming NPCs of Link's Awakening, Oracle of Ages shares one of the biggest flaws I found from that game: players have to progress through side stories in order to gain access to each new dungeon. To name a few off the top of my head: after crashing on Crescent Island, the player needs to travel back and forth through time in order to gather their belongings which were stolen by the Tokay inhabiting the island. As a side note: look at how easy it was to just implement a new race of creatures--were the Ocarina of Time races really that necessary? Anyway, after accessing Rolling Ridge players need to complete a mini-trading sequence which involves completing several minigames in a certain order before being able to approach the dungeon of that area. It's frustrating and slows down the pace of the game, but it's far from the only time something like this happens.
One of the more annoying side stories is one in which players need to navigate a complex series of whirlpools before discovering the Zora Village, where they need to give medicine to King Zora--the same King Zora from Ocarina of Time, in case you weren't nostalgic enough. The player then needs to complete a minigame in a library nearby in order to heal a fairy who was poisoned by the water supply, which then gains the player access to Jabu-Jabu's Belly. Yes, entire dungeons are injected into Oracle of Ages from Ocarina of Time, though this version of Jabu-Jabu's Belly is cursed with the aforementioned Mermaid Suit, turning an already annoying dungeon into a complete nightmare just to navigate. Compare all these needlessly complex steps to Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past, where players faced a series of challenges in order to access each dungeon, which in turn were marked very clearly on the map. It's an annoying holdover of Nintendo Hard, though instead of just being annoyingly difficult the steps needed to progress are intentionally convoluted to keep the player invested in the game longer than necessary.
The boss fights against Veran are as interesting as she is a villain, and the climb up the Black Tower is a memorable setpiece moment. The ending is full of action and gets pretty tense, though the actual resolution is fairly quick and a bit disappointing. Of course, this is all ruined in a Linked Game when players are funneled into a fight with Koume and Kotake, then Twinrova (with one of the most bizarrely obtuse methods to beat the boss I've seen in a Zelda game), and finally Ganon. This all just feels like an unnecessary grab for nostalgia and I'd have much preferred some sort of resurrection with both Onox and Veran, the latter being the real highlight of this series. Like many players I'm kind of sick of Ganon, and his presence in this game at the very end feels forced.
The most disappointing thing in the Linked Game is the final screen, which shows Link in a boat sailing into the distance. I get that the developers likely wanted to make some sort of connection with Link's Awakening, but to just shove it in after the credits feels lazy. What really gets me about this is the implication of this particular Link's adventure: it can be safely assumed that the Link of the NES Zelda titles is not the same as this one, so when first approaching Oracles I assumed these were going to be the last hurrah of the Link to the Past character after surviving his harrowing adventures at sea, but with these games being firmly located between A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, the ending to the latter seems far more bittersweet.
If there are a total of four games dedicated to this Link and his last appearance is floating by himself at sea, then the fate of the character looks dire at best. I don't like to believe that such a legendary figure died at sea like some random asshole, and Oracles could have patched things right up. I do admit that it's a unique direction to go with such an important character, but so many of these games are full of dark, tragic stories that I feel it's becoming too common with the series. A Link to the Past had such a happy ending but both of the Oracle games turned Link into some throwaway hero at the whim of the Triforce, and the message I get is that when Link tries to escape all this Zelda nonsense he's lost at sea and dies alone after being forced to murder an entire village of people to wake up a stupid fish.
Verdict
Try as I might, I just can't find much to praise about the Oracle series. Oracle of Seasons is bland and unmemorable, while Oracle of Ages has good presentation marred by unnecessary plot obstructions. Both games are full to the brim of annoying throwbacks to Ocarina of Time despite being set in a world where these throwbacks seem anachronistic, and for some players it might be overwhelming. Classic items are replaced by weird gadgets for seemingly no reason, and the implication at the end of the Linked Game is just depressing. The best I can say is that both games are decent continuations of the gameplay seen in Link's Awakening, so if you really liked that game then these are just more of the same. It's cool to see just what Capcom could squeeze out of the Game Boy Color during its autumn days, but Link's Awakening does more than either of these games without overstaying its welcome. I highly doubt I'll be returning to Holodrum or Labrynna any time soon.
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