Zelda Retrospective: The Legend of Zelda - Oracle of Seasons/Ages Reviews

Between the releases of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, Capcom subsidiary Flagship proposed a full Game Boy Color remake of the original Legend of Zelda. Facing severe budgetary and hardware constraints, Flagship was approached by Shigeru Miyamoto with a new pitch for their project: a trilogy of Zelda games to see the Game Boy Color off into the sunset. After planning a series of game-linking mechanics, the third game was cancelled and the remaining two were released as Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages in 2001, a year after Majora's Mask. Because the games were released only a few weeks before the Game Boy Advance, I ultimately missed this series and only played the games recently; so recently, in fact, that I honestly thought I wouldn't finish them in time to write this review.

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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Zelda Retrospective: The Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening Review

While A Link to the Past released in 1991 and took the world by storm, Nintendo's handheld Game Boy was still missing a dedicated Zelda title despite its age at the time. In 1993, this time released in the same year worldwide, the Game Boy finally saw its first Zelda in the form of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. Beginning its life as a port of the Super Nintendo A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening has found a place as one of the fan-favorite games of the series. Five years after the release of the original game and a month after the release of Ocarina of Time, a remastered version of Link's Awakening was released on the Game Boy Color, featuring full-color sprites and additional content. Graphical differences and a new dungeon aside, the games are fairly similar; that said, this review is going to talk about more specific points of the game so knowledge of one or the other won't be necessary. I should note that the DX version is the only one I've played so don't hold me in too much contempt if there are more differences than that. I'm sure there are more than a few purists of the original for whatever reason.

Review: The Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening

Some time after A Link to the Past, Link is shipwrecked and stranded on Koholint island, a strange place full of strange characters. Koholint is immediately a far cry from the familiar locales of the series past; the island is seemingly only inhabited with a small village, monsters from the Super Mario series run rampant, the town's merchant is a deadly sorceror, and so on. Right away the game hits home that Koholint's dream-like quality is intentional, and Link is tasked by a mysterious owl to "wake the Wind Fish," who, according to statues around the island, is "Wind Fish in name only, for it is neither." The strange nature of the game is one of its defining characteristics, and one of the main reasons I would recommend it. Don't quit reading now, I have a bit more to say than that.

This actually works when dating. Try it out!

Much of the surreal quality of Link's Awakening stems from the game's bizarre development cycle; as mentioned before, the game was initially conceived as a port of A Link to the Past before moving to an original project. After deciding on a new idea for a portable Zelda, director Takashi Tezuka took major influence from the then-recently-canned David Lynch masterpiece Twin Peaks, a bizarre crime thriller set in a town full of unique and quirky individuals. Link's Awakening introduces a dark and foreboding atmosphere at points when the game's bosses begin fearing for Link's success; despite the fact that Link was forcibly drawn into the dream of the Wind Fish, if he wants to leave Koholint island he must awaken the sleeping Wind Fish. The Wind Fish is forced into a perpetual dream by an enigmatic monster called Nightmare and only by defeating the monster can Link leave. As the Nightmare reveals during the course of the game, waking the Wind Fish means ending its dream, meaning Koholint and the villagers will disappear forever.

If this was in a game like A Link to the Past where most of the characters are fairly static the player's moral debate would be far less engaging. There's no hint of choice when it comes to the story, so the only way to not effectively murder an island worth of living people is to not play. The developers were keen on this fact, which is where many of the Twin Peaks inspirations begin to shine through. To quote the game's director, "The drama was all about a small number of characters in a small town. So when it came to Link’s Awakening, I wanted to make something that, while it would be small enough in scope to easily understand, it would have deep and distinctive characteristics." Every character on the island has something to do and each has their own interests, but none are more apparent than the character Marin.

Marin is one of the best characters in the entire Zelda series; she loves to sing and wants to leave her small island to explore the wide world. People and animals love her, though she's not without her strange and at times horrifying quirks such as her sadistic bloodlust for murdering chickens. Compared to other major characters in the series, Marin is completely relatable. Compared to the likes of Sahasrahla, the villagers in Adventure of Link, any version of Zelda and so on, Marin has pretty reasonable goals and doesn't fall into the trap of concerning herself with the mystical aspects of the world in which she lives. Link's Awakening makes sure the player becomes intimate with Marin, as she is a major figure over the course of the game. She pulls Link out of the ocean and gives him his shield; she teaches Link the Ballad of the Wind Fish; the player is even tasked with bringing her across the island to wake up a sleeping walrus blocking the desert. Characters speak very highly of her, and because she's such a help to the player without getting in the way there's no real reason a player might have to dislike her. If there's any reason the player might feel conflicted about waking the Wind Fish, Marin is likely going to be it.

The even greater emphasis on the story comes at a price, however, as Link's Awakening is even more linear than A Link to the Past, though still not quite as bad as Adventure of Link. Much of the island will be cut off by progression-blocking obstacles preventing the player from exploring as much as they want, an annoying compromise between its two forebears. Even worse, and this is my biggest annoyance with Link's Awakening, is the gating of exploration behind important story events.

Like I've said before, I don't mind story in games and I outright love the characters and setting of Link's Awakening; up to this point in the series, this is by far the most engaging Zelda simply from those perspectives. The problem comes looking at the series history: in past Zelda titles, players could explore a dungeon up to finding the item required to progress and simply leave before finding the boss. It wasn't exactly a good substitute for the instantly explorable open world of the first game, but it did allow for some interesting breaks in pacing if players wanted to run into a dungeon, find an item, run out, make a beeline to a dungeon which might have a more urgent item, and otherwise explore at their hearts' content as long as they went back to beat the dungeon bosses.

Link's Awakening instead forces the player to finish each dungeon in order rather than allow them to search Koholint at their own discretion. For example, the second dungeon can only be entered by walking a villager's Chain Chomp--a Mario character--into the swamp and having it eat the plant blocking the dungeon entrance. This chain of events only begins once the player has defeated the boss of the first dungeon--upon returning to the village, the Chain Chomp will go missing and Link will be prompted to find it.

That's not the only example of this, either. There's an extremely long and elaborate trading sequence required to finish the game, and one step of the trading sequence involves handing a stick to Marin's father, Tarin, who will only appear in that location after the third dungeon is completed. Marin won't move to the beach for the wonderful moment in an above screenshot until after Tarin is given the stick, so the player can't access the desert using her song. After the fourth dungeon a ghost will begin haunting Link and stops the player from entering most locations until he's put to rest. You get the idea.

What annoys me about this kind of design is that the requirements can become a bit obtuse, especially since the map never has any sort of waypoint in case the player gets lost. As a series first the map will fill out by each grid when the player enters it, but that's hardly a decent substitute if the player is exploring the map as much as possible when it becomes available. There's an old man in the village who Link can call--but can't interact with in person, because the man is shy--but I sincerely think that if the game is obstinate enough to require specific plot triggers then a small point on the map should at least be a courtesy.

To be frank, this is pretty much my only real complaint with the game, though it does make repeat playthroughs annoying when so many specific events crop up. Outside of that, the game does a very good job at translating the gameplay mechanics of A Link to the Past; since the game is running on much weaker hardware it's not possible for Link's sword to be animated as smoothly, so instead the developers drew a motion blur sprite over the sword in order to keep the fluid side swipe. The Pegasus Boots and Hookshot return, and there are even new items like Roc's Feather which, as a series first, allow Link to jump. Link's Awakening does a great job of complimenting A Link to the Past while serving as a great sequel, expanding ideas that never made it into the earlier game while experimenting with ideas that might have been harder to implement.

Dungeons are just as massive and labyrinthine as past entries in the series, and I'd go as far as to say some of the later dungeons stand as some of the most difficult in the Zelda series. One dungeon, either the sixth or the seventh, was so difficult that as a child I had to completely drop the game and didn't actually finish it until it was time to write this review.

I mentioned this in an earlier review, but I really appreciate games that can make you reflect on the work put into its creation. The opposite of "this didn't age well," I suppose, is "this was ahead of its time." For a console that was barely stronger than an NES and could only display monochrome colors, it's miraculous that Link's Awakening has so many expressive and detailed sprites--even more when considering the DX remaster. I think the real problem some people have with games that don't "hold up," aside from the obvious reason that these games might have been played at a much younger age of a person's life, is more that there are just so damn many video games that a lot didn't do much to stand out among their peers. When I look at a game now like The Legend of Dragoon, a title I held in very high regard in my younger years, it doesn't really stand out compared to its contemporary and my favorite game of all time, Xenogears, as the former mostly falls in line with many role-playing tropes of the time: a young man comes back to his home village to find it's been razed by an evil army who kidnapped his childhood fling; hijinks ensue across a fantasy land before the bigger and more ancient threat is revealed. Xenogears, despite being unfinished, places a heavy emphasis on exploring and deconstructing JRPG tropes which is part of why I hold it in such high regard as a huge adult.

The Zelda series is far from the most original in terms of storytelling, but what made the original Zelda stand out was the way it confronted gameplay tropes of the time and created a wholly unique experience with a familiar backdrop. The second game didn't stand out at all aside from the story presented at the end, but A Link to the Past took much of the formula found in both games and perfected them to their upper limit. Link's Awakening, on the other hand, took the challenge of transporting that unique formula into a fully-fledged sequel on much weaker hardware than its predecessor, and the dedication shines through in most aspects. I can only fault the story progression so much because I know it was trying something new, and for its part the story is far more intricate and thoughtful than any of the other games in the series.

It's a bit of a subtle point, but the sound design in Link's Awakening is utterly brilliant and will likely shock first-time players. The music is vibrant and triumphant when it needs to be, but can also become dark and foreboding when the situation calls for it. The boss theme is frantic and tense, though it's a bit of a shame it's repeated for the final boss considering the battle with Nightmare is such a shocking encounter. This aside, the major goal of the game is for Link to find the instruments which can wake the Wind Fish. I have a theory that this was a last-minute addition to subtly gloat about how spectacular the soundtrack of such a low-resolution game came to be, but that's just me thinking about what I'd do in their position. Link's Awakening also expands the ocarina from A Link to the Past, which itself expands on the flute from the original Zelda. Players familiar with the series will probably know what I'm trying to say here, but there's a great progression of the involvement of music in each Zelda--the second game aside. Having music be a thematic element to the series would never have worked if the sound design wasn't so high quality, and despite using a worse sound chip I do think much of the soundtrack is even more memorable than even that of A Link to the Past in many cases.

Link's Awakening is a sequel on an entirely different scale than Adventure of Link, down to perfecting the thematic elements of the game's story. Both The Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past deal with a character growing in the face of adversity when all hope seems lost; Adventure of Link and Link's Awakening are more internal struggles, though the former only briefly touches on this theme in its final hour while Link's Awakening presents this struggle throughout the entire game. Link is still haunted by the stress of his long journey, as evidenced by the forms the Nightmare takes in their long struggle at the end of the game, but the player at this point is also likely feeling the stress that their actions will probably end up killing the entire population of Koholint. Weaving the conflict in a video game between the protagonist and a player is a difficult task even in modern game storytelling, but Link's Awakening presents this struggle effortlessly with clever dialogue and endearing characters.

Verdict

Link's Awakening sort of daunted me when approaching it for this review. Unnecessarily obtuse at points with some seriously imposing dungeons, this isn't the kind of game players should approach for a quick weekend play--as I've since discovered to my own detriment. It's a really slow-burning game, and for impatient or people less interested in older games, it might become overwhelming. Luckily for those with taste, Link's Awakening is designed to be taken in slowly, rewarding patient players or those who want to explore a unique world. It's not perfect, but consider that my biggest complaint is that the game sometimes demands you become invested in its world--to be blunt, Koholint feels like a fully lived-in place, full of charm and more personality than anything the Zelda series has seen so far. If you have that patience, this is easily one of the finest handheld games of all time and is a worthy successor to A Link to the Past.

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3DS successor possible. Told you! [Nintendo Switch news]

Just like I predicted, the Switch is not the console-hybrid handheld everyone was holding out hope for. As it turns out, Nintendo might even be working on a successor to the Nintendo 3DS:

"According to the report, Kimishima stated that the 3DS is different from the Switch in terms of shape, size, and pricing, and he feels that they can co-exist together.

'The required need and market is there for it, and we’re considering a successor,'  said Kimishima on the subject of a possible successor for the Nintendo 3DS."

Eiji Aonuma has now confirmed that the Switch is a home console that can be taken on the go, rather than a new handheld:

"There’s an element of that, but it doesn’t automatically mean things will happen more quickly or more easily. Plus, Nintendo 3DS still has plenty of titles in development. The concept of the Switch is that you have a home console that you can take with you on the go, and in that respect it is both home console and handheld, but it doesn’t mean for us that the concept of a dedicated handheld will just disappear.”

Just to be clear, I called this dramatic twist on the day of the recent Fire Emblem-oriented Nintendo Direct, where I noted the bizarre release of a brand-new Fire Emblem sub-series (which some are theorizing will be a dedicated series of remakes for older titles in the series) along with a New 3DS port of Fire Emblem Warriors, skipping the Wii U entirely.

I'm so smart. It's almost unreal how prescient and wise I am, like some sort of great video game oracle.

Sources cited:

http://www.siliconera.com/2017/02/02/nintendo-president-sees-need-market-3ds-successor-consideration/

http://www.siliconera.com/2017/02/03/legend-zelda-producer-aonuma-says-switch-wont-taking-place-dedicated-handheld/

http://subjective-objective.blogspot.com/2017/01/fire-emblem-direct-switch-anxiety.html

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