The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and its counterpart, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, had a short but troubled development cycle. More than twenty years later, it’s fairly well known that the developers hoped to make a third game in the saga. But before that, they planned to remake the NES classic, The Legend of Zelda, and then follow up with new sequels if it went well.
Neither of those scenarios happened. There is no third Oracle game and there is no remake of The Legend of Zelda, but Oracle of Seasons gives us a small glimpse of the latter. Oracle of Seasons has a completely different story and new game mechanics, but the overworld design, dungeon design, and bosses are reminders of the remake we never saw.
Oracle of Seasons repeats some of the mistakes of Oracle of Ages to a lesser degree. As the first Zelda games designed after the jump to 3D, it makes sense that the developers would want to explore some new ideas they had learned. Unfortunately, this means some choices are a bad fit for the Game Boy Color hardware. What felt magical in 2001 feels like an obvious design mistake in 2024.
Playing Oracle of Seasons after finishing Oracle of Ages allows you to enter a password to alter the story. The story differences during the game are minor. It’s a small incentive to replay the two games in both orders, but only the most dedicated Zelda fans will care to see the changes. The new items are a fun addition, but it is tedious to swap between the two games to learn passwords, write them down (or use that handy screenshot button on a Nintendo Switch), and swap back to the first game to speak to the correct person. I’m sure they did the best they could in 2001, but I can’t be bothered to go through all of these steps repeatedly nowadays.
The secret ending consists primarily of a boss fight and extra dialogue. I would argue the secret boss takes away something unique from both Oracle games, but I have the benefit of more than 20 years of additional Zelda games. What seemed like a cool finale in 2001 summons a “not again” reaction for a modern Zelda player.
You may notice a recurring theme. Oracle of Seasons was great in 2001. I can recognize its good intentions today, but I also struggle to want to keep playing. There’s just enough friction that I had to put it down more times than I expected. Just like Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons has not aged as well as many other Zelda games.
Oracle of Seasons has a unique central mechanic, something that Oracle of Ages lacks. However, it also feels like a first attempt. Oracle of Seasons, as the name suggests, gives you control of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, and winter. You can change the world around you by using the Rod of Seasons while standing atop particular tree stumps, . Many Zelda games have two overworlds, but because of the season-changing mechanic, Oracle of Seasons effectively has four overworlds.
The season-changing mechanic is a very cool idea, but it has three problems that make it feel like a rough draft. First, you only learn one season at a time. You are halfway through the game before you have the freedom to change between all four seasons. This is likely intended as a tutorial, but it goes on for too long and feels limiting in the early game. Second, you can only change the seasons while standing on specific tree stumps. Oracle of Ages lets you travel between the two time periods whenever you want later in the game, and I wish Oracle of Seasons had a similar upgrade that allowed you to change the seasons at will.
Third, and most importantly, there is no consistency in how the seasons change. This is an example of the Oracle games being too ambitious for the hardware. You change the seasons by standing on a tree stump, but you cannot see the exact extent of the changes. If you walk in the wrong direction, you might leave the area with the season you want, and when you walk back, the season will have reset to what it was before the changes. There’s no easy way to know where those boundaries are without trial and error. Having a consistent pattern of change would have solved this. For example, the tree stump could change every screen adjacent to it. Instead, it seems to change whole game regions at a time, but no one memorizes the boundaries of those regions, and they can be in any shape or any number of screens.
Altogether, this makes the season-changing mechanic a bit tedious to deal with. It’s a lot of trial and error. I rarely felt like I knew I was making the right decision. I just located what seemed like the nearest tree stump and started swinging my Rod of Seasons until I found the right answer.
All this season-changing is necessary because General Onox has captured Din, the titular Oracle of Seasons, and caused the Temple of Seasons to fall underground into the world of Subrosia (what you might consider the fifth overworld). Onox’s actions have caused the seasons of Holodrum to go haywire, and now it can be winter one moment and summer the next. Without the Rod of Seasons, Link cannot traverse the world to rescue Din.
Like Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons lifts gameplay directly from Link’s Awakening. Playing the game feels great because it’s a duplicate of one of the all-time great Game Boy games. The main problem that plagues all three games is the lack of buttons. Be prepared to open the menu frequently to swap your equipped items since you only have two buttons to work with. This feels a bit odd playing with a modern controller on a Nintendo Switch, but your mileage will vary. I play a lot of retro games with modern controllers, and I can handle some tedious menu navigation.
Holodrum is full of new and returning characters. If you played Oracle of Ages first, like I did, then you meet some of the same people you saw there as well. The witch’s apprentice, Maple, is one of my favorites, and you can never go wrong with an animal companion (or three!). The Subrosians are a group of hooded characters who only appear in Oracle of Seasons, and I generally like their world and demeanor — even with their tendency to make me play stealth minigames.
The world of Holodrum is likely to remind you of the world of Hyrule from The Legend of Zelda from time to time. While the final version is not anything like a direct copy, fans of the original game will notice small references like the location of the first dungeon, the appearance of Lynels on the northern side of the map, and the Old Men you might find in caves.
The dungeons are much simpler, and I would argue more fun, than the puzzle-heavy designs in Oracle of Ages. Expect to run through a lot of rooms repeatedly and to fight a lot of enemies. The two games share some bad design elements. I particularly dislike the revolving doors that force you to walk through the same rooms repeatedly. But the dungeons disregard the season-changing mechanic entirely and feel properly designed for the Game Boy Color. My only real complaint is that the best dungeons occur the later parts of the game, so the early game can feel slower and less fun. If I had not previously played, I would not have known to wait for the best parts of the game to show up.
The dungeon items are a mixture of Zelda classics and unique additions. Notable inclusions are the Magnetic Gloves, which test whether you remember your elementary school lessons on how magnets work, and the Magic Boomerang — a boomerang that you can throw and then control with the d-pad.
Dungeon bosses are fun to fight and are the final proof that makes it very clear that this game began as a remake of The Legend of Zelda. The cast of bosses are mostly updated versions of bosses from The Legend of Zelda, with a few other surprises. My favorite is the inclusion of Aquamentus, the first boss from The Legend of Zelda, as the first boss of Oracle of Seasons.
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons avoids the worst problems of its counterpart, Oracle of Ages, but both games feel too ambitious. The game’s core mechanic is not as impressive as it should be because of the hardware limitations, and the password system for connecting the two games is tedious and generally not worth bothering with. However, Oracle of Seasons cements itself as the better of the two games with an engaging main quest, dungeons that are fun instead of frustrating, and updated bosses that are a memory of younger days. Some parts of Oracle of Seasons are clunky, but it’s a solid adventure game and one of the better games in the Game Boy Color library.
