Zelda Runthrough: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages

Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons are a pair of Zelda games for the Game Boy Color, developed not by Nintendo, but by a subsidiary of Capcom, and released simultaneously.  The gimmick here is that the games can be played in either order.  A password system (or link cable, if you felt like it) allows you to transfer progress from one game to the other.  This allows you to connect the two storylines, and unlock a hidden final boss (which may or may not be a certain pig-headed fella).

The good news is that the games are fun.  The developers took the basic template from Link's Awakening, and made lots of improvements.  The worlds are each much larger, and filled with more characters.  The dungeons are more intricate, and every bit as challenging, and the new items allow for lots of new puzzle types.  To summarize, it's more and better everything.  This is impressive, considering that the Game Boy Color is little more than the Game Boy with, well, color.

So it's hard to explain why I finished these games feeling so...meh.  But I'll try.

One of the heavily promoted features allows you to collect rings and share them between the two games.  (The developers must have been thinking about a certain other pair of connected Game Boy games, and decided that a pointless collectathon would get the kiddies excited.)  However, most of the rings are earned by planting nuts all over the game world, and waiting for the trees to grow and bear fruit that may (or may not!) be a ring.  Since there's no way to control what the tree produces, you'll be getting a lot of repeats and selling them to the ring merchant.  Not fun.  Add to that the fact that 98% of these rings only give you tiny bonuses, and you can only hold one or two at a time, and you can understand why I eventually gave up on this feature.

Okay, so maybe that's not a big deal.  But here's another thing.  To appeal to series fans, the games threw in loads of characters from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, like the Mask Seller and Tinkle.  There is no context for their inclusion, and they serve no purpose except to take up a screen, and be included in the massive trade sequences (an undesired holdover from Link's Awakening).  In an extreme bit of laziness, the games bring back the Deku Tree as a major character in both games, renamed the (wait for it) Maku Tree.

Again, only a minor annoyance.  However, these things are emblematic of a general design philosophy, one that says that a handheld Zelda game will inevitably be inferior to the console-based ones, and the only way to compensate is to pad it out with unnecessary content and fan-service.  To be fair, Ocarina of Time sets the bar pretty high, and Capcom must have felt a great deal of pressure to not fuck around with the Zelda formula too much.  But the genius, the miracle, of Link's Awakening, is that its developers dared themselves to make something better than Link to the Past, and largely succeeded, against all odds.  The Oracle games are better in pretty much every respect than Link's Awakening, and yet they kind of feel like a cop-out.

If I sound grouchy, then it's probably because these games are also extremely long, and a bit of Zelda fatigue is inevitable.