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Novis

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Impression/Review of Oracle of Seasons. Not bad Capcom. From January again.

Alright, just beat Oracle of Season. tl;dr: if you liked Link's Awakening, you'll probably like Oracle of Season. Would recommend.

Thought the game was fun and mostly enjoyed my time with it. The premise is kinda standard (okay, mostly standard) but seeing full on still pictures for scenes in color is a nice touch. The music is not as strong as it is in Link's Awakening and neither is the writing, which is a shame but understandable. I like the conceit of changing the seasons to get to new area or to help find secrets. Give the overworld freshness and helps exploration from getting too stale. Dungeons reminded a bit of Zelda 1 at times and seeing how the game was originally suppose to be a Zelda 1 remake, I can see why there were similarities (especially with a few of the dungeon bosses)

Two major pain points I had with the game was whenever you died to a dungeon boss (or sometimes mini-boss) and the final dungeon was a bit disappointing. The first point was because whenever you died, you'd get sent back to the beginning of the dungeon and getting back to the boss was always a chore, since the shortcut wasn't quick enough a lot of the time. The second because the final dungeon was just short. 8 rooms total, two of them have a fairy for you but in order to get out, you'd have to wait for floor tiles to pop up and fly at you and shatter. All of them. Everytime you entered the room. And the other rooms, you couldn't advance until you beat every enemy in the room otherwise it would loop you back to the first room again. So it feeds back into the first pain point of making it annoying to die to the boss since you have to beat all of those enemies over and over and over again. Another issue I had was the game did a bad job telegraphing certain things you could do (or had to do) in order to complete a challenge or a boss. (spoilers) One area required you to start in winter, and move to the next area, change the season to something warmer, and repeat until you finish with summer. But if Fall warmer than spring? Would that be the other way around? Or is fall and spring about the same temp? Kinda weird logic to me.

The Oracle games introduce a ring mechanic. Randomly throughout both games, there are ring you can collect, appraise (basically, find out what the ring is and does), and equip. You can equip only one ring at a time and at the beginning, can only carry one ring at a time. Later, you can upgrade you ring box to 3 rings carried or 5 rings carried. These rings also help Link in certain areas like give him more damage at the cost of taking more damage or helping him find patches of hidden dirt to plant seeds or make his spin slash charge faster or help you breath indefinitely underwater. I think it's a novel system and a good way to help curb some of the games randomness or difficulty but at a cost. However, you are occasionally given rings that don't really do anything. For example, if you kill 1000 enemies, you will be given a ring that says as much but doesn't impart and stat changes or benefits. It is like a cosmetic item without seeing any cosmetic changes (this game was on a the Gameboy Color afterall, so changes to the sprite would probably break how Link's sprite would look). It felt like a way to pad out the collect-a-thon since some rings can only be attained in one game or the other (similar to how Pokemon can only be collected in one version vs the other). However, you can easily transfer all your ring easily to the other title via transfer cable or a password/code.

Finally, the quests are not too memorable outside of one. Everything mostly just feels like ways to gate your progress until you achieve or gain something instead of motivating you to beating the game or helping people. And with the dialog/writing being pretty basic, there's no real attachment to the goings-on of the game outside of just enjoyment of the mechanics. There is one interesting quest where you can help a family take care of their child by making decisions like naming the child or helping the mother decide how to put the child to sleep at night. I don't know how it pays off, however. I imagine I would need to play Ages to see any benefit from that quest.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Oracle of Seasons and look forward to Oracle of Ages to see how the two games tie together. Also, given the name, it would be interesting to see what Ages does with Time, given it's name and the franchise's reliance of time as a mechanic.

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