Sunday, October 30, 2022

Of Charms and Magic Rings

Playing Hollow Knight really made me appreciate its Charm system, which is somewhat similar to the Magic Rings from Oracle of Ages & Seasons. And if these two Zelda games were ever to be remade, then they would profit from a few adjustments to the ring system, where the developers could learn a thing or two from the Charms in Hollow Knight.

The main difference between the Charms and the Magic Rings is that you can equip multiple Charms based on a number of notches. In Oracle of Ages & Seasons your "notches" came with the Ring Box, where the L-3 Ring Box could store up to five Magic Rings. However, you could only ever equip one ring at a time, which could be changed on the fly.

This had quite a negative effect on the gameplay, because there is an incentive to go into the menu and change your equipped Magic Ring based on the situation. Attacking some foes? Equip the Red Ring. Dodging some traps? Equip the Blue Ring. Going for a dive? Equip the Zora Ring.

An extreme example could be a difficult boss fight, where you might want to switch from the Blue to the Red Ring whenever you're about to strike and then back to the Blue Ring when you have to dodge some attacks. I actually did this when I first fought Onox in his second phase and the fight turned out too difficult for me at the time.

But this leads to constant interruptions of the gameplay, because you keep going into the menu. One of the major improvements that came with the Link's Awakening remake was that you didn't have to constantly open the menu to switch your items any longer, since most of the important items got their dedicated button. The Oracle games will profit from the same thing, but the Magic Rings were yet another reason to go into the menu more often than necessary if you wanted to make the most out of them.

A simple solution would be to follow the example of Hollow Knight and let you equip multiple Magic Rings at the same time, as many as there are slots in your Ring Box. This even makes sense, since Link has more than just one finger to put a ring on.

This idea may seem somewhat broken at first, especially when you could get the benefits of the Red, Blue, and Green Ring all at the same time, so you could increase both your attack power and defense simultaneously. But keep in mind that you had to play through most of both Oracle games in order to even obtain these rings. If they were to turn the Hero's Secret into a Hero Mode with the usual shenanigans, such as increased damage and no hearts, then having a new advantage will be good. Plus, you still will need to find those larger Ring Boxes in a New Game+, so you're not overpowered from the get-go.

Some rings might cancel each other out, though, where it will have to automatically remove the conflicting rings, with the most obvious example for this being the different transformation rings. So, there will be some limits to all of this, but it would still be much more interesting than in the original.

The main problem with the Magic Rings in Oracle of Ages & Seasons was that some rings were simply too good, first and foremost the aforementioned Red, Blue, and Green Ring, and with that there was little to no reason to try (m)any of the other rings. Some were useful, no doubt, but just not useful enough to remove the bigger advantages. But if you could equip multiple rings at the same time, then this would make some of those perks suddenly a lot more interesting, e.g. the Red Joy Ring, which lets you find more Rupees, or the Swimmer's Ring.

In addition, now it would even make sense that the game lets you keep inferior versions of certain rings, like the Heart Ring L-1 or the Rang Ring L-1. If you could use them together with their upgraded counterparts, their effects would stack. If you equip the Light Ring L-1 and L-2, for example, which let you still shoot sword beams after taking two and three hearts of damage respectively, then you will be able to shoot beams after a deficit of five hearts now.

Hollow Knight actually does something similar, where some Charms are stronger versions of others, though the system there works even better thanks to the Charm Notches, where more powerful Charms use up more notches. They also could do something similar with the rings, but it wouldn't make much sense, because it's not like one ring would be larger than the others and then waste more space in your Ring Box. And it's best to keep it simple, where the system shouldn't change too much.

One other effect of a few Charms in Hollow Knight is changing interactions with certain characters, similar to the masks in Majora's Mask. And that's even something you would expect from a variety of the Magic Rings, e.g. the Friendship Ring, or basically any ring that acts as a trophy. Imagine Impa being very confident about you in the beginning of a New Game+, because you are wearing the Victory Ring. This doesn't have to be anything major, but some altered dialogues here and there depending on your rings could be interesting.

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