Thursday, July 27, 2023

Oracle of Ages & Seasons @ Nintendo Switch Online

on a Minecart ride through the Gnarled Root Dungeon

As a small surprise today, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons became part of the Nintendo Switch Online Game Boy library. So, anyone with the basic subscription can play these Zelda classics now on their Nintendo Switch.

This may bode ill for a potential remake, but only for a moment. And we just got Tears of the Kingdom anyway, so there won't be any other Zelda releases in the near future, probably not before 2024, which gives a remake enough time to be of interest.

For those who have already played the original games, the Nintendo Switch Online version won't make much of a difference and they might want a remake for the novelties it brings alone. And those who are giving them a try for the first time now might find the password system to be too archaic to truly get into the whole mechanic of linking both games.

Something tells me that my ring guides will get a lot of visits soon... and I'm happy to answer the same questions for the hundredth time, where this will always remain a convoluted topic.

A remake would certainly help with that and make the whole experience a lot more accessible. So, the Nintendo Switch Online release can be seen as an appetizer for the real deal. Not everyone will bite afterwards, since getting into the emulated Game Boy Color classics will certainly be good enough for some and a remake will be sold at full price, as usually, but the Nintendo Switch Online release won't make it obsolete or undesirable by any means.

the GBA Shop in Horon Village

Also, like on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console, you are unable to enter the Game Boy Advance exclusive shops. You can still get the rings in there via password manipulation, though, which is also covered by my guides. But this is another thing where a remake will certainly shine, because some features simply are not accessible on the emulated versions and a remake can come up with new things to replace them.

Unlike on the Nintendo 3DS, however, you can still talk to the Blue Snake and you can also select the Game Link option when creating a new file, but both will give you an error. It might be that you can get Ring Fortunes via online play somehow, but I doubt it and I won't have the time to investigate stuff like this myself, sadly.

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