Today is Pokémon Day. And 25 years ago, on February 27th 2001, Nintendo and Capcom released a different spin on the "Blue and Red" formula with The Legend of Zelda: The Mysterious Seeds, which got divided into two chapters released as two separate games. They would later be known as Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons to the west, and instead of being two different versions of the same game, they were two unique games in the same scope of their Game Boy Color predecessor, Link's Awakening DX, with the twist that you could connect their stories and worlds via passwords.
So, two new Zelda games came out on the same day and you had to decide which one to play first, where depending on this choice certain events in the games will play out differently. It was a fairly new concept, which adds a lot of replay value to both games, because you have to play each of them at least twice to experience all of the story and collect all of the items. (And at least four times to experience absolutely everything, due to some other choices you can make.)
It wasn't the only thing to let these games stand out within the Zelda series, even to this date, as their titles may indicate. Oracle of Ages brought the time traveling ideas from Ocarina of Time to the next level, where can swap between past and present on the spot with hundreds of years between, while small changes in the past may have big effects on the present. And Oracle of Seasons lets you alter the world's time of the year, where lakes freeze in winter and dry out in summer.
These games were quite ambitious for Game Boy titles and you can already experience them on the Nintendo Switch, via the Nintendo Switch Online offerings. However, the password system is far from intuitive, which is why this blog has been a strong advocate for a remake, ever since Link's Awakening was announced for the Nintendo Switch. You can read all about this idea in the Oracle of Worlds article from 2019, which I later renamed into Seeds of Courage, following the release of Echoes of Wisdom.
But the concept is quite simple: same engine and look as the new Link's Awakening and Echoes of Wisdom, one single game, no passwords. You start by choosing either "Holodrum" or "Labrynna" as the starting point of Link's adventure and everything unfolds naturally from there. After beating the first story chapter, you will then be transported into the other land, but the Maku Trees are now connected via a portal, so that you can easily travel back and forth both lands without switching between games.
That's the short version, but my ideas from 2019 have stayed mostly unchanged. After Echoes of Wisdom, however, it makes sense to revise the Magic Rings to work in the same way as the accessories, meaning that you should be able to equip multiple rings at once and carry them all around. This would make a number of rings a lot more useful in certain situations, which you otherwise probably would just ignore.
Now, this title would become a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive and there may even be a good technical reason for this. Switching between the ages and seasons isn't as simple as switching between screens in the original, because you would have to load a whole other world. And maybe on the Nintendo Switch 2 this can be achieved without major loading times.
In any case, such a remake would be the perfect way to celebrate both the 25th Anniversary of the Oracle games, as well as the 40th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda in the year 2026. After all, Oracle of Seasons was half a remake of the NES classic. Maybe they could make use of that fact and feature the classic enemies and bosses in new ways that re-explore the original Zelda... Or maybe they will remake the first game first and then re-use those assets for the Oracles afterwards.
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