The Myth of the L-3 Power and Armor Rings

The Power Ring L-3 and the Armor Ring L-3 were always perceived as the most powerful rings in Oracle of Ages & Seasons. First of all, you have to go through great hardships to find these rings. They can only be obtained in a Linked Game, where you have to beat the Hero's Caves, which are probably the most difficult dungeons in the games. And both of these rings come with a terrible price.



They must be great, right?

No, no, it's all lies. You've been deceived by all those little up and down arrows! Both of these rings rarely even scratch the effects of the Red and Blue Rings, which are easier to get and don't have any disadvantages.

WHATZITUYA from GameFAQs and I did some testing to figure out how those rings actually work. For reference you need to know the power levels of your weapons:

• Fists: 1 damage
• Wooden Sword: 2 damage
• Noble Sword: 3 damage
• Master Sword: 5 damage
• Biggoron's Sword: 5 damage

Now, let's take a look at what the Power Rings and Armor Rings actually do:

• Power Ring L-1: +1 Sword Damage,
  but it adds 1/4 heart of damage to every received hit
• Power Ring L-1: +2 Sword Damage,
  but it adds 1/2 heart of damage to every received hit
• Power Ring L-3: +3 Sword Damage,
  but it adds one heart of damage to every received hit

• Armor Ring L-1: -1 Sword Damage,
  but it subtracts 1/4 heart of damage from every second received hit
• Armor Ring L-2: -1 Sword Damage,
  but it subtracts 1/4 heart of damage from every received hit
• Armor Ring L-3: -1 Sword Damage,
  but it alternately subtracts 1/2 heart or 1/4 of damage from received hits

No, it's not a mistake that all the Armor Rings only reduce the Sword damage by 1, in contrary to the ingame description, but that doesn't prevent them from being useless. Now compare this to the Red and Blue Rings:

• Red Ring: Sword Damage x2
• Blue Ring: Damage taken 1/2

The math is very simple. With the Red Ring and the Master Sword you cause 10 damage. With the Power Ring L-3 it's only 8 damage. Only when you use the Wooden Sword, there's some actual advantage. But this doesn't even take the one heart of extra damage that you get from every tiny scratch into account.

With the Blue Ring all received damage gets halved. If an enemy deals four hearts of damage, you will only lose two hearts. With the Armor Ring L-3 you will lose 3.5 or 3.75 hearts. Only when you receive 1/2 heart of damage it actually makes a difference from the Blue Ring. And again, this doesn't take into account that it weakens your sword.

So, yeah, do not use the Power Ring L-3 or the Armor Ring L-3. They are deceptions and nothing else.


The Double Edged Ring is very interesting by the way. It increases your sword damage by 8, so the Master Sword deals 13 damage. You will take one heart damage with every strike, which renders this ring useless on small enemies, but on bosses it can be absolutely devastating.

Getting all 64 Rings (Again)

As I told you earlier, I was replaying both the Oracle of Ages & Seasons at the same time. I used the same Hero's Secret to start a new game in both games, which allowed sharing the rings, even though both games weren't really linked, story-wise. I regularly switched between the games to transfer rings and basically played both games side by side, dungeon for dungeon (see this post for more details on how to do that).

It was a very cool experience, because you get to see how differently the games evolve and how they compare directly to each other. I would basically see how many items and hearts I got while being at the same point in the two games. For example in Ages you can get the L-2 sword right after Level 4, but the L-2 shield not until after Level 6. In Seasons you get both after Level 5. Or how the dungeons compare next to each other. The Sword & Shield Maze is a way more awesome eight dungeon than the Ancient Tomb, which felt somewhat bland compared to the later dungeons in both games.

Well, but comparing the games was not the point. This was done many times already and I love them equally. My big goal here was to get all 64 rings again from scratch - something I haven't done in ten years. I had a complete ring collection on the GBC and after my original playthroughs I never bothered with collecting them again. Whenever I decided to replay the Oracle games, I simply used a pre-existing Hero's Secret together with a Ring Secret that gave me all 64 rings right from the start. It was lazy, but it felt great to start with all the useful rings like the Blue Ring.

But I was missing out. It's definitely one of the most interesting and challenging collectible side-quests in the Zelda series. I had a lot of fun doing this a second time. Because I didn't have all the good rings (like the Blue Ring) right from the start, I paid more attention to the rings, which I normally wouldn't use at all. And some can give you big advantages. Especially the Joy Rings, which give you double amounts of Rupees and other items, are pretty powerful. Normally I would just use the Blue Ring all the time and not bother with the other ones. But some effects are really interesting.

I haven't completed my collection yet. I'm at the end of both normal games and I'm down to the seven rings, that are exclusive to the Linked Games: Power Ring L-3, Armor Ring L-3, Heart Ring L-1, Aqua Ring, Ice Shoe Ring, Spin Ring and the Blue Joy Ring. Those you can only get in Linked games, with half of them being exclusive to a specific order. Right now I have finished both the unlinked games in Ages and Seasons and got all the 57 rings that you can get without linking the games. So, I'm past the worst.

And it was a fruitful experience. I finally got to study the true nature of how the random rings work in thins game (see my latest post). I could also update my Ring Guide on ZeldaEurope with some spots, which I had missed before.

If you know how the random system works, you can easily figure out the best spot(s) for getting a specific ring. So, collecting all random rings went surprisingly well. I got all 31 random rings when I reached the end of the games without any extra farming, just by planting and harvesting Gasha trees between the dungeons. Compared to collecting all 64 Ship Parts in Phantom Hourglass, which can be a very tedious and repetitive task, this was rather enjoyable.

The only problem are the rings exclusive to mini-games. Actually that's only two rings: the Light Ring L-2 from the Target Shooting game in Lynna Village and the Bomber's Ring for getting a perfect score in the Platinum level of the Goron Dance minigame.

The latter used to be a pure nightmare on the GameBoy Color. It's THE definite main reason, why I never wanted to collect all 64 rings again. If you've ever played the Goron Dance minigame, you know what I'm talking about, because lots of people struggle with this game for getting the Mermaid Keys alone. And the Platinum level is ten times worse. You have to beat eight rounds without making a single mistake and some of the "songs" are just ridiculous. I personally struggle with getting the long pauses right. And even if you happen to win, it's not guaranteed that you receive the Bomber's Ring. You can also get a Protection Ring (which is plunder and basically just saying "screw you"). And the chance for the Protection Ring is slightly higher.

Surprisingly it went really, really smooth for me. On the 3DS (or any emulator) you can use Restore Points between the rounds. So, if you mess up, you would just reload. And I got the Bomber's Ring on my first try! I can't tell you how happy I was, I jumped in joy. It's probably the hardest to get ring and it went really well.

The Light Ring L-2 was a different story, though. It's not hard to score 350 points in the Shooting Gallery, but you can win three other rings (Blue Holy Ring, Red Luck Ring & Octo-Ring - all plunder basically) and the probability for getting the Light Ring L-2 (which you can only get in this game) is really low. Below 5% definitely. I had to beat the game 30 times to finally get it. And I'm not the only one with this problem. Imagine collecting Wither Skeleton Skulls in Minecraft, but with a minigame instead of killing a skeleton. It's ridiculous, but I got it eventually.

The Restore Points also helps with the Piece of Heart from Maple. Just save before meeting her and in case, she drops it and you miss it, you can reload and try from a different angle. Restore Points definitely make the games a lot easier (and enjoyable). On the GameBoy Color/Advance you didn't have this luxury and some parts, especially the Goron Dance, could be really frustrating (I remember that I broke a table when I was furious about a part in Oracle of Ages :D).

The next step would be playing the Linked Games and collecting the seven missing rings there. But I'll save that for later, maybe next year, because replaying the games right after replaying them wouldn't be much fun. But I'm looking forward to both Hero's Caves, where you get the L-3 Power and Armor rings, especially the one in Ages - I haven't beaten that one in ages (pun intented).

And the Aqua Ring might be a good challenge, because the minigame here was really hard and I haven't beaten it since my first time in 2001 or 2002. I can hardly remember it, besides the fact that it was really annoying. The other rings are basically free gifts though, nothing to miss.

So, yeah, did you ever try to get all 64 rings? How did it go? Tell me about it in the comments.

Oracle of Ages & Seasons - Random Rings Guide

It appears that there's no English guide helping you with the random nature with the rings in Oracle of Ages & Seasons. 31 Magic Rings are gotten randomly from different sources. Usually you would just get the info "Maple/Gasha Nut", which isn't really helpful, since there are multiple tiers and different sources and Gasha Spots yield different results. In German we do have good guides about this topic, so I decided to translate this into English to help everyone, who's struggling right now with the rings on the 3DS Virtual Console.

First I'll list all the random rings. They come in five different tiers.

Tier 1:

• Cursed Ring
• Blue Luck Ring*
• Green Holy Ring*
• Blue Holy Ring*
• Red Holy Ring*
• Octo Ring*
• Moblin Ring*
• Like Like Ring*

Tier 2:

• Maple's Ring
• Toss Ring*
• Roc's Ring
• Quicksand Ring*
• Red Luck Ring*
• Whisp Ring
• Zora Ring
• Fist Ring

Tier 3:

• Power Ring L-2*
• Heart Ring L-2
• Red Joy Ring
• Gasha Ring
• Peace Ring
• Whimsical Ring*
• Protection Ring*

Tier 4:

• Expert's Ring
• Charge Ring
• First Gen Ring
• Bombproof Ring*
• Energy Ring
• Dbl. Edged Ring

Tier 5:

• Green Ring
• Rang Ring L-2

The rings marked with * can also be gotten from fixed places, like a chest or in a minigame.

Now I will list the sources for the random ring a long with their offered tiers in square brackets. The Gasha Spots are listed in the order, how you normally would get access to them (this order can be broken though).

Maple [2-3]
Chest Game (3 consecutive chests) [1]
Chest Game (4 consecutive chests) [2]
Chest Game (5 consecutive chests) [3]


Oracle of Ages Gasha Spots:

• Lynna Village, toilet house [1-2]
• Yoll Graveyard [2-4]
• Talus Peaks (past), east of Restoration Wall [2-4]
• South Shore (past) [1-2]
• Crescent Island (present), on the hill [2-4]
• Crescent Island (present), small island in the northeast [2-4]
• Crescent Island (past), One Eyed Tokay Statue [3-5]
• Nuun Highlands [2-4]
• Fairies' Woods [1-2]
• Rolling Ridge Base (past) [1-3]
• Rolling Ridge (past) [1-3]
• Rolling Ridge (present), south of Target Carts [1-3]
• Talus Peaks (past) [1-2]
• Talus Peaks (present) [1-3]
• Zora Village (past) [2-4]
• Sea of Storms (present), Linked Game only [3-5]

Note how certain early spots like Yoll Graveyard yield good results, while certain hard to reach spots like at Talus Peaks are pretty bad. The best spot in the game is definitely the one in front of the One Eyed Tokay statue in the past. You can reach this spot with your raft right after Level 3, so you have early access to it in the game. You can get the very useful Green Ring even before Level 4!


Oracle of Seasons Gasha Spots:

• Horon Village. at Mayor's house [1-2]
• North Horon, at Impa's house [1-2]
• Woods of Winter [1-2]
• Temple Remains, entrance [1-3]
• Holodrum Plain, riverside [1-3]
• Spool Swamp, floodgate [1-2]
• Spool Swamp, southeast corner [1-3]
• Eyeglass Lake [2-4]
• Sunken Village [1-2]
• Holodrum Plain, small island [1-3]
• Goron Mountain, east of Temple Remains [3-5]
• Mt. Cucco base [1-2]
• Mt. Cucco (fall), by the Flying Rooster [2-4]
• Tarm Ruins [3-5]
• Samasa Desert [1-3]
• Western Coast [1-2]

Yes, the last spot, which you can find in the game, is not better than the ones in the beginning... The best spot is at Tarm Ruins. Easy to access (there's a warp point right next to it) and best results. Before you get there you can use the hidden spot next to the lower entrance to Goron Mountain. But it's hard to navigate there. However, if you've gotton Dimitri's Flute you can get there even before Level 3.

To get the Piece of Heart from a Gasha Nut, you need a spot, that offers level 4 or 5. And as you can see, in both games there are only two spots available for the Green Ring and the Rang Ring L-2.

Killing more enemies yields different (eventually better) results. Normally a tree grows after 20 killed beasts, the Gasha Nut after 40. If you wear the Gasha Ring those values are halfed, so the Nut will grow after 20 kills.


I hope this helps. I plan to write a full ring guide in the near future.

Zelda II and a Remake

What's Miyamoto's worst game? Wii Music? Super Mario Sunshine? Apparently it's Zelda II - The Adventure of Link... Miyamoto talked with Kotaku about why he's unhappy with how this very special game turned out. Here are some quotes:

"So one thing, of course, is, from a hardware perspective, if we had been able to have the switch between the scenes speed up, if that had been faster, we could have done more with how we used the sidescrolling vs. the overhead [view] and kind of the interchange between the two. But, because of the limitations on how quickly those scenes changed, we weren't able to."

"The other thing is it would have been nice to have had bigger enemies in the game, but the Famicom/NES hardware wasn't capable of doing that. Certainly, with hardware nowadays you can do that and we have done that, but of course nowadays creating bigger enemies takes a lot of effort."

Does this smell like remake to you? It certainly does. Usually Nintendo justifies their remakes and remastered versions of Zelda games with hardware limitations or because there were things, they weren't able to do the first time. On the GameCube they had trouble loading the islands, which on the Wii U can now be done all at once, so here comes The Wind Waker HD... Aonuma wants to fix the Water Temple, so here we go with Ocarina of Time 3D...

But actually I could imagine that a remake of Zelda II could turn into something amazing. Note that I'm saying "remake" as in real remake. Not just new graphics, but everything better.

(Artwork from ReddFloxy)

There's a lot of potential in this format. One of the biggest flaws of Zelda II for me personally was the lack of items. The enemies all get to use boomerangs, bombs and similar, while Link only has sword and shield. It's part of the challenge for sure, but also the reason why the game could feel frustrating at times. Adding items to the game would bring the combat to the next level. Using bow, bombs and boomerang could be a lot of fun and make you feel more badass.

While they fully employ the switch of between an overhead view map and the side scrolling perspective, they could add later traditional Zelda elements such as treasure chests, collectibles and similar. I would love to explore the vast world of Northern Hyrule in greater detail. The world of Zelda II is massive and exciting.

The game should remain challenging, but naturally it will become easier with various improvements that later became standard in the series. Like being able to save everywhere. Or not getting a Game Over from falling to your death. That way it could be more inviding for people, who struggled with the original game on the NES. They might give this one a try.

Oh, yeah, and the music! This game has simply some of the best music pieces in the entire series. Orchestral versions would rock (too bad that the Symphony of the Goddesses only featured one song of the game...)

Of course that's something for further down the road. With Ocarina of Time 3D, Four Swords AE, The Wind Waker HD, A Link Between Worlds and a potential Majora's Mask 3D Nintendo has re-explored many old Zelda worlds lately. Right now Zelda needs new worlds. But some day in the future such a remake could work.

Retro, Tingle and the Curse of Conversion

A Zelda game made by Retro Studios. That's certainly something many Zelda fans dreamt about, but was denied by Miyamoto, because he didn't want to outsource Zelda. But they can still mock the Zelda fans by letting Retro make the third Tingle game. I'm not kidding here.

Say "hello" to Kensuke Tanabe. He's the producer of all the Retro Studio and Vanpool titles. In case you don't know, Retro Studios made such great games as the Metroid Prime Trilogy (simply one of my favorites) and the latest Donkey Kong Country games, currently working on Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Vanpool are the guys, who made the Tingle games including Rupeeland. Later they had invented the Dillon franchise.

In an interview with VentureBeat Tanabe admitted his obsession with Tingle. Even though the character is hated in the West, he still thinks that this can be changed, turn the hate into love, by making yet another Tingle game. And the head of Retro Studios even jokes that they could make that game. Of course this all wasn't really serious and Tanabe explains that's just some crazy idea from himself and not Nintendo, but still I could see this happening, no matter how ludicrous it might seem.

As of late Nintendo has a problem. When some of their products gets rejected, they think it's not because the people simply didn't like it or because the product was bad, but because the people didn't understand it properly. The Wii U is great, people just don't understand it! - That's Nintendo's statement. The Wind Waker's art style was great for Zelda, people just didn't understand it. - That's Aonuma's statement and the reason, why they keep making more Toon Zelda, even though the Wind Waker received a lot of hate and Twilight Princess outsold comic-look Zelda big time. And you can certainly expect Nintendo to make Metroid: Other M 2, just because they think the first game wasn't understood properly. ... That Tanabe wants to sell more Tingle just fits the whole profile.

And maybe his vision would come true... Most likely not, but if I said it would be impossible to convert the people to like Tingle, I would be a hypocrite. Because I got converted myself. Two times actually. One time with the Wind Waker and later with Tingle.

I'm not hostile towards the Wind Waker anymore, but I used to be when the game came out. I was 16 years old, so everything had to be cool and there's no way that I would buy that weird GameCube with the kiddy Zelda. Three years later at the German army, a comrade had a GameCube with the Zelda Collector's Edition, where I helped him with Majora's Mask. Of course I was curious about the Wind Waker demo and I gave it a try. And I liked it. The game was really charming and I loved, how dark and atmospheric the Forsaken Fortress and Dragon Roost Cavern dungeons looked despite the toon style. Windfall Island was great and probably my favorite town in the series. I would later get my own GameCube with the Wind Waker that year (though Twilight Princess at the horizon was the main reason to get the system). I got converted.

With Tingle it was similar. At first I hated him. Especially in Majora's Mask. As a young lad I considered him to be the one and only flaw of the game. I wished he wasn't in there. In the Wind Waker I thought he was more funny, even though he rips you off badly, but I never had problems with collecting enough Rupees. I still hated him for the Tingle Tuner, which simply was a terribly implemented feature and gave him more attention than he should have. Then one day I would win Tingle's Rupeeland in an online quiz game. At first I didn't want to touch this abomination of a game, but when I started playing it, I noticed the similar Action Adventure gameplay and that the game had a lot of charme. While this game is far from perfect, I really liked it for what it is. It made me stop hating Tingle and appreciate the weird sense of humor surrounding him.

So, mission successful, Tanabe! I got converted. But I'm an exception. In both cases I got my hands on the games by coincident (or you could say "fate"). If you're unwilling to buy something, no marketing will change that. You can't force people to buy Tingle games, if they hate Tingle. Tingle's Rupeeland sold poorly, it didn't change much about Tingle's reception. And yet another Tingle game won't change this, especially one made by Retro - in that case you would just make the Zelda fans furious.

Also, just because I grew to like the Wind Waker and Tingle, doesn't mean I want more Wind Waker and Tingle. I learned to like them for what they are in the Zelda series, but I don't really want more. I originally rejected both for a reason and that's never going to change. Nintendo won't change this, no matter how many Toon Zelda and Tingle games they'll keep making.


This behavior on Nintendo's site is very unhealthy. They should stop chasing ghosts and focus on what the people really want from games like Zelda. Instead they try to manipulate you into liking something that you hated.

GREZZO made StreetPass Garden

Today there's an update for the StreetPass Mii Plaza, that potentially kills the application and also SELLS you four new StreetPass games. I personally haven't bothered with StreetPass until after the Symphony of the Goddesses concert, where I had to learn that you can only collect 10 people at max... So, it's all pretty new for me and four games being added seems a little deterrend for me personally. Especially since they cost money.

What striked me was the fact that one of the four new games, StreetPass Garden, was made by GREZZO (source). You know, the guys who made Ocarina of Time 3D and the Four Swords Anniversary Edition.

This is sad news. I thought that Nintendo had them made the Zelda remakes, so they would gather experience with Zelda to potentially work on future Zelda side projects. I thought they might be helping with A Link Between Worlds.

But instead of let's say... pimping the Oracle games, Nintendo made them develop a gay garden "simulator". What a waste.

This also means less man power for Zelda. Hopefully they will return to Zelda now and start working on Majora's Mask 3D.

Some Improvements to Hyrule Blog

Looks like I'm using this blog more often right now and I guess this will continue, since we have a couple of new Zelda releases waiting for us.

I used this opportunity to make some long overdue improvements. The first thing you will notice that I finally changed the background a little bit more into what I always had in mind with it. Namely this original TLoZ artwork:

It's a little bit dark now at the sides. Maybe I'll find a better color later on. Or some texture.

Next change was moving the label widget down to the lowest point in the side menu. It has gotten very long and kept getting in the way of the Blog Archive. Also, a lot of posts are not labeled correctly, I have forgotten to use some minor labels such as "Zelda News", I really need to go through all the posts and label them correctly at some time. Maybe I will remove some labels entirely. It's bad that you can't collapse the label widget, it would make things less bloated. So, the labels are at the bottom for now.

Instead I decided to expand the hot buttons. I added buttons for more recent games, which includes the Oracle of Ages & Seasons (which have been re-released on VC), the Wind Waker (which is getting an HD port on the Wii U) and A Link Between Worlds (the next 3DS Zelda game). All three games have been an important part of my posts lately, so their buttons are definitely justified. I have also replaced the 25th Anniversary button with a button for the BS Zelda games, since the anniversary stuff feels outdated and the BS Zelda games were always an interesting and curious part of the blog. And there's now a search bar, where the labels used to be. So, if you want to find something quick, you can use that.

I know, it's not much. Baby steps. I'm still very lazy with this, but keep in mind that it's about the posts, not the design.