Game Review: ゼルダの伝説：ふしぎの木の実 -時空の章-
2017-Jul-13, Thursday 21:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I was originally planning to play both Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages together and then write a joint review because I wasn't sure there was enough difference between them to warrant separate treatments. Obviously, now I know that's wrong. They have the same premise, where Link is tested by the Triforce and dumped into a land that may or may not really exist, but beyond that and the basic gameplay conceits of the Legend of Zelda series nearly everything is different. Oracle of Seasons focused on combat and the end result was mostly a disappointment for me, but Oracle of Ages focused on puzzles and that was a much better choice for the format. If I had played this game first and then played Seasons, I might have been happier overall. This is definitely my favorite of the two.
The Japanese title is fushigi no kinomi -jikū no shō-, "The Mysterious Seed -Time-Space Chapter-".
In Seasons Din was kidnapped, and this time it's Nayru, the Miko of Time, but instead of being kidnapped she's possessed by Beran. Beran uses her powers to throw the land of Labrynna into chaos and then travel into the past, where she plans to influence Queen Anbi into building a monument to her eternal glory that Beran can coincidentally use to plunge Labrynna, and eventually Hyrule, into eternal lamentations. Queen Anbi somehow thinks this is good idea, but she's not portrayed sympathetically, to say the least. She's happy with "Nayru"'s help because she's stopped time so that the villagers don't have to sleep or take breaks and can work unceasingly on her tower, which is called the Tower of Darkness (暗黒の塔, ankoku no to), and which Google also tells me is that Japanese name of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.
Since I played in a linked game, putting in my Oracle of Seasons password when starting the game, there's an additional element. The very beginning, even before Link was pulled into Labrynna, was a brief cutscene of Twinrova, the Gerudo sorceresses who served Ganondorf. They talked about their plot to to use the Flame of Destruction (滅びの炎, horobi no honoo) lit by Gorgon in Oracle of Season as part of the plot to resurrect Ganon, and they show up here and during the plot of Oracle of Ages. They mention the Flame of Lamentation (嘆きの炎, nageki no honoo) lit by Beran, cackle about their evil plot, and finally become the penultimate boss. You know who the final boss is.
Part of me wishes there had been a bit more explanation of exactly how Twinrova's plan was going to work, but that's a dangerous wish. The Zelda games are better at moment-to-moment gameplay and character interactions than they are about story. All I really need to know is that Labrynna is in danger and Link needs to save it. I can make the assocaitons between the Triforce and the flames myself without the game telling me.
...courage = lamentation? Power = destruction? Wisdom = despair?
Whereas the main puzzle mechanic in Oracle of Seasons was the changing of seasons, in Oracle of Ages it's switching between the present and past, called 今 (ima, "now") and 昔 (mukashi, "long ago") in the game. At first this only occurs at designated points, but Link quickly expands his capabilities to being able to return to the present from any area in the past, and then being able to jump back and forth wherever he wants. The puzzles thus involve manipulating time in order to solve problems in the present, getting items in the past that are broken or have disappeared, and otherwise manipulating time itself in order to open doors and push blocks around.
This was fantastic. My biggest problem with the time travel in Ocarina of Time is that it doesn't actually feel like it matters. The necessity to return to the Temple of Time means that there's no way to really make small changes in the landscape and swap back and forth between times, whereas that happens constantly in Oracle of Ages. One of the first time puzzles involves the death of the Maka Tree, Labrynna's guardian spirit, until you go back in time and kill the monsters attacking her. When he returns to the present, she is tall and healthy once more, though having lost her memory. That becomes the main quest as Link goes into eight dungeons, fights bosses, and finds the memories of the sea, the sky, the earth, the seasons, and so on to restore the power of the Maka Tree.
One corner of the map is a lava-strewn ruin until you time travel back and save it by restoring the one element that was out of place. It's the Village of Symmetry, you see, and none of the inhabitants could move to go search for the solution for fear of ruining the village's perfect layout. There's a cursed fairy queen and a book with the way to save her, but the fairy queen is in the past and the book is in the present. There are lizard people called the Tokage (from 蜥蜴, "lizard") who love the scent seeds--yes, seeds return as a mechanic--but have no source of them because the tree requires centuries to grow. Well, that's not a problem here. Once you get the seed, just go back in time and plant it. The Tokage tend the tree and when Link returns to the present, the scent seeds are in full bloom.
Because of this, there was a much greater sense that my actions had consequences. Ocarina of Time almost seemed like two separate worlds that just happened to look very similar. In Oracle of Ages, there's an obvious connection between the past and the present in the way that the earlier game simply wasn't able to portray.
Only one dungeon uses time travel as a mechanic, requiring two keys and for Link to go to the past when his progress in the present has been blocked in order to find a key item, but I think that's good for my mental health. As befitting a game focused on puzzles, the dungeons were labyrinthine and required a lot of backtracking, flipping switches, going up and down floors, and manipulating blocks. If I had to go between the past and present, shoving blocks in the past so they were in a different location in the present, I would have lost my mind. I already spent a lot of time on Zeldadungeon.net trying to puzzle out where exactly I had to stand to save time from jumping back and forth between time zones. Having to manipulate two dungeons simultaneously would have been madness, and I suspect that's why they only required travel between two versions of the same dungeon once and still kept them as unconnected spaces.
As I mentioned, seeds still exist in Oracle of Ages, but despite the opportunities for puzzle design they're consistently underutilized. The main usage of seeds is through the seed shooter, which bounces seeds off walls into switches, but the specific seed almost never matters. There's one puzzle that requires a scent seed so that a bunch of otherwise-inaccessible monsters will run into a cliff, and another puzzle that is easier with gale seeds than with flame ones, but that's all that matters.
There are rings as well, but after seeing how they worked in Oracle of Seasons, I mostly ignored them. Relatively early on I found a ring that made Link immune to Zora fireballs and I wore that for the rest of the game.
Most of the other items are the same, though Ages lacks some specific upgrades like the Roc Bird's Cape. The item that stands out the most is the Substitution Hook (and later, the Long Substitution Hook), which is similar to the hookshot from the earlier games except instead of pulling Link to a distant target, it swaps Link with the target. This breaks pots, but there are octahedral stones scattered throughout Labrynna that serve as the means for puzzle-solving. This was probably the most fun I had playing the game, especially with complicated sequences of swapping octahedrons around to place them on multiple switches or create a certain shape. Or in one case, moving a boss so that its own projectiles hurt it as it swapped colors, like an 8-bit Ikaruga.
The Cane of Somaria also makes a triumphant return from A Link to the Past, but as there, its main use is creating blocks to press switches or shove to make sure Link doesn't fall into a pit. It was fun to see, but it got just as much use now as it did then. Which is to say, very little.
While it shaped the plot, I didn't make much use of the other features of a linked game. There are people scattered through Labrynna who offer Link a special password and a counterpart in Holodrum to tell it to. Booting up Oracle of Seasons and doing so provides an upgrade, as well as a password to bring that upgrade back to Oracle of Seasons. I did that once, to get the third level of sword upgrade so I could have the Master Sword. There are a bunch of other upgrades available, like the mirror shield, another seed-bag upgrade, another heart container, but I'm not a completionist in Zelda games. I don't need to get every last heart fragment. So I got the sword and moved on.
I did appreciate the cameos from Seasons characters, though. In addition to the screenshot above, there's dialogue elsewhere of a goron wondering who these weird people in the robes are, Peck and Ramin and their son show up--in my game, he was a massive introvert who ran from Link--and Kāno the ring merchant remembers Link and seems to be the same person. But other than that, I played a linked game to fight Ganon, not to collect all 64 rings.
After the disappointments of Oracle of Seasons, I thought that Oracle of Ages would be adequate but not great. I was wrong. It turns out that that the two-button Game Boy Color format is a lot better at delivering a satisfying puzzle experience than a hardcore combat simulator, and the time travel focus of Oracle of Ages was a more interesting structure for those puzzles than the four seasons of Oracle of Seasons. As I said at the beginning of this review, I should have played Ages first and then Seasons. The cameos in Seasons would have made me feel more kindly toward it, whereas I think Ages can better stand on its own. There's no fat here, just a fun puzzle Zelda experience. I missed out by not playing this game until now.
⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index
The Japanese title is fushigi no kinomi -jikū no shō-, "The Mysterious Seed -Time-Space Chapter-".
"Quiet! I can't hear Nayru's song!"
In Seasons Din was kidnapped, and this time it's Nayru, the Miko of Time, but instead of being kidnapped she's possessed by Beran. Beran uses her powers to throw the land of Labrynna into chaos and then travel into the past, where she plans to influence Queen Anbi into building a monument to her eternal glory that Beran can coincidentally use to plunge Labrynna, and eventually Hyrule, into eternal lamentations. Queen Anbi somehow thinks this is good idea, but she's not portrayed sympathetically, to say the least. She's happy with "Nayru"'s help because she's stopped time so that the villagers don't have to sleep or take breaks and can work unceasingly on her tower, which is called the Tower of Darkness (暗黒の塔, ankoku no to), and which Google also tells me is that Japanese name of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.
Since I played in a linked game, putting in my Oracle of Seasons password when starting the game, there's an additional element. The very beginning, even before Link was pulled into Labrynna, was a brief cutscene of Twinrova, the Gerudo sorceresses who served Ganondorf. They talked about their plot to to use the Flame of Destruction (滅びの炎, horobi no honoo) lit by Gorgon in Oracle of Season as part of the plot to resurrect Ganon, and they show up here and during the plot of Oracle of Ages. They mention the Flame of Lamentation (嘆きの炎, nageki no honoo) lit by Beran, cackle about their evil plot, and finally become the penultimate boss. You know who the final boss is.
Part of me wishes there had been a bit more explanation of exactly how Twinrova's plan was going to work, but that's a dangerous wish. The Zelda games are better at moment-to-moment gameplay and character interactions than they are about story. All I really need to know is that Labrynna is in danger and Link needs to save it. I can make the assocaitons between the Triforce and the flames myself without the game telling me.
...courage = lamentation? Power = destruction? Wisdom = despair?
"The islands around here seem like they're moving west little by little."
Whereas the main puzzle mechanic in Oracle of Seasons was the changing of seasons, in Oracle of Ages it's switching between the present and past, called 今 (ima, "now") and 昔 (mukashi, "long ago") in the game. At first this only occurs at designated points, but Link quickly expands his capabilities to being able to return to the present from any area in the past, and then being able to jump back and forth wherever he wants. The puzzles thus involve manipulating time in order to solve problems in the present, getting items in the past that are broken or have disappeared, and otherwise manipulating time itself in order to open doors and push blocks around.
This was fantastic. My biggest problem with the time travel in Ocarina of Time is that it doesn't actually feel like it matters. The necessity to return to the Temple of Time means that there's no way to really make small changes in the landscape and swap back and forth between times, whereas that happens constantly in Oracle of Ages. One of the first time puzzles involves the death of the Maka Tree, Labrynna's guardian spirit, until you go back in time and kill the monsters attacking her. When he returns to the present, she is tall and healthy once more, though having lost her memory. That becomes the main quest as Link goes into eight dungeons, fights bosses, and finds the memories of the sea, the sky, the earth, the seasons, and so on to restore the power of the Maka Tree.
This was a volcano before Link meddled with time and space.
One corner of the map is a lava-strewn ruin until you time travel back and save it by restoring the one element that was out of place. It's the Village of Symmetry, you see, and none of the inhabitants could move to go search for the solution for fear of ruining the village's perfect layout. There's a cursed fairy queen and a book with the way to save her, but the fairy queen is in the past and the book is in the present. There are lizard people called the Tokage (from 蜥蜴, "lizard") who love the scent seeds--yes, seeds return as a mechanic--but have no source of them because the tree requires centuries to grow. Well, that's not a problem here. Once you get the seed, just go back in time and plant it. The Tokage tend the tree and when Link returns to the present, the scent seeds are in full bloom.
Because of this, there was a much greater sense that my actions had consequences. Ocarina of Time almost seemed like two separate worlds that just happened to look very similar. In Oracle of Ages, there's an obvious connection between the past and the present in the way that the earlier game simply wasn't able to portray.
Only one dungeon uses time travel as a mechanic, requiring two keys and for Link to go to the past when his progress in the present has been blocked in order to find a key item, but I think that's good for my mental health. As befitting a game focused on puzzles, the dungeons were labyrinthine and required a lot of backtracking, flipping switches, going up and down floors, and manipulating blocks. If I had to go between the past and present, shoving blocks in the past so they were in a different location in the present, I would have lost my mind. I already spent a lot of time on Zeldadungeon.net trying to puzzle out where exactly I had to stand to save time from jumping back and forth between time zones. Having to manipulate two dungeons simultaneously would have been madness, and I suspect that's why they only required travel between two versions of the same dungeon once and still kept them as unconnected spaces.
Boing.
As I mentioned, seeds still exist in Oracle of Ages, but despite the opportunities for puzzle design they're consistently underutilized. The main usage of seeds is through the seed shooter, which bounces seeds off walls into switches, but the specific seed almost never matters. There's one puzzle that requires a scent seed so that a bunch of otherwise-inaccessible monsters will run into a cliff, and another puzzle that is easier with gale seeds than with flame ones, but that's all that matters.
There are rings as well, but after seeing how they worked in Oracle of Seasons, I mostly ignored them. Relatively early on I found a ring that made Link immune to Zora fireballs and I wore that for the rest of the game.
Most of the other items are the same, though Ages lacks some specific upgrades like the Roc Bird's Cape. The item that stands out the most is the Substitution Hook (and later, the Long Substitution Hook), which is similar to the hookshot from the earlier games except instead of pulling Link to a distant target, it swaps Link with the target. This breaks pots, but there are octahedral stones scattered throughout Labrynna that serve as the means for puzzle-solving. This was probably the most fun I had playing the game, especially with complicated sequences of swapping octahedrons around to place them on multiple switches or create a certain shape. Or in one case, moving a boss so that its own projectiles hurt it as it swapped colors, like an 8-bit Ikaruga.
The Cane of Somaria also makes a triumphant return from A Link to the Past, but as there, its main use is creating blocks to press switches or shove to make sure Link doesn't fall into a pit. It was fun to see, but it got just as much use now as it did then. Which is to say, very little.
"But the Ura dance is still more stylish."
While it shaped the plot, I didn't make much use of the other features of a linked game. There are people scattered through Labrynna who offer Link a special password and a counterpart in Holodrum to tell it to. Booting up Oracle of Seasons and doing so provides an upgrade, as well as a password to bring that upgrade back to Oracle of Seasons. I did that once, to get the third level of sword upgrade so I could have the Master Sword. There are a bunch of other upgrades available, like the mirror shield, another seed-bag upgrade, another heart container, but I'm not a completionist in Zelda games. I don't need to get every last heart fragment. So I got the sword and moved on.
I did appreciate the cameos from Seasons characters, though. In addition to the screenshot above, there's dialogue elsewhere of a goron wondering who these weird people in the robes are, Peck and Ramin and their son show up--in my game, he was a massive introvert who ran from Link--and Kāno the ring merchant remembers Link and seems to be the same person. But other than that, I played a linked game to fight Ganon, not to collect all 64 rings.
The Concert of Ages.
After the disappointments of Oracle of Seasons, I thought that Oracle of Ages would be adequate but not great. I was wrong. It turns out that that the two-button Game Boy Color format is a lot better at delivering a satisfying puzzle experience than a hardcore combat simulator, and the time travel focus of Oracle of Ages was a more interesting structure for those puzzles than the four seasons of Oracle of Seasons. As I said at the beginning of this review, I should have played Ages first and then Seasons. The cameos in Seasons would have made me feel more kindly toward it, whereas I think Ages can better stand on its own. There's no fat here, just a fun puzzle Zelda experience. I missed out by not playing this game until now.
⏮ back to Legend of Zelda reviews index
