2.5/5 ★ – Onahx's review of The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons.

The Oracle games are easily the most overlooked Zelda games and there’s definitely a reason why. It’s not that either game is necessarily bad, but I also wouldn’t call them up to the gold standard of the rest of the franchise. Oracle of Seasons definitely suffers far more from the elements that hold back both games. These two games started off life as a remake of the first Zelda before becoming their own thing, with Seasons being more action oriented and Ages being more puzzle oriented. Seasons is also the one that’s more obvious about originally being a Zelda 1 remake. I really have no idea why Capcom felt like they needed to make an entirely new engine instead of using LA’s. The gameplay just isn’t as tight here and with the combat difficulty being intentionally cracked up for Oracle of Seasons the later half of the game can get extremely frustrating at times. In particular, the invincibility frames here are SO short. Enemies can knock down your health insanely fast simply because you have so little time to recover. You combine this with the fact that you have to continually pause the game to equip items (a problem the original LA had too) and you have a recipe for a real slog of a game at times. Anyways, I’m making this game sound awful when it’s truly just kinda mid. The world is full of very fun characters and the season changing is an engaging way interact with Holodrum, the new land Link has found. Subrosia is also a charming little underworld that’s very memorable. And the ways the two worlds interact with each other the further you get into the game are very fun. The game’s final dungeon, Sword & Shield Maze, is fantastic and leaves you with a good taste in your mouth at the end. The animal buddies are also unique and fun to explore with! All this to say, Oracle of Seasons has a lot of great ideas, but they all just get so held back by the limitations of the Gameboy and the unfortunately wack new engine. It kinda feels like if a Zelda knockoff were an actual Zelda game. It’s not terrible, but honestly you just have so many better choices within this series, including Oracle of Ages, this game’s twin. Would love to see a remake of these games one day as I feel like it could solve a lot of the issues found here but I’m not holding my breath for that.