In one of the latest updates to the perks provided by having a Nintendo Online subscription, the Legend of Zelda games Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons were added to the Game Boy Color section. As a child, I was obsessed with the dual nature of these games. They’d blown my mind by introducing the idea of transferring save data between them by putting in specially generated passcodes or by using a link cable when you started a new game. I was not quite ten when they came out and it had literlly never occurred to me that you might be able to bring something from one game into another one. While a soft continuity (some aspects of a game carrying forward into another in a way that subtly influences your experience) are still fairly common, I don’t know if I’ve played another game that is quite so drastically influenced by including data from another. Technically speaking, I’ve never played any game that is this drastically influenced because while I’ve played both games, I was never able to play them sequentially.

I played Oracle of Ages first, mostly because the game was blue and, starting with Red and Blue versions years prior, I always got the cooler tone version of any game and my brother got the warmer tone version. I have no idea why this happened, but it is true of every game with different versions from when I got my first handheld game console until I stopped getting video games from my parents in college. While we were both given our copies of the game at the same time, he finished Oracle of Seasons first and then borrowed my game to carry his save file forward. When I went to do the same, since I got less time to game than he did, he simply refused to let me borrow his game. Since I knew better than to press my luck, I decided to wait until he was bored of the games and just borrow it then, without saying anything. Unfortunately for me, my excellent plan was ruined when I finally got my copy of the game back and discovered he’d saved over every file with his game data. Undetered, I decided to play Oracle of Seasons as first this time around and was close to finally beating the game when all of my games “mysteriously” disappeared (the first time). After that, I gave up and never got around to replacing those games, even as an adult.

Now, though, as I find time that needs to be filled between other game releases or when I’m not feeling up for a bigger time committment, I pull out my switch and play through a bit of Oracle of Seasons. I’ve been slowly picking away at this game, fifteen to thirty minutes at a time, and am surprised at how different the game feels. I remember struggling to navigate the map and to figure out how to apply the various seasons so I could make forward progress. Now, the game feels laughably easy. Despite only playing this game through once, I barely even need to stop to think with each new puzzle. Sure, Seasons is oriented around action and Ages was more focused on the puzzles, but I am really feeling the change in my level of skill and analytical ability over the past twenty-ish years. Given my tendency to replay games and the period of my early twenties when I replaced and replayed most of the games that my parents had sold or that had otherwise mysteriously vanished during the years my brother always seemed to have money for stuff despite not working nearly enough, there really aren’t many other games from my youth that I haven’t at least partially replayed since then.

Seasons is a pleasant enough passtime. I’ll probably set it aside now that Sea of Stars is out and I’m hankering for a replay of Chained Echoes, but there’s something comforting about traveling this world I barely remember in hopes of finally getting to play Oracle of Ages as the radically altered sequel. There’s not a lot of games that have an entirely different villain and plot (in terms of finer details, anyway, since the major story notes of rescuing a kidnapped Oracle are still mostly the same) if you play them as the sequel rather than as the prequel. If I’ve got enough time and Nintendo doesn’t take them down for some reason, I’ll probably go through them both again, but in the reverse order. It’s not like that will be a significant time investment, even if I try to get them one hundred percent complete before I move on. Nothing wrong with a fun little distraction between all my fun big ones.