The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages - Development

Development

In early 1999, Yoshiki Okamoto, then head of Capcom's screenwriter subsidiary Flagship, proposed his idea of remaking the original The Legend of Zelda for the Game Boy Color to Shigeru Miyamoto, the game designer at Nintendo who created the series. As his offer was declined, Okamoto threatened Miyamoto with creating an identical competitive product with a new title and different characters, and was eventually asked to develop six Zelda games for the Game Boy Color: two based on earlier installments and four original entries into the series. Okamoto wanted to release them in quick succession of four to five months, and held on to his concept of bringing the first game to the handheld console to make young children experience the merits of the original Zelda, but also as a test for the development team to move on to a more ambitious sequel if it turned out to be successful.

Contrary to Miyamoto's design mentality of creating the gameplay system first, development started out with the scenario writing, which Flagship was in charge of. Some of the staff members, the team led by director and designer Hidemaro Fujibayashi that was responsible for tasks other than the storyline, wanted to skip the remake and create an original Zelda title right away. As the first installment in the series was deemed too difficult for the new generation of players, more and more changes were applied to the point where it had an entirely different world map. As a result, the team ran into problems because the scenario and the maps had to be reworked constantly to make all the modifications match. The Game Boy Color's screen presented an additional hurdle when attempting to rework the earlier Zelda title as it is narrower than that of a television; players could not view an entire room without scrolling which made it easy to overlook stairways or clues on walls.

Dismayed by the rate at which the team had been spending money for a year without results, Okamoto asked Miyamoto for help, who then came up with the idea of a whole trilogy of games, each with a different focus on gameplay elements. This trilogy was referred to as the "Triforce Series", named after a fictional holy relic known as the Triforce that plays a major role in many Zelda titles. The Triforce is composed of three parts: the Triforces of Power, Wisdom, and Courage; each game in the trilogy was to be associated with a piece of the Triforce, one of the titles being the conversion of the original The Legend of Zelda. The first game of the three was demonstrated at Nintendo's SpaceWorld trade show in 1999, under the working title Zelda no Densetsu: Fushigina Kinomi – Chikara no Shō. This action-oriented game concerned Ganon's theft of Princess Zelda and the "Rod of the Seasons", which threw the seasons of Hyrule into chaos—a precursor to the plot of Oracle of Seasons. In the playable demonstration, Link solved puzzles by using the Rod of the Seasons to manipulate the environment and change the current season. Chie no Shō, which focused on color-based puzzles, and Yūki no Shō, which used the times of day to solve puzzles in a mechanic similar to the use of seasons, were not shown. In the US, the games became The Legend of Zelda: Mystical Seed of Power, Mystical Seed of Wisdom, and Mystical Seed of Courage.

The games interacted with each other: players could begin with any of the three titles and have the actions of the first game affect the story of the other two, a concept conceived by Okamoto. More than ten of Flagship's scenarists, among them Resident Evil writer Junichi Miyashita, worked simultaneously on the three stories. The developers considered using a cell phone adapter to transfer data, but later decided on a password system. The limitations of this system and the difficulty of coordinating three games proved too complicated, so the team scaled back to two titles at Miyamoto's suggestion. Condensing the games into a single cartridge was never considered, as the prospect of multiple endings and the added replay value afforded by the ability to play the titles in either order was very attractive. Oracle of Seasons was adapted from Mystical Seed of Power, Oracle of Ages was adapted from Mystical Seed of Wisdom, and Mystical Seed of Courage was canceled.

These sweeping design changes pushed the release dates closer to the upcoming release of the Game Boy Advance (GBA), the next system in the Game Boy line that is backward compatible with Game Boy Color games. The team considered adding special functionality to the game triggered only when played on a GBA, but was afraid that the additional development time required for the addition would cause the games to be released after the GBA. When the release date of the GBA was postponed, the team was able to incorporate GBA functionality and still release the games approximately a month before the GBA was released. Staggered releases were abandoned in favor of releasing the two games simultaneously. This made it easier for the team to test the interaction between the games and keep the style consistent. Each title was shipped on an 8-megabit cartridge. The music for the games was composed by two employees of the Japanese music and sound effect production company Pure Sound, credited under the pseudonyms "M-Adachi" and "Kyopi". Nintendo artist and series regular Yusuke Nakano designed the characters for the two titles, and incorporated previous creations from Ocarina of Time into Oracle of Seasons and characters from Majora's Mask into Oracle of Ages.