I got this one, along with its prequel-sequel (co-quel?) Oracle of Ages during a Nintendo eShop sale about a month ago. It was a fairly standard old-school top-down Zelda adventure. The central gameplay gimmick here is the appropriately named Rod of Seasons, an item that allows you to control which of the four seasons it is at any given time. This allows you to reach different locations at different times, the staple of any top-down Zelda game. For instance, depending on what season it is, you can cross frozen bodies of water, pick mushrooms, avoid piled up snowbanks, and climb vines up onto new rock ledge platforms.
A fine gimmick for an old game. But did Oracle of Seasons hold up as a solid experience 14 years later? Eh, not really. There was an annoying amount of backtracking and a less-than-streamlined way to equip and use items. Granted, the whole game took all of a dozen hours or so and had its moments, but this is easily one of the least essential Legend of Zelda games I've ever played. And I expected that much going in, really. The dungeons felt just a little too similar and long-running for me to enjoy or differentiate them. That's fine - Seasons is allegedly the more combat-oriented game in the Oracle duology, and I still get to look forward to the reportedly more puzzle-centric Ages. Ultimately, I appreciated the way the overworld in this game was designed - every corner of it made with the season-changing gimmick in mind - but the dungeons and bosses themselves, the core elements of any great Zelda game, left me a little underwhelmed.
This and Oracle of Ages were my first real Zelda games that I played through on my own so I'll probably always like them a little more than most, but for what it's worth I remember liking Ages a lot better. I thought the past/present gimmick worked better than switching between four seasons (makes sense- they had just done this in Ocarina of Time) and there were a couple levels towards the end that seemed much more interesting to explore than what Seasons had to offer.
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