Thursday, February 2, 2012

Oracle of Ages and Seasons: Rings at Chest Game

I'm currently revising various guides for ZeldaEurope before the site gets relaunched somewhen later this year. Usually quests and sidequests in Zelda are pretty simple, so the guides are easy to correct. But with the guide for the Magic Rings in the Oracle games I stumbled over a sidequest, which is a science on its own. The only other games to use random mechanics are the ones on the Nintendo DS, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. But while the ship parts and treasures are gotten randomly, it all follows simple patterns. Not so with the rings in the Oracle games. Some rings can only be gotten in one place. Those are the easy ones to describe. Others may have fixed places, but can also be gotten randomly. Others can only be gotten from sources for random rings. These sources can be Maple, Gasha Nuts, minigames, Fortune Links and other places. However, it's not as simple as in the Nintendo DS games, where you have a giant pool of random items. Only in certain minigames you can win certain rings. Only soil patches found later in the game may produce very rare rings like the Green Ring. And so on. There are many different rules here.

I'm still not entirely sure what gives what. And there's no site or guide on the internet, which really deals with all of this in detail. Usually the guides just say "you can find this ring randomly", but it's not as simple as that. So, I started a little research in order to create the bets fucking Magic Ring guide out there yet. One thing I've already covered is the Treasure Chest Game in the Horon and Lynna Secret Shops.


To play the game you have to pay 10 Rupees. There's a 50% chance to pick the right chest, you can win a ring for opening three, four or five chests in a row. I used an emulator and quick saving to make sure to win as many rings as possible in all three categories. This is what I've got:

Three consecutive chests: Cursed Ring x4, Blue Luck Ring x7, Green Holy Ring x6, Blue Holy Ring x3, Red Holy Ring x6, Octo Ring x4, Moblin Ring x5, Like Like Ring x9

Four consecutive chests: Maple's Ring x4, Toss Ring x5, Red Luck Ring x2, Roc's Ring x6, Quicksand Ring x5, Whisp Ring x7, Zora Ring x4, Fist Ring x3

Five consecutive chests: Power Ring L-2 x8, Heart Ring L-2 x6, Red Joy Ring x5, Peace Ring x13, Gasha Ring x7, Whimsical Ring x6, Protection Ring x5

It doesn't matter, whether you play the game in Oracle of Seasons or Ages. The rings are the same. But I'd say this is not a very reliable source if you're looking for a specific ring. Also, it's hard to win the game, you will waste a lot of Rupees unless you're very lucky.

Update: On the Virtual Console you can use Restore Points for this game. Just create one before picking the first chest. The order of the chests is determined before the game, so the one Restore Point at the beginning is good enough, just remember the chests. It's a very good way of getting the rare Heart Ring L-2 and some other useful rings. Also, the results correspondent to the first three tiers of random rings. So, you can also use Gasha Trees to get them all.


By the way in the Lynna Shooting Gallery you can win the Blue Holy Ring, the Red Luck Ring, the Octo-Ring and the Light Ring L-2 by scoring 350 points or more. For the latter this is the ONLY way to win the ring. It gets even worse with the Bomber's Ring, that can only be gotten from a perfect core at the Platinum level in the aweful Goron Dance minigame.

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