Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons: Subrosians
The website zeldafandom.wiki lists Subrosians as a “recurring species” in the Legend of Zelda universe. I take some issue with this because they have, to date, only been featured in one game: Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons. The Zoras, Gorons, and Gerudo I would argue are an actually recurring species/tribe, and even the Rito have appeared in at least three games to date. Meanwhile the Subrosians remain fixed on a single game cartridge in my memory languishing beneath the legacy of a game that only recently got ported to the Switch.
Nintendo has, in the last few months as of this writing, re-released the two part Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons and Time for their GameBoy application on the Nintendo Switch. Because my sister is the sweetheart that she is and pays for a family plan I’m able to play a game that I’m positive is one of the culprits for my youth-induced eye-strain. I played Oracle of Seasons until the batteries on my Gameboy color, and then Gameboy advance SP, were caput, and even then I would play the game practically attached to one of the many wall outlets in my home until my Mom forced me to go to bed. While not as complex as Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess, the Oracle of Seasons offered me a satisfying Legend of Zelda experience that I still remember to this day in no small part because they literally let me ride in the pouch of a kangaroo that had boxing gloves.
Literally.
A flipping kangaroo with boxing gloves.
Released for the Gameboy Color on May 13, 2001, the game was originally designed by Flagship Co, Ltd. an independent studio that had developed games such as Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and Dino Crisis 2. The game was partly begun as an effort to recreate the original Legend of Zelda published on the NES to allow a newer generation to experience the game. This plan was eventually dropped for a new idea. With the help of Shigeru Miyamoto a new trilogy, and then eventually a duology was proposed, developed, and released.
Cover for North American Release provided by The Cover Project.
I cared about rescuing Din from General Knox. I cared about finding all four seasons to add my mystical staff that would allow me to change the season atop tree stumps. I cared about defeating all of the castle bosses (though I never did) to collect the essences of the seasons. I cared about helping the people of the land of Hyrule/Not-Hyrule a.k.a. Holodrum. But if I’m being honest, I cared far more about the Subroasians.
To say that I liked Subrosians would be an understatement.
I was obsessed with them.
I spent more time in the realm of Subrosia than I did actually playing the main mission. I played the dance mini game over and over again even after I acquired the original prize. I spoke to every Subrosian that I could to learn more about their world. I can hum from memory the background theme note-for-note. I walked around every square tile of map space in the region, seeing if there was any way I could explore more before having to go to yet another temple to get some doo-dad that would let me reach a new square of the map. The only female Subroasian in the game is named Rosa and I could actually take her on dates where she would just follow me around and use her key to open doors. There were multiple times when I wouldn’t do anything but just walk around with her because I loved watching her follow me. I actually tried to see if she would follow me out of the realm, and was disappointed when she wouldn’t follow me through a portal. I made a comic-book when I was ten that was a rip-off of the Powerpuff girls and Captain Underpants and I made the sidekick-character a Subrosian. Playing Oracle of Seasons wasn’t about saving Din, it was about exploring Subrosia.
I don’t really know what it was about these little characters that so charmed and obsessed me. Their character design was simple: blue, green, red, or gold robes (one wore a red bow on her head) that covered their entire bodies except for a hole where two large white dominated their face. Their world was mostly rocks and lava which they enjoyed taking baths in. One of them gave me a bowl of lava chili that I would later feed to a Goron as part of the now mandatory trading mission.
I could gush about these dudes all day, but what’s important is the fact that they were established in one game and then never appeared again.
This is partly just the reality of the game market.
When Oracle of Seasons was released alongside Oracle of Ages the games sold around 3.96 million copies. Which one sold more I can’t say as I’m at the mercy of published sales figures and private corporations like Nintendo tend to keep data like that to themselves. This isn’t a bad number for a Zelda game developed by a third party. I point out though that compared to the original Legend of Zelda game that sold 6.5 million copies or Ocarina of Time that sold 7.6 million it’s still not as good as the more mainstream console games. If you had a GameBoy like I did you were able to meet the Subrosians and discover their weird lava world, but some people weren’t so lucky. Others are console purists that won’t touch hand-held game systems.
And some people only play games on a PC.
Video Games are, and always have been, a capitalist enterprise. Developers are at the mercy of, to quote Guermo DelToro, “The bastards with the money.” Because of this the market is always going to influence what games get made and receive more attention. I could not find anything in my research about the history of Subrosians and how they were developed, but I was able to find several reddit forums that discussed this largely abandoned race. One commenter in r/zelda named “r/prefernoname” asked what happened to them and most of the answers seem to be the same. I’m paraphrasing here but: “they had their moment, and now they’re gone.”
It’s a somewhat tragic sentiment if, but this isn’t really anything new.
The Picori race from Legend of Zelda the Minish cap and the Twili people are two wonderful examples of other races in the Zelda universe who “had their moment.”
Subrosia and its inhabitants were part of the larger design of the long-game Oracle of Seasons. General Knox has sunk the Temple of Seasons into the earth creating chaos and kidnapped Din, a dancer who obviously has some unspoken connection to the elements. Link, transported to Holodrum by the Triforce, must return the seasons to balance and the way to do so is by reaching Subrosia via portals and finding all of the Season elements. Unlike the Zoras, Gerudo, Rito, and the Gorons who still make regular appearances in the main storylines and ever offer quests and subquests, the Subrosians didn’t stick. Without any concrete data I can only speculate but it’s likely that developers just couldn’t find enough excuse to bring them back, or the lack of reasons to reuse their world allowed them to be an interesting element in one game that had its moment before players moved on.
My bias aside, it is unfortunate.
The most recent Legend of Zelda game is Tears of the Kingdom, and a large part of that game is an underground region known as the Depths. It’s populated by a host of monsters, Ziga clan members, and Zonai constructs still chugging along and processing Zonaite for seemingly nobody. It’s a beautiful sub-world that I’ve spent literal hours exploring, and even after 100 hours playing I still haven’t found everything. While playing this world I thought about the Subrosians, with their big eyes and weird hidden bodies, and wondered why they haven’t made a return?
And then I saw a puff shroom and added it to my inventory.
I didn’t want this essay to be one long bemoaning of how Nintendo has once again abandoned something in their dragon’s horde of intellectual property that is ever expanding. Instead I wanted to observe Subroasians as a fascinating addition to the canon of Zelda, note my own personal obsession with them, and observe how each new game can offer something to the next generation of players. Now that the Oracle games are on the switch, children can play the games I played as a kid and discover this new race of beings and experience the same things I did. This may in turn rekindle interest in this race and inspire new generations of game developers, or it may just create new appreciation for some of the older Nintendo titles. Nothing will ever recreate the energy I had when playing this game for the first time, and it shouldn’t. There’s some dude, dudette, or non-gender-specific dude[z] out there playing Tears of the Kingdom who will recall some element of the game 20 years from now and wish Nintendo would bring that back in greater depth.
Looking at all of this I ask myself What did I want to say in this essay?
My answer, as best I can figure, is that game elements come and go; what keeps an element “recurring” is a random variable. The Subroasians had their “moment” and maybe they’ll have their moment again. Regardless of whatever happens, they still exist in Oracle of Seasons, eating their lava chili, relaxing in their lava baths, exchanging ore chunks for goods and services, and one of them is still sitting on the beach, holding her key, waiting for me to take her out on a date again.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.23.2023
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