Right, this one’s just for you lot.

No preamble. No “welcome back to the channel.” You’re already here, you already know what this channel is, so let’s get straight into it.

Recently, IMDb quietly did something Nintendo didn’t want it to do.

THE LEAK

It started with a voice actor. Nobuyuki Hiyama. He’s voiced Link before, going all the way back to the Ocarina of Time days. His IMDb profile got updated this week, and it now credits him for two things. One adult Link in the Ocarina of Time remake, as we knew. Two, a role in something called The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask HD, using the Fierce Deity Mask.

That second one, nobody announced. Nobody leaked it deliberately. It just appeared.

And here’s why that matters more than a normal leak. Voice work gets added right at the end of production. Post-production, specifically. So if Hiyama’s credit is already live, Majora’s Mask HD isn’t an early pitch document sitting in a drawer somewhere. It’s close. Possibly closer than the Ocarina remake was when we first heard about it.

I’ll be honest, my first reaction to a Majora’s Mask HD leak was mild disappointment. Not because I don’t want it, I do, it’s my favourite three days in the whole franchise. But “HD” as a label usually means something narrower than a full remake. Think Wind Waker HD rather than the ground-up rebuild we’re getting with Ocarina. Reused assets, a lick of paint, a few modern conveniences bolted on. That’s nothing. But it’s not what got me actually excited.

Because that’s not the story I actually want to talk to you about.

THE DIRECTOR

The same IMDb trail led somewhere else. The director attached to Majora’s Mask HD is Mikiharu Ooiwa. Some of you will already know that name. He’s been on the Zelda team for over fifteen years, since Ocarina of Time 3D, and most recently, he directed Echoes of Wisdom.

That matters more than a name-drop. Echoes of Wisdom was the first mainline Zelda where Zelda herself did the doing, and it was built entirely around a single reality-bending toy box mechanic, the Tri Rod, that the whole game’s design radiated outward from. Ooiwa isn’t a journeyman director slotted into whatever project needs a name attached. He’s someone who’s shown he can take one strange, narrow idea and build a full game’s architecture around it without it collapsing under its own gimmick. Keep that in your back pocket; it’s going to matter in a minute.

His IMDb profile lists two projects as “coming soon.” One is Majora’s Mask HD. The other is simply called The Legend of Zelda: Oracles.

No subtitle. No “of Ages” or “of Seasons.” Just Oracles.

WHAT WE ACTUALLY KNOW

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of moment where speculation calcifies into fact if you’re not paying attention. So here’s what’s actually confirmed, and what isn’t.

Confirmed: the project exists, it’s in pre-production, and Ooiwa is attached. Confirmed: actress Mitsugi Saiga is being considered for the role of Link. Not confirmed as cast, considered.

That casting detail is worth sitting with for a second, actually. It’s a small thing on paper, but Link’s Japanese voice work has skewed toward a particular register for a long time, and floating an actress for the role, even just at the consideration stage, is the kind of decision that tends to signal something about tone. I wouldn’t build a whole theory on it. But I noticed it, and I think you should too.

Not confirmed: whether this is a remake of Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons at all. It could be. Given the naming, given the era Nintendo’s currently mining for remake material, it’s the obvious guess. But nobody involved has said the words “remake” or “Game Boy Colour” out loud. It’s entirely possible this is something new wearing an old name.

And there’s a detail underneath all of this that I can’t mention. The original Oracle games were directed by a young Hidemaro Fujibayashi. Long before Breath of the Wild. Long before Tears of the Kingdom. If Nintendo is quietly reviving that duology now, it’s handing it to someone who’s spent 15 years absorbing exactly the design philosophy Fujibayashi built his career on. I’m not going to lean on that too hard; we’ve talked about the Fujibayashi throughline elsewhere on this channel, and I don’t want to repeat myself. But it’s sitting there. Make of it what you will.

THE LINKED GAME PROBLEM

Let’s actually talk design for a second, because this is the bit I find genuinely interesting rather than just newsworthy.

The entire identity of the original Oracle games was the link mechanic. Two cartridges, two save files, a password system that lets choices in one game ripple into the other. Beat Oracle of Seasons first, and Ages plays differently. It was ambitious in a way that Game Boy Colour hardware had no business supporting, and it worked because Nintendo built two full, distinct toolsets, Seasons built around terrain manipulation, Ages built around time travel, and then found a clever, low-tech way to stitch them together after the fact.

If this is a modern remake, that’s the single hardest problem on the table. You can’t sell someone two separate seventy-pound purchases and call it a “linked” experience the way you could with two forty-pound Game Boy carts. So either Nintendo finds a genuinely new answer to what “linked” means on a single console, maybe something closer to how Echoes of Wisdom or the modern Pokémon games handle version differences, or the whole conceit gets quietly dropped, and we get one game wearing the Oracle name.

Honestly, if I’m being the annoying design nerd for a second, I’d rather they solve the linking problem than abandon it. It was the one truly novel thing about those games. Losing it to make development easier would be the safe choice and also, I think, the wrong one.

WHY NOW

Three projects. Ocarina of Time remake, confirmed and coming. Majora’s Mask HD, apparently deep in post-production. And now Oracles, sitting in pre-production behind it.

That’s not a coincidence; that’s a pipeline. And it lines up with something that’s easy to forget when you’re deep in the discourse. This is Zelda’s fortieth anniversary year. Nintendo doesn’t let that kind of number pass quietly. Not for this franchise.

So if you’re asking why the Oracle games specifically, why now, after two decades of people asking for exactly this and getting nothing. I think the honest answer is: because the anniversary demanded a moment, and somebody in Kyoto decided the moment needed a surprise, not just another straight line from Ocarina to Majora’s Mask. Everyone was braced for the obvious sequel leak. Nobody was braced for this one. That’s usually a sign the decision came from somewhere further up than the marketing calendar.

THE MYSTERIOUS THIRD ORACLE

There’s one more thread I want to pull, because it’s older than this leak by two decades, and I think it’s the actual emotional core of why an Oracle’s announcement would matter so much.

Ages and Seasons weren’t originally meant to be a pair. They were meant to be three.

Back when the games were in early development, they weren’t even called Oracle of anything. They were part of a concept sometimes referred to as the Triforce Trilogy, three games, each one tied to a piece of the Triforce and a goddess. Mystical Seed of Power, tied to Din. Mystical Seed of Wisdom, tied to Nayru. And Mystical Seed of Courage, tied to Farore.

Power became the Oracle of Seasons. Wisdom became the Oracle of Ages. Courage never came out at all.

The accounts of exactly what Courage was going to play like don’t fully agree with each other; some say it was built around a colour-based puzzle mechanic, others say it had the time-of-day system that ended up in Ages instead. I’m not going to pretend there’s a clean answer there; the record’s genuinely muddy. Both accounts agree on why it died. Linking three separate games through a password system was already pushing the Game Boy Colour past what it could comfortably handle with two. Add a third, with the Game Boy Advance already on the horizon, and the maths just stopped working. Courage got cut, and its ideas got folded back into the two games that survived.

And that’s the quietly sad part, if you think about it for more than a few seconds. Farore, the goddess of courage, is in the released games. But she’s not a character with a story. She’s a tree. She’s the Maku Tree, sitting there handing out passwords, standing in for an entire cancelled adventure that never got to exist.

Fans never really let that go, either. There’s a fan-made project called Oracle of Secrets, built entirely from scratch as an unofficial spiritual successor to A Link to the Past, featuring a brand-new story and dungeons, created by hobbyists with no involvement from Nintendo whatsoever. It’s been in active, dedicated development for years. People built the third Oracle game themselves because nobody else would.

Which is what makes this leak land differently for me than a normal remake rumour. If Ooiwa’s Oracles project is real and genuinely picking up that unfinished trilogy, this is the first time in over twenty years Nintendo has had an actual shot at closing that story properly. Officially. Not as a ROM hack built in someone’s spare time, but as the real thing.

I don’t know if that’s what’s happening. Nobody does yet. But it’s the version of this leak I want to be true.

CLOSE

I don’t have a neat bow to put on this one. That’s kind of the point of these leak conversations, isn’t it? You get a thread, you pull it, and it just keeps unspooling.

What I’d actually love is to hear what you think Oracles even means if it isn’t a remake. Original title using the name as a callback? Compilation of both games with something new stitched between them? A genuine solution to the linking problem on modern hardware? Drop it in the Discord, I mean that, I want to read it.

Thanks for being here. Properly here, paying for it here. It’s the only reason I get to make videos like this one before anyone else does.

Back with the next one soon.