For the last two weeks, an official Nintendo website has erroneously suggested that The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is available on Nintendo Switch Online.
This was shared today by Reddit user vertexjrpg, who posted a screenshot of what they saw. Kotaku was able to confirm that the NSO indicator was there as recently as this morning, and per Wayback Machine was there as far back as November 4, which is when the “History” section of the 40th anniversary website was first added. As of this afternoon, it has been removed. Kotaku has reached out to Nintendo for comment.
Does this mean anything? Probably not. Most likely, this is a case of whoever made this website putting a button that should have gone somewhere else in the wrong place. It happens. But there’s always the minute possibility that this is somehow a sign of something to come. With GameCube and GBA games now viable fodder for NSO inclusion as of the Switch 2, next on the list would be Wii, Wii U, DS, and 3DS. Right now, the only way to (legally, officially) play games on any of these consoles is by owning the physical system, and either a physical copy of a given game or a digital one downloaded from back when their respective online shops were still active. So it’s not exactly easy for a Zelda fan, especially someone coming in more recently with Ocarina of Time, to experience excellent games like A Link Between Worlds.
I’m not optimistic we’ll see 3DS games on NSO any time soon, but I want to believe it is an eventual inevitability, if only so I can go back at will to an awful lot of otherwise inaccessible Pokémon games. As long as I don’t have to sign up for a third, more expensive subscription tier to make it happen.
