How do you know Link didn't have gear prior to washing up on Toronbo? It's a dream; we don't know exactly what he did or didn't have equipped prior to the shipwreck and being subjected to the rules of the dream.
What kind of rules would that even be? You get your sword and shield + clothes but not any of your other shit? Seems oddly specific. If the owl wants him to wake up the wind fish by getting him to defeat all the bosses then wouldnt Link being at his top condition from the start be advantageous? And he still doesnt have his previous equipment by the oracle games. Youre stretching a bit here. They didnt care.
I suspect that if the Wind Fish had total control over the dream, Koholint wouldn't have Nightmares, or at least wouldn't have so many pits, monsters and obstacles scattered everywhere to hinder Link's progress. The dream is as much Link's as it is the Wind Fish's, which explains characters like Marin and Tarin as well as his starting equipment (which matches the standard tunic, sword and shield he starts with or acquires early on in the other games).
So link has some psychological attachment to starting over almost entirely at the start of an adventure? I guess that makes sense, but I still doubt thats what the devs were thinking. And whats the excuse in oracle of ages? Why would the triforce make Link start over in Seasons? Wouldnt it be far more advantageous to have Link at his strongest to help? Even in a linked game you only start with a wooden sword for no reason.
Oracle of Ages starts the same way, but I mentioned Seasons because it's generally considered the first game chronologically between the two. I'm not sure why the Triforce would have Link start over except that perhaps it's testing him. That's what the intro would suggest, anyway. It definitely makes more sense than the notion that Link is just throwing his own stuff away and placing himself in greater danger.
I want to reiterate that most games use some separate incarnation of Link, spread across years and years, which explains why he "starts over" in many of them. The ones that feature the same Link as in the previous game, notably Majora's Mask, often have some other explanation. In Majora's Mask it's obviously a combination of time travel and Skull Kid.
I can believe that Link might not keep his stuff with him at all times if he thinks he's done being a hero and the games are spread apart by some years, but it makes little sense that he would go out to sea without his Flute. He also has to have some way of making it back to land for the Oracle games, and at the start we see a cutscene with him horseriding.
Yeah that makes sense. And I know that theres a clear reason in it being another Link for why you have to get old equipment again for every other case in the series. Its just that Im conditioned to accept the video game logic where the protag starts fresh on each new adventure with seemingly either no reason or a shitty reason. Like Mega Man or Metroid. It doesnt make sense for X to get rid of his armors after every game and make himself more vulnerable yet he does so anyway even when his fighting clearly isnt over yet. ---