The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

from a story perspective, this game is a masterpiece, theres no getting around that. however, the actual game is SO GODDAMN STRESSFUL that it barely makes it worth it. the timeloop system gives me a headache and want to turn the game off. this sucks, because its a game Ive heard nothing but nonstop praise for and I want to love it, but theres just so much holding me back from being able to enjoy this title.

This has always been one of my favorite games on a conceptual level. I remember back in my freshman year of college I went on this long rant to my friend about how the concept behind this game was so beautiful. After about 20 minutes of really getting into the nitty-gritty I noticed that he was a little quiet. Turns out he had fallen asleep. Anyways, that doesn't matter, because you, my faithful reader, cannot fall asleep. You are merely a rhetorical construct. But that doesn't matter and I am getting away from the point, which the concept behind this game.

And what a beautiful concept it is, though.

The three day time limit at first brush feels like a gimmick or at best an annoyance. In reality, it's something quite the opposite, something that pushes the game further, into a darker but also more meaningful realm, perhaps past even it's more acclaimed brother.

I wish that all games were written with this sort of temporal locality. How often has it bothered you - in a lesser game - that the inn-keep that you talked to has pretty much been standing in the same place for the entire duration of what must have been a multi-month journey? Or that village citizens tell you the same thing over and over? Majora's Mask has solved this problem. Every person in the game has things they're doing during the three day period - meaningful things, that add to the plot. No one stands in one place. They're all off living their own life. And through gratuitous use of the Ocarina, you can track them all down and help them out.

All of this is only possible with the 3 day time limit.

Along with that comes the central theme of this game: death. Whoah, kind of heavy, right? Hard to imagine a kid's game dealing with death directly. Honestly, it still kind of surprises me even now. But most of the plot of the game is about how people deal with the fact that the world is going to end in 3 days. Some deny it. Some run away. One of the small sideplots that always stuck in my mind from this game was the couple who (after Link performs many tasks) finally got together in the final hours of the third day, even as the world is ending. There is something very honest and pure about their story that I rarely see captured elsewhere.

And maybe I'm thinking about it on too much of a meta-level, but part of the emotional pull of the game is that you can't save everyone. There's no way you can complete all 20 tasks in the Bomber's Notebook in a single 72 hour run. So you have to reset time, and your work is undone.

All the traditional Zelda stuff? I mean, it's fantastic too. Zelda has always been one of my favorite series because of the puzzles, which really demand some thought. But if you want to push the whole "games as art" agenda, you can't really point to a game which is built on nothing more than solving cute puzzles and killing evil monsters. Majora's Mask is one of those rare games that goes beyond just mindless fun.

one of the most fascinating games of all time from a thematic and atmospheric perspective and has absolutely awesome side quests but i can just not ever get behind the dungeons, ever. NONE of them are fun to me, which is sad. i'll still always go to bat for majora but if this game had better dungeons, it would be an all-timer. i really can't stress enough how much i dislike these dungeons compared to other zelda titles.

I remember playing this as a kid I was kinda bummed there were only 4 dungeons. That's where my mind was at the time -- bigger is better. But MM stuck with me a lot more than the other Zelda games; it's world feels a lot more real and the story feels a lot more conceptual than the typical; Link-got-sword-save-world-and-maybe-smooch-lady plotline. The re-use of assets from OOT really adds to the uncanny mood of the whole thing. Just about everything in the game seems like it's designed to build a mood, more-so than constantly serving gamer expectations. I think that design philosophy paid off, particularly since it wasn't likely the design team was going to be able to top OOT in any conventional way.

This game can be quite punishing if you don't know what you're doing. Luckily, it came out in the era where the internet was at least sufficiently advanced to allow for text walkthroughs, and the game itself isn't quite so hostile towards the player as one might think. Remember, this is a Zelda adventure for those who've played Ocarina of Time and want a greater challenge, not a first-timer's game. I wonder just how many people ended up buying this expecting a cool side-adventure or a worthy sequel and were deeply confused by the mechanics, story, and art direction.

Unless you seem to think that games should play themselves, you shouldn't see a problem with such an additional challenge. It's not as if the game tries to trick you into failing or anything - the Bomber's Notebook is an essential piece of organization, replacing the pen-and-paper maps and strategy guides that fans of the original Legend of Zelda had to create. There's very little that can't be achieved in this game without trial and error. I will admit that the original game did have a few issues with lack of short iteration times (a term I only understand from Extra Credits, so apologies if I don't use it correctly here). If you failed at something the first time, it would take a while before you could try it again. Luckily, the 3DS version rectifies this with the Song of Double Time being much more flexible, allowing you to go back to the dawn of the first day and fast-forward to exactly the point that you need.

The "3DS vs. N64" debate with this game will probably continue to rage on. On the one hand, the original has a large number of technical issues related to the use of the expansion pack and short development time. On the other, the 3DS version changes too much about the gameplay, and not always in a positive way. An ideal version would take the save functions, song of double time, and Bomber's Notebook streamlining of the 3DS version and plug them back into the original N64 gameplay. As no such version exists, you'll have to excuse me for giving this high rating to a theoretical construct.

I greatly appreciate the avant-garde sensibilities of the art direction for this game. It would have been very easy to let the tight development schedule result in a game with much the same feel as Ocarina of Time (which is itself no stranger to some very distinctive design choices), but instead, the team developed a syncretism of a wide variety of art styles and cultures to create something which could truly be considered strange and new regardless of who was playing the game. Of course, the mask traditions of Japan are influences, but so are those of Central Africa and Inuit Peoples. None of the masks seem like copycats of real-world ones (excepting those which are intended to be homages), so the game doesn't strike me as orientalist or derivative. The music is also worth mentioning (though I'd go into more detail on it on RYM), as its variety of traditional styles and modern psychedelia/post-industrial is among the most innovative soundtracks for a Nintendo title. Even nowadays, few companies would dare to make a game with this kind of direction, not only risking alienating people with its visual design, but also delving deep into existential and spiritual themes of healing and apocalypse. Remember, this is a children's game company.

I appreciate Majora's Mask's attempt to shake up the Zelda formula, but for my taste, this experiment in apocalyptic time loops is not a successful one.

If you ignore the fact that you are given about 1 real-world hour before the world ends and you are kicked back to to the start of the game's time loop, the gameplay here is pretty similar to Ocarina of Time, but this structural twist completely alters the mental experience of playing the game. You are constantly on the clock. Even if the time limit is not unreasonable, this is a game you fundamentally cannot relax in.
If you're stuck on a puzzle or can't find your way in a dungeon, you no longer poke around at your leisure - you worry about whether you still have time to finish the dungeon and how much progress you'll lose if you don't. Whatever synergy this has with the narrative premise and atmosphere of the game, for me the ever-present time limit simply makes the experience of playing this game unpleasant.

Appropriately enough for a game that takes place in the days before the end of the world, its bleak atmosphere is quite unlike any other Zelda game, but it's still a Zelda game, and story/characters/narrative don't rise beyond the usual standard of 'largely forgettable'. There's a large assortment of side-quests that involve you being in some arbitrary place at an arbitrary time, and while Zelda side-quests are never my favorite part of these games, the added temporal dimension here makes them particularly exhausting to deal with. The unskippable, repetitive animations/dialog sequences/mini-cutscenes that reliably blight Nintendo games are made more insufferable by the inherently repetitive nature of Majora's Mask.

Perhaps it makes for better pretentious youtube video essays but I'll stick with OoT as the best N64 Zelda.