So last year, I was catching up on all of my Zelda games I had been collecting and finally got around to playing this beloved black sheep of the franchise. It was a very intriguing experience to me, as are many of the Non-Ganon Zelda titles. So for a quick recap for those who never played, Majora's Mask is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time. Link is on a journey to find Navi for reasons I and most Zelda fans can't quite fathom. He stumbles a mischievous Skull Kid wearing an ominous mask and his two fairy buddies who love to play tricks and rob people. Things quickly go south for Link, and he loses both Epona and gets turned into a Deku Shrub. He follows the Masked Kid to a parallel world called Termina which is guarded by four great giants of legend. Hoping to get his stuff back, Link ends up irritating the Masked Kid, who reveals the Mask has demonic powers that allow him to control the moon in Termina and has it on a three-day course to crush it flat. Thus begins Link's three-day journey to save Termina.
This game breaks a lot of conventions and bears a striking resemblance to Link's Awakening in terms of playing with the series formula. The two biggest changes are obviously the Three Day time limit, which sets you off on a marathon to get things done quickly before you have to use the Song of Time and reset the cycle. What makes this mechanic so intriguing is that Termina is a living town whose inhabitants stick to a pretty strict schedule. I would honestly say the best part of the game is playing Groundhog's Day with the townsfolk and exploring all of their stories. From the carnival performers trying to prepare for a show they don't realize is cancelled, to the brat pack neighborhood kids who spend their free time helping the local residents, and the love story between a man cursed to be a child and his bride-to-be who helps run the inn. It's difficult not to get attached to the game's large and colorful cast of supporting characters, and it can be a fun challenge to figure out how to complete each of their story arcs.
The second major mechanics are the Masks, which give Link various abilities or privileges. Many of them are one-note wonders needed to complete a quest with one of the town's folks, but the three key masks allow Link to transform into one of the various races of the new Zelda mythos, such as a Goron, Deku, and Zora. What most people don't mention is that all three of these masks are essentially haunted by the spirit of some character who died tragically before the story begins and usually plays a large role in the villages of their respective race. These forms give Link some cool abilities and expand his repertoire of abilities, in addition to the usual Zelda tools. Barring the various masks and the swords, most of Link's tools are pulled straight from Ocarina of Time. Overall, the Mask concept was really neat, and I'm surprised it never resurfaced in some new fashion in later titles.
The dungeons feel a bit rougher around the edges than OoT, but that's probably due to them having a much heavier focus on puzzle solving, and having a few more things to do in them like collect fairies. In fact, MM probably has more mini-games than any other entry and, like any game overloaded with them, the quality varies from game to game. The bosses are a mixed bag as well, with three of the four main dungeon bosses being surprisingly straightforward and easy to deal with and one boss and a few of the side bosses being more trouble than they are worth due to either dealing with the N64's funky control scheme or the A.I. just being an outright ass to you. The biggest stress factor for all of this is the three-day timer, especially if you don't figure out or look up the Inverted Song of Time, which effectively doubles how much in-game time you have to complete things. The dungeons and areas are surprisingly simple once you get a grasp of what needs to be done, but they're designed in a way to eat up valuable time, so it's not uncommon to take two cycles to complete a dungeon, with the first run collecting all the items and the second run taking down the boss. This is pretty stressful in the beginning but eventually upgrades to annoyance as you get further in and simply screwing up a scenario like the stealth mission into the Pirate's Den chewing up all of your time and forcing you to have to restart the whole scenario all over again.
I spent a lot of my time playing this game debating on whether I loved or hated the time loop mechanic. On the one hand, I love what it does for the narrative and exploring the world and its inhabitants; and on the other hand, it made dungeon crawling more stressful and tedious than it really needed to be. There are also a few townspeople missions that you'll likely start and soon learn you can't actually finish them until you find the right item. Majora's Mask hits pretty hard and heavy with the chain of deals and over-reliance on plot coupons to advance the story and keep you from sequence breaking. Still, I feel the good outweighs the bad, and I've never really played a game quite like Majora's Mask.
What really caught me off guard, though several friends who had played it before me, always mentioned, was just how "off" the game feels. There is a general creepiness to the game that is difficult to describe and partly stems from a subtle but prevalent theme of death that permeates a lot of the stories within the game as well as the creepy models the N64 makes. The Happy Mask Salesman is a wonderful example because outside a few bobbing motions here and there, he has a tendency to just kind of teleport into position like he's moving in a strobe light half his animations are missing to give it a fluid movement. I don't know if it was intentional or something due to memory limits, but it works for the game, and there are a bunch of other things that make Termina feel weird and unsettling despite the goofy inhabitants. After playing through it, I understand why this game is the subject of so many weird rumors and how the whole BenDrowned creepypasta came about.
Overall, this is a pretty weird ride but one I recommend that most people should check out, even if you're not a fan of Zelda titles.
Last edited by Wolf Kanno; 03-11-2023 at 08:06 AM.
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