#20: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D
I played Majora's Mask on the Gamecube through the Zelda Collectors Edition just like Ocarina of Time. I was never able to get through it and just couldn't get into it in general. Then along came the 3D version with some great quality of life features and I played through it three times over the years.
Majora's Mask is a different kind of Zelda game. It features less dungeons but instead more and more intricate side quests through which you get masks. The structure is rather different from most Zelda games too. There is no tutorial dungeon for example.
The three day cycle is a brilliant concept that works perfectly in creating a sense of urgency and a feeling of impending doom, which is actually the case. The cutscene where the moon actually drops onto Clocktown is a great payoff for waiting until midnight. That is, if you want to see the world burn.
During these three days you see the people on town change their behaviour. At first most of them behave like it's no big deal, then slowly they get more and more scared and some of them like the postman descend into panic and despair. They just give up on life. It's tragic and sad in some cases. Majora's Mask deals with surprisingly deep subject matter like coping with loss and death (sometimes your own death) and the meaning of true friendship. In most Zelda games there are side quests that just feel like filler, fetch quests for example. None of the side quests in Majora's Mask really feel like that. The reward or payoff isn't just rupees or whatever, it's a mask with unique traits.
Three of the masks stick out of the crowd. The Dekumask, the Zoramask and the Goronmask. With these masks you can transform yourself in each of these three races. The way you get them is again very sad and tragic. Both the Zoramaskand Goronmask come from individuals that died a horrible death. The Dekumask you obtain by freeing youself from the curse the skull kid cast upon you at the start of the game. In the end it is revealed that this mask also came from a deceased Deku who got murdered by the skull kid. In the end credits one of the dekus from the deku palace is shown mourning him. Even though you saved Termina from complete extinction some people will stay dead and in some cases their loved ones won't even be aware of it at first because Link impersonated them after their death with the masks.
Majora's Mask is a grim and sad game, but it still has a often moments with light atmosphere with uplifting themes in the fields and the four areas after you defeat the dungeon bosses.
Ultimately no matter what you do, whom you help, it always ends up getting undone when you have to return to the first day. With every cycle you make some progress until the final fight against evil incarnate: Majora.
This mask is pure evil. As soon as the skull kid put it on he started controlling it and made it make terrible atrocities while laughing. All just for fun while the moon slowly decends. It's almost like Majora feeds off of people's pain and suffering. Definitely the most evil villain in any Zelda game.
The four dungeons are all great, the weakest being to nobody's surprise the water dungeon, the Great Bay Temple. It offers the most complicated and through that tedious level design. Sometimes you just go to far with being intricate and complex (same goes for the water dungeons in OoT and TP). That doesn't mean it's bad, it just means I always spent an unnecessarily long time there getting lost while the time ran out. If there wasn't a song to make time go slower it would have been seriously frustrating. Ad to that the janky camera in some places.
The best dungeon is easily the Stone Tower which resides in Ikana, which is also imo the most memorable and unique area of the game. Everyone died a long time ago, so Majora desturbed their century long sleep to torture them. The dungeon itself features a brilliant concept where after the first half you obtain the light arrows wirh which you can activate switches to turn the entire dungeon upside down. The other unique concept that gets especially heave use when scalling the tower itself are the copies that you create of yourself through playing a certain song on the Ocarina to stand on switches. My only gripe with the dungeon is that you constantly need to replay that song over and over again. Interestingly the Stone Tower's boss is the worst in the game. He could have been better if the fight didn't go on forever like that. At least it does in the 3D version, I never got to that point in the original.
All four regions go from grim and depressing before, to happy go lucky after you beat the dungeon boss.
In the end you get to the moon and there is a green field with a tree and children dancing atound it. Very weird. The fight against Majora himself is a lot of fun with three very different stages. When you have the Fierce Diety mask the originally tough fight turns into a cakewalk. What the Fierce Diety is gets never explained. The mask salesman is insanely scared of Majora's power, but the Fierce Diety seems to be even more powerfull. What is it? What are these kids on the moon and why are they there?
The game leaves us with quite a few unanswered questions.
Majora's Mask is the most unique and different Zelda game, way darker in subject matter than any other Nintendo game I know of.
The Legend of Zelda: Death and Suffering is the fifth Zelda game on my list so far.
