Guessed by @coolbeans
Yeah, it does say +13 there. It's not wrong, that's actually what happened. That is to say, last year's list was wrong for putting this game so low. The thing is, I always replayed the other 3D Zeldas many times, but never felt compelled to replay Majora's Mask (only did it once for the remake). So while I formed a very consolidated opinion on the other games in the series, this one was always the weird one that I played way back when. And I'm sometimes consumed by my recency bias.
What this also meant, is that when I watched first playthroughs of all the 3D Zeldas this year, this one was the most exciting, because my memory of it wasn't nearly as fresh. And even if I stand by this game not being much my style, it is an absolutely amazing game. The fact that it was made in close to 1 year is just mind-boggling, because outside of the reused assets, it doesn't show any signs of being rushed - if anything it's quite the opposite, with an insane attention to detail not often seen even in games with long development cycles.
Even if I played it twice before, this year was when Majora's Mask totally blew me away. I obviously remembered it tackling all these heavy themes, how people deal with grief and imminent destruction and all that stuff, but what I didn't remember was just how well it handled these. It's not just saying these things for the sake of it, it makes you really feel it, the way the characters react to all the events that are happening in Termina feels believable and real, which is funny because most of the faces you see already existed in Ocarina of Time, but this is the game where you remember them. And through living the same cycle endlessly, of being with these people as they descend into either madness, desperation, or hopelessness, over and over again, you begin to care about them, and it makes you want to bring the cycle to an end, to save Termina for all the people who live in it. In a series of games that are all about saving the world, none of them made you care as much as Majora's Mask does. It may never be my favorite Zelda game, but it's genuinely hard to argue against it being the best. I just hope I don't have to keep reminding myself of that.
