The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask Review
The
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shocked the world when it was
released. It had everything you could want in a game in 1998: the
graphics, story, the gameplay, everything was revolutionary for its
time. It set the precedent that 3D action-adventure games of the
future would try and try again to emulate. So when its “sequel”
of sorts, Majora’s Mask, was released in 2000, it had HUGE shoes to
fill, and I think it's safe to say this game delivered.
Majora’s Mask essentially took
everything that made Ocarina of Time the masterpiece it is and
improved and expanded upon it tenfold. But make no mistake, the two
are very different experiences and should be treated as such. While
Ocarina of Time’s gameplay is focused around the story, Majora’s
Mask goes in the opposite direction and places more emphasis on
worldbuilding. That’s not to say that there’s no story in
Majora’s Mask. Link goes on a journey after the events of Ocarina
in search for a “friend,” as the game puts it. He’s attacked by
a Skull Kid who possesses Majora’s Mask, an evil mask that gives
its wearer immense power. The Skull Kid transforms Link into a Deku
Scrub. You eventually find out that the moon is slowly falling toward
the earth, and you have three days to stop it. You set out to find
the four giants of Termina, who are able to stop the moon from
falling. And… yeah, that’s basically it. Along the way you’ll
meet plenty of colorful characters that enrich the world around you
and make it feel more alive.
Something that I really
appreciate is when games are able to tell a story without directly
telling it to the player. In Majora’s Mask, you have to go out of
your way to learn more about the world around you, and OH BOY,
there’s a lot to learn. Termina is a huge, living, breathing world
with tons and tons of people to meet and talk to. The bulk of the
gameplay when you’re not exploring dungeons is helping out the
various characters around Termina. And what’s really great about
this is that everyone has their own set schedule of where they’ll
be and what they’ll be doing throughout the three days. So many
people you’ll see in Clock Town have their own story and background
that you could completely miss on your first playthrough of the game.
The game has an interesting dynamic of giving the player the bare
minimum of the story. It’s up to YOU as the player to learn about
these different people, what their stories are, and how you can help
them.
And what’s your reward for
helping the various denizens of Termina? Why, masks of course! They
didn’t fuckin’ call this game Majora’s… uh… ADVENTURE did
they? Nah, it’s Majora’s MASK, and WOW there are a lot of masks
to get. The masks are the other core gameplay mechanic of Majora’s
Mask (that word is really beginning to lose its meaning).
For helping the people of Termina you’re awarded masks that all do
different things. For example, for fending off a robber from an old
lady, she’ll give you the Blast Mask, which, well, let’s you blow
stuff up. If you promise some spooky ghost guy on a giant mushroom
that you’ll spread his dance moves to the world, he’ll give you a
mask of his… face? Alrighty then… What’s cool about a
lot of these masks is that using them in certain situations will
allow you to help people even more. For example, this weird shut-in
guy tells you that he’s scared that he won’t see his chicks grow
up into adult Cuccos before the moon comes crashing down. By rounding
up the chicks using the Bremen’s Mask, the chicks will grow up…
somehow… and become adults, which will reward you with the Bunny
Hood. It’s awesome how bits and pieces of the world sort of
interconnect. It gives an awesome sense of scale and depth to the
game. It also adds a lot of character to the game overall. It was
very ahead of its time.
Majora’s Mask has a very dark,
anxious atmosphere. As the three days slowly go by in the game, you
start to feel more pressured to accomplish whatever you need to do.
The evil looking, gigantic moon will slowly appear to be bigger and
bigger in the sky as time goes on. Using the Song of Time will bring
you back to the first day, but you’ll lose whatever you did in the
previous three-day cycle. You have a few ways of making things easier
like being able to slow down the flow of time, but ultimately what
you accomplish will be up to the clock. There are three (technically
four) masks that transform Link into different forms: the Deku Mask,
the Goron Mask, the Zora Mask, and the Fierce Deity’s Mask, which
is your reward for collecting all the masks at the end of the game.
And these masks aren’t without their backstory: they embody the
spirits of who they once were. The Deku Mask closely resembles the
withered tree you see in the beginning of the game, and is also
presumed to be the son of the butler at the Deku Palace; the Goron
Mask is the spirit of the Goron hero Darmani, who died trying to save
his homeland of Snowhead from Skull Kid’s curse; and the Zora Mask
is the spirit of Mikau, the guitarist of the popular music group The
Indigo-Go’s, who died trying to save the eggs of his love interest,
Lulu. As for the Fierce Deity’s Mask, well… not too much is known
about that one. I suggest looking into that yourself, because it’s
mostly speculation. This adds to the dark mood of the game even
further. Each of the masks has their own set of attacks and
properties that can be used in a ton of different situations. The
Deku Mask lets you fly out of these flowers that are scattered about
the world; the Goron Mask lets you roll
around super fast; and the Zora Mask lets you swim quickly. Anyway,
the reason I think this is so cool is because it gives you an even
bigger connection to the world – a direct connection even – by
letting the player inhabit the spirit of someone who used to be a
part of the world. What other game has done this before? I don’t
doubt that it’s been replicated since the game’s release, but I
feel like that this is such an awesome mechanic both in terms of
gameplay and adding to the atmosphere of the game.
Visually, the game, well, looks
as good as an N64 game could look. Because there’s often a ton of
models on screen at once, the game
requires use of the Expansion Pak, which doubled the console’s RAM
from 4 to 8 megabytes. I’m a firm believer that art direction will
always trump graphical fidelity, and the game excels in that regard.
And yeah, it bears repeating again that this game was for the N64,
but since it released near the end of its life cycle, the developers
took full advantage of the console’s hardware. It does suck that
it’s locked at 20 FPS like a lot of other N64 games were, but it’s
still not painful to look at. The 3DS remake of the game looks
beautiful and runs at 30 FPS, but to me I feel like the art style
in that game kinda contradicts the dark tone of the game. It worked
amazingly for Ocarina of Time’s 3DS remake, but to me, the art
style seems too cheery and light to fit Majora’s Mask. I dunno, but
for some reason the crappier, more primitive graphics of the N64
version seem to fit the game a whole lot more to me. The soundtrack
for the game is absolutely phenomenal. It’s just another thing that
contributes to the wonderfully dark feel of the game. A few songs are
reused from Ocarina of Time like the Lost Woods theme, but the
soundtrack is almost entirely original. There’s not much else to
say about it; you’ve been listening to songs from it throughout
this video, so hopefully you’ll get an idea of what it sounds like.
I think it’s probably worth
mentioning what makes the 3DS version of the game different from the
N64 version. Aside from the obvious graphical overhaul I just
finished bashing, there’s also greater camera control if you have
the New 3DS, touch screen menus, motion control in first-person view
which takes advantage of the gyroscope, and slight changes to the
mask transformations. There were other notable changes like Owl
Statues permanently saving the game as opposed to only saving what
you did within the current three-day cycle, and smaller save points
that can’t be warped to were added around the world. A big change
involves the bosses, all of whom now have a visible weak point in the
form of a gigantic eye. In a lot of cases, this makes the boss fights
10 times easier. Not only that, but it makes the tragic mistake of
converting what used to be really creative, challenging boss fights
into bosses that follow the generic, awful video game trope of
exposing a weak spot, and hitting that weak spot, rinse and repeat
three times. It really, really sucks that this change was made,
because the bosses in the original version were pretty good for the
most part, even though they were frustrating at times. I possibly
might not have minded the changes were it not for the fact that the
bosses were basically ruined. Eh, just a small price to pay for what
is otherwise a fantastic remake.
So, all in all, The Legend of
Zelda: Majora’s Mask is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, and is
without a doubt one of my favorite games of all time. Everything from
the atmosphere to the music to the gameplay is masterfully done, and
the world the developers created is incredibly detailed and
cinematic. There are very few games that I’ve done repeat
playthroughs of for years that are still surprising
me with new things I haven’t noticed. Do you remember this clip I
showed earlier in the video (Author's note: This is something you'll only see in the video. It's a clip of a thief talking to the owner of the Curiosity Shop in Clock Town.)? I
just happened to run into
that scene
while recording footage for something else. I
had never seen it before, ever. It’s
things like that that have kept me coming back to this game since
I was probably six or seven years old, and I’m nearly eighteen now.
The 3DS remake
is arguably the definitive
version of the game due to
the beautiful graphics overhaul and more fluid gameplay. It
takes a lot for me to say this, but Majora’s Mask is about as close
to perfect as a game can get, and one can only hope that future
installments to the series like Breath of the Wild can even come
close to matching the level of beauty Majora’s Mask has achieved.
Please play this game; you owe it to yourself as a gamer to do so.
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