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.