As a grotesque, anthropomorphized moon threatens to collide with your world and bring about total annihilation, you, as the gamer, wrestle with the very real notion that you don’t know how to stop this, and moreover, that you’re not going to have the time to do anything about it anyway, even if you could figure out what that was supposed to be.
In short, you’re doomed.
And you know it.
Bummer.
Quite obviously, it is not a stretch to say that “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” is one of Nintendo’s darker creations, nor is it unfair to say that the game isn’t shy about throwing the player into the deep end quickly. The primary objective of the game, that of preventing this global apocalypse, is shoved in your face right away.
And it is added upon with still more to burden yourself with, as though preventing widespread death and devastation is … somehow not enough.
Whereas its immediate predecessor (and certified gem) “Ocarina of Time” started you out in the comfy confines of your personal home and community, introducing you gradually to external threats (with mostly obvious methods – and fairly introduced abilities – to overcome them), Majora’s Mask at the outset puts you in a vulnerable position alone on the road, makes you an immediate victim of a robbery and a curse(!), then leaves you with this hellish scenario of the moon colliding with your immediate location raining certain destruction … with just three days to try to stop it from happening.
Feelings of dread and doom overwhelm, to the extent few games have emulated before or since. We’re 45 minutes into this game, and we cannot in our wildest imaginations begin to understand how we’re going to get our heroic alter-ego, Link, through this one.
“Well, it’s been a good run buddy, but I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this one alive.”
“Me neither. See you on the other side, champ.”
Compare this to previous Zelda games. An enemy, even a grossly overpowered one like Ganon, is still just one entity. The challenge is easier to wrap your arms around.
- Take down this bad guy.
- Save the princess.
- Win the day!
The threat in Majora’s Mask is more elusive, ultimately, and more conceptually difficult to process. Its scope is immense, akin to asking a person to solve a problem like world hunger or devise a method for ridding the world of cockroaches.
“Where do I even begin?”
Where indeed. The trick, which is revealed in those early moments (but only after a sort of dread-panic has taken firm hold), is that time travel once again comes into play, as it did in the previous game.
Here, it’s implemented differently, as a kind of looping dynamic. You can go back to the beginning of this hellish scenario as many times as you like, as it turns out, as a way of “buying” yourself more time.
But this is a true deal with the devil, Faustian in its intent.
Yes, you get a chance to restart. But it’s a return to the same initial feelings of despair that so overwhelmed you to begin with. It’s the same place, with the same people, with the same scenario. Played out, over and over again. And as if that doesn’t sound problematic enough – retraumatizing yourself over and over again – certain things you’ve done to rectify the problems in the world around you … well those reset as well. Progress is lost. You must begin all over again. And perhaps worst of all, once you reach a certain point in the time loop, you reach yet another level of horrifying understanding, and it’s that your first impression was actually correct:
The breadth of the task in front of you is simply impossible.
You cannot do it. There’s just no way to save everyone and fix everything. Some wrongs will not be corrected, and there’s nothing you can do about that.
In a sense, you truly ARE doomed.
THIS is the essence of Majora’s Mask. And it’s effing brilliant.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask at a glance:
Genre: Adventure
Released: 2000
Platform: Nintendo 64
Runner-up for GameSpot’s “Best Nintendo 64 Game”
Granted, this isn’t for everyone.
We all have our own personal demons to contend with, afterall, and a game that leans into anxiety as being fundamental to the overarching experience just isn’t going to appeal to every single person out there.
Predictably, this threat of a moon collision is only part of the trouble. The antagonist of the story, Skull Kid, is a classic trickster, the sort who will make your existence miserable at every turn, but by the end of the story, we discover he’s not entirely the problem either. Something mystical beyond your understanding is going on, lending to your initial feelings of dread, confusion, and smallness.
As an immediate follow-up to Ocarina of Time – developed, completed, and released in less than two years from the release of that first game – and utilizing the same basic play controls, game engine, and graphical assets, Majora’s Mask had to work a little harder to differentiate itself and provide a distinct adventure, still worthwhile of people’s time and money.
As we’ve established, the sequel achieved this partly through its fantastical story, but it also did so by putting our adventurer in a different setting, Termina, which was familiar to the traditional setting of Hyrule … yet still specifically unique in its layout and demands on the gamer.
Termina distinguished itself by its distinct geography and also by being nightmarish, a reflection of Ocarina of Time, seen through a darker, more troubling lens.
Yet I think what made Majora’s Mask tolerable to me – beyond a fascination with darker story elements which many of us succumb to from time to time – was a firm sense of control.
Not over everything mind you. We’ve already established that this game forces you to make choices and sacrifices. You can’t save everyone.
But what the game does do is give you the ability to make those choices for yourself. And moreover, the three-day Groundhog Day-like reliving of the same events over and over again eventually provides a measure of comfort throughout the course of the game.
“Well, this person is unhappy right now, but I can help them out next go around.”
Majora’s Mask also alleviates one’ anxiety levels by providing a proper road map. Along with the time reset mechanic, which provides you the opportunity to Samuel Beckett the wrongs you think need righting, you’re also provided fairly clear instructions pertaining to undoing your initial curse (whew) and even, almost unbelievably, how to stop a friggin’ moon from colliding with the planet.*
* This involves gods and statues and some general video game silliness BUT … at least the road map is there. It’s the greatest of warm blankets to know that there IS a path to success when things seemed so overwhelmingly hopeless at the start.
Some stress is therefore alleviated as objectives are achieved. And even in those extra hairy moments, you can always take the time-honored tradition of video gaming that has existed since the invention of the medium:
You can turn off the game and walk away from it.
In other words, you can quite literally put your problems on pause. You can take some time away and strategize for a bit, and then return to the issue when you think you have a better idea of how to proceed. In the meantime, you can make those emotions of despair or sadness a little less raw.
There’s something deeply appealing about that.
This, afterall, is escapism. And in the Zelda experience in particular, which is so reliant upon puzzle solving, the ability to take breaks and return to the action is integral to ultimate success.
I don’t doubt that people do this sort of compartmentalization in their day-to-day lives, but I find it difficult to engage in. Small problems can begin to feel immense when I can’t sort them out right away.
And large problems … well, those can feel like a moon trying to collide with me and my loved ones.
Ah yes, about THAT.
Well, I played “Majora’s Mask” during my wife’s cancer surgery recovery.
It was a tumultuous time (to say the least), and this will always be a game that I associate with that time in my life as a result.
I had been laid off by my previous employer that spring, and within a month of that exciting news, my wife had gotten a breast cancer diagnosis. As I frantically searched for employment opportunities, my wife began the process of consultation, of treatment, which consisted of a bilateral mastectomy, of recovery, a drug regimen – that to put it mildly is not for the faint of heart – eventually still more surgery, and then yes, back with the bad drug.
Are things “normal” now? In as much as they can be. Scars, both physical and emotional, remain to remind us. And she gets to roll with this obnoxious, terrible drug – and what it does to her – for the foreseeable future. Which means we ride that out together daily.
But regardless of how we’re doing now, that moment in time was flush with change and difficulty. I was involved in caring for the most important person on the planet to me, helping her to recover and to find the capacity to get back to doing things for herself.
I took on more of the parenting and for a time more of the cooking (not my forte!), and I found part-time work that would allow me to work remotely and in the evenings, giving me time to help her more directly in those early days post-surgery.
And of course … cancer.
There’s a super specific existential mind-fuck that a cancer diagnosis brings that’s difficult to explain. It’s like hearing your world is ending. And in a way, whether you survive your battle or not, it does change things irrevocably.
It was in this context in which I played Majora’s Mask for the first time. The artificial doom and stress of trying to prevent a moon from crashing into the planet … sorta seemed attainable, almost cute by comparison.
I mean, try going through a cancer battle with the love of your life and get back to me. There’s no “pushing pause” on that.
I became partial to this game because of this duality of having to save the pretend world and then having to save my own world when I turned it off.
The world-saving in Zelda provided an escape, but it also offered tangible progress, which isn’t something you always see in a linear way dealing with one’s health.
Finding all of the fairies in a dungeon or helping a townsperson with their troubles felt good.
Seeing your partner have a bad day … less so.
Anyway, my wife is fond of saying that she doesn’t play video games, and for the most part this is true. She won’t pick up a game controller, I think mostly because she is self-conscious about some experience from her youth. Her parents also were not kind to/about the medium, as I understand it, and that’s reason enough to shy away as an adult.
She WILL play mobile and online games to wind down, and I play stuff with the kids fairly regularly, but she and I just don’t play games together. It’s not a thing that we do.
Majora’s Mask was the exception.
With my wife in bed, drain tubes stretching outward this way and that, I sat at the foot of our bed, playing her old Nintendo 64 and her old cartridge (with a memory port expansion she purchased for just this occasion) with her offering helpful tips for literal days and weeks, until finally, eventually, the game was conquered, and the world was saved.
We had done it – a total team effort. I couldn’t have done it without her. We experienced the game together, in the most trying of circumstances, but we did it together.
This was like a dang miracle, something I’ll legitimately treasure forever.
That time in our lives wasn’t easy for her or I, and cancer is not the sort of thing you just get to say goodbye to either.
You know when they ring the bell? That doesn’t mean the cancer goes away forever. It means you did the things you needed to do over that period of time, giving yourself a chance.
Majora’s Mask demands that a person make sacrifices, but the lesson of the game is not that everything is hopeless.
The lesson is that we have to be able to accept losses and move forward anyway. We have to fight. The world is a bitter, difficult place, full of jagged edges and unkind souls, and those things that you hold most dear will be threatened.
And yet, we persist, and we do so because we can make a difference for some people.
Occasionally, we even get a chance to make a difference for those we consider to be our everything.
So what makes it worth playing today?
In trying to piece together a list of the very best retro games in existence, I eventually tumbled into two main considerations.
- How a game made me feel.
- How high of a score could I justify in giving it?
At times, a game might be an easy call for a perfect score and a hearty recommendation, yet not pull me toward it in a significant manner. Such early examples on this list have included Tetris and Ms. Pac-Man. Fine games to be sure. Absolute must-plays, in fact. But personal favorites? No. Not really.
That oddity, of a game’s value exceeding my own personal enjoyment of it, has a flip side to it. And we have by now come to that part of the countdown, where I can’t in good conscience give a game a perfect score because of huge flaws or reservations that cannot – and should not – be ignored.
The games which are about to continue featuring on this list are some of my very favorites. Games which provoke an emotional response that exceeds the game’s relative virtue. A cold-hearted appraisal can leave little doubt: these games have issues.
But I love them all the same.
And truly, there is no game that exemplifies this in quite the same way as Majora’s Mask.
This game is deeply personal to me (hopefully by now it’s clear why), and I adore most aspects of it.
The story and characterization are among the best you’ll find anywhere, and the gimmick of the three-day reset adds an urgency to the proceedings that provides forward momentum that I find satisfyingly compelling.*
* Let it also be said that this is unique; it’s not the sort of thing you see in other games. And in gaming, unique (or at least, “unique done well”) is almost universally a good thing.
The weaponry is good and fun to use, it gets into the meaty story stuff quickly (assuming you’ve played Ocarina beforehand, methinks), and my lord, these are some of the most ingenious temples ever designed (even with one or two so-so efforts, most of these are best-in-series worthy).
Unfortunately, Majora’s Mask can also be nonsensical in its intent, demanding you puzzle out problems with solutions so obscure, you’d almost be better served tackling things like world hunger, roach extermination, or even a cancer battle instead.
The clearest examples of how bafflingly opaque Majora’s Mask can be are the various mask quests that involve helping individual non-playable characters (NPCs) through their problems.
Most of them require reasoning out a solution that is annoyingly cryptic. Can a person come to the answers they need organically? In most cases, probably. But only through unreasonable amounts of trial and error. There are only so many permutations to attempt, but still, working your way through all of them is an absurd request.
The underlying problem with this is that these aren’t normal, garden-variety side quests. The end of the game provides a more thrilling and fascinating conclusion should you make the effort to collect every mask in the game. And it does this because the “side quests” are telling a good chunk of the narrative. They’re critical to the overall story.
The masks themselves each serve a purpose as well. Yes, there is a bomb mask that blows you up … but it blows up nearby walls and boulders too. (Clever, clever.) So it behooves you to track some/most/all of them down.
But again, most troublingly, if I can’t truly come to appreciate the sad inevitability of the story, of the futile notion that we can save everyone and everything, without waiting outside a door at a particular time, with a particular mask, to unlock another particular scenario, that unlocks another particular scenario, in which only a specific item presented, again at the exact right moment, will unlock a scene that provides us this beautiful moment, and none of these actions are plainly obvious to undertake … maybe we can allow that the designers of the game went a little too far with all of this.
And this is the game’s greatest failing.
The end result is the first game in this countdown that doesn’t earn a perfect score, despite my absolute adoration for it.
Majora’s Mask is 100% a game everyone should play. Among Zelda games, even understanding its flaws, it might actually be the one I personally enjoyed experiencing the most. It was certainly affecting.
But instead of attempting to ram your head through a wall in trying to complete it properly and experience everything, I think it’s only fair that you are warned to bring along a guide so as to save your sanity.
The overall experience, should you sneak the occasional hint, will be among the best you’ll find in all of gaming. And even the flaws will stand out as being memorable and interesting, and a worthwhile part of a beautifully messy game.
And that’s Majora’s Mask – and really life, for that matter:
A beautiful mess.
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (Nintendo 64)
- The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition (GameCube)
- Virtual Console (Wii and WiiU)
- Nintendo 3DS (remake)
- Nintendo Switch Online (Expansion Pack)