The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

2024-03-16
I went into Majora's Mask dreading playing it after I found Ocarina of Time to be pretty badly dated. What I got instead was a delightfully weird game that kept me entertained almost the whole time. The skull kid, the giant moon, the horror vibes as you continually put on a mask that turns you into a Deku Scrub or a Goron or a Zora. The giant turtle. The jam session with the Zora. I mean Majora's Mask's 2nd form alone is one of the coolest most fucked up things I've ever seen in a game. And the third form goes Resident Evil. This game is so awesome.

It takes the bland, empty feeling open world of Ocarina and tightens it all up and fills it with weird shit. Overall the formula is Zelda through and through, you get trinkets that unlock things, you go to new dungeons, you fight bosses, get heart containers, on your way to fight the final boss. But there's some interesting wrinkles in the masks which operate as trinkets but...weirder. And of course the time loop mechanic. I was honestly really surprised that a game this old had a mechanic as odd and interesting as this. You're on a loop of 3 days and everyone you meet has their own little schedules and events that can only happen at certain times of day. I'd say it reminds me of Pathologic but I can only assume Pathologic was in fact inspired by Majora's Mask.

I do have my gripes which honestly are mainly around the 3 day loop reseting dungeons being a pretty tedious thing. Thankfully I was already using a guide so it wasn't too much trouble to finish dungeons in the time limit but I can only imagine that would be horrible to get 80% of the way done with a dungeon only to run out of time and have to do the whole thing over again.

These gripes end up being completely overshadowed by how weird and wonderful of a game it is.