LogFAQs > #939416247

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I actually started Majora's Mask a day before its first match in GOTD 1 by complete coincidence (I was doing a bit of a Zelda run-through at the time), and finished the game a day after the contest finished. The dumb thing is that I remember feeling like some aspects of the playthrough were a chore, yet I can't in good faith call MM a bad game. Will be interesting if I ever re-visit it.

I think I'd feel some of that tedium of I were trying to 100% it. Though there are a couple parts in the main game that I'm a little unsure of (most of which I just finished, lol,) I've enjoyed the strong majority of the game so far and have felt fairly compelled to clear the sidequests.

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I'm bad at finishing games. There have been dozens of times, even in recent memory, where I've started a game, had no major complaints toward it, but still stopped playing before the end, for one reason or another. Even so, there are a few I've completed multiple times, one of which is Earthbound. Although parts of Earthbound's gameplay are antiquated enough to turn off some people, it's always been one of my favorites. I wish more games would emulate things like the instant-wins against weak enemies and I hold it up as one of the best examples of how to use the storytelling opportunities that come from video games in particular.

But one part of EB that almost everyone could do without is the Monkey Cave, where you have to run around delivering inventory items to monkeys who are blocking the way forward. On the bright side, all the items you need can be found in the cave itself, but it can still be a dull and tedious affair with a lot of backtracking.

I bring this up because Majora's Mask has it's own version of the Monkey Cave, in the form of the Well at Ikana Canyon. It's probably the more complex dungeon of the two and requires more preparation. You have to bring milk, a blue potion, ten bombs, ten deku nuts, and five magic beans from outside the dungeon if you want to go everywhere. It's definitely an area where I would recommend reading a guide. You could get most of the way through before learning that you need milk and having to run all the way across the dungeon to get out, and then back through a second time with the milk. That would be rather galling. This is plot-mandatory and the reward is the Mirror Shield, with a creepy new design in line with this game's aesthetic.

Still, I'm being a bit facetious, because I never really minded the Monkey Cave, and though I was glad to leave it behind, the Well wasn't so bad either.

With the Mirror Shield we can explore Ikana Castle, a miniature dungeon unto itself, and learn the last song in the game: the Elegy of Emptiness. This lets us leave behind motionless copies of ourselves in all four forms, which look like an unsettling Nutcracker version of Link and the true appearances of his Deku, Goron, and Zora counterparts. It's mostly used to weight down switches in the next area, the Stone Tower, which we have to scale to reach the game's last temple. So far there's no use for creating a clone of our Deku form, which is too light to keep a switch down. The Stone Tower ascent is a bit of a let-down because it's mostly just hookshotting and weighting down switches again and again. You have to go into the menu quite a lot to exchange your masks for one another. Although it's pretty cool visually, the Elegy of Emptiness would be better assigned to a single inventory item rather than a song with a long input, from a gameplay perspective. You have to use it much more frequently than any of the other songs, when clearing out this area, so the length of the method becomes a little draining. I activated the Owl Statue at the top of the tower before calling it a night.

I definitely underestimated how much was left of this game and how long it would take me to progress. For the rest of the week, this topic will probably slow down to a rate of one update per day, in the evening. Still, I'm closing in on the end of game #1. I'm hoping to be able to start the next game by Thursday.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 0/129
Currently Playing: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask