LogFAQs > #939518249

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

What I thought of Majora's Mask: A great game to start with.
Would I play Majora's Mask again? Definitely
Did it deserve to win Game of the Decade? Yes, even if it wouldn't have been my first pick.

I respect Nintendo for making a game like Majora's Mask. It's easy for huge AAA developers to repeat themselves for the sake of financial safety and broad appeal. There's no denying that Nintendo have done this in the past. I find the New Super Mario Bros. series of games to be unbearably dull for essentially this reason. MM might be the furthest they have come from those games aesthetically. New Mario is cute and bubbly to the point of being sacchirine, while Majora's Mask is brooding, somber, and creepy.

I think what I admire most about the game is the art direction. It has a very consistent visual theme of morbidity. The animations when Link transforms with his masks are painful and disturbing, his new power-set includes thing like making souless copies of himself and disguising himself as a monster, and even tools like the Mirror Shield have been redesigned, in that case to resemble a tormented human face. The four deities you call upon are ugly long-legged elder gods, and instead of collecting sacred artifacts or rescuing maidens or sages you collect the corpses of your enemies. It's all framed by the ever-present threat of the apocalyptic moon, which is deliberately placed within the player's vision at important moments. Seeing it hanging over the peaceful Romani Ranch and nearly coming face-to-face with it at the peak of Snowhead mountain made for some of the game's most memorable moments.

All those visual motifs serve to reinforce the game's themes, perhaps the most significant of which is futility. It makes an interesting contrast against most video games as well as most other stories based around a time-loop, such as Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow. While a character like Phil Connors learns from each successive cycle of his personal time loop, and a satisfying part of most adventure games or RPGs is visiting new places and leaving them better than you found them, the time loop in Majora's Mask is used specifically to undermine your achievements. Although you can run around Termina righting wrongs and preventing disaster, it will all be rendered meaningless when the moon strikes and you're forced to start again. You have to ignore the villany around you for the sake of simple pragmatism: you know that an old woman will be robbed on the first night of every cycle, but you can't practically help her every single time.

What's even better is the way those things are conveyed. Link's silent protagonist status serves this game well: cutscenes of him lamenting how his heroic achievements are undone would be much less impactful than allowing the player to experience that feeling himself through the gameplay. We can hold up Majora's Mask as a valuable example of how to use video games, in particular, to tell a story. Exploring this young medium in that way has always excited me.

I find that most really good games have either a great story (Mother 3, Silent Hill 2, Xenogears) or great gameplay (Star Fox 64, Symphony of the Night,) but the combination of the two (Final Fantasy Tactics, Dark Souls) is much rarer. Majora's Mask is one game I would say is great at both. The gameplay is where MM more closely resembles its Zelda brethren: some aspects of the formula started by Link to the Past are visible here. While that was a generally potent gameplay format (I remember absolutely loving the dungeons in Twilight Princess,) it eventually became repetitive enough that I was glad to see Breath of the Wild tear it down.

Majora might be the second-most unusual post-LttP Zelda game (we will have to revisit this claim when it comes time to play A Link Between Worlds.) You find items like the hookshot outside dungeons and the boss fights are open-ended brawls rather than repeating puzzle battles. I like this approach to boss fights! I think my favorite was the first one, where there's a surprising variety of mechanics at play: you have to dodge and block against his attacks, change targets (or spin attack) against his minions and throw bombs against the swarms of gnats he summons. As I mentioned earlier, the surprising highlight was playing as a Zora. The room for skill and elegance just in swimming around made the aquatic sections satisfying and fun.

I definitely have some complaints. I wish most of the masks were more useful. Mechanics like the Elegy of Emptiness weren't much fun to play around with. A common annoyance in Zelda games is how often you have to pause the game to change items. Masks can exacerbate this issue, especially for players who understandably dedicate a slot to the bunny hood at all times. There were tons of times when I talked to a shopkeeper with a mask on and had to go through their mask dialog, remove my mask, and talk to them again. Likewise, I wish I could swap a mask for another item while wearing it. Those are essentially nitpicks. I think most of my issues with the game are ultimately no big deal.

It's heartening for a game like this to be so powerful in our popularity contests. I've talked to a lot of people who were turned off by the time loop mechanic or the sense of helplessness it evokes, which I consider to be its important artistic decisions. Of course, there's a cynical part of me that thinks its strength is mostly attributable to GameFAQs' obsession with Nintendo and Zelda in particular - but the fact that it won where Twilight Princess failed at least says something.

Likewise, I don't know how long it might have taken me to revist Majora's Mask without this project, but I'm glad I did, and that makes me feel optimistic for the rest of it.

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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