LogFAQs > #961349330

1. The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask (Nintendo 64, 2000)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/3/AAPnqYAACwfh.jpg

Majoras Mask is a fascinating game. Even those of you who detest it I think will acknowledge that it is, by some significant margin, the most interesting and unique of the 3D Zeldas, if not the entire series. Certainly, some of you decry this as a flaw, and while I understand how you could reach that position, youre also totally wrong.

Kidding.

Sort of.

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Majoras Mask does some things intrinsically that most other games in its genre, and of its time period, dont do well, if at all. I alluded to this when I talked about Pikmin, but its even truer here: Majoras Mask is a game that has stakes. Your initial response, if you are wishy washy about the game, might be How can it have stakes! You just reset the timeline! While it is true that you can reset the timeline, I think its that ability that actually heightens the stakes. Over the course of playing the game, learning the intricacies of Clock Town and Termina and its residents, you cannot help but grow attached to them. You see and affect the rhythms of their lives. You save an old woman. You help a young couple in dire straits get married. You dont know that this will happen, at least not the first time you play the game, and it takes you several cycles to aid these strange, but by-and-large good, townsfolk, and to heal the environment around them. When you have to reset the timeline, youre truly pulled in two directions: the things youve improved are undone, but youre closer to fixing it for good. As long as you play the Song of Time in time. And if you dont, god, do you feel terrible.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/6/AAPnqYAACwfk.jpg

Majoras Mask has a lot of qualities that I think have aged gracefully, whether or not they were intentional in the first place. It is an unabashedly humanist game, in a way that video games seldom are, even now. Ironically, the most humanist game I can think of since, Hades, features precisely one living human. Perhaps thats not a coincidence, though, because Majoras Mask embraced some of the qualities of roguelites before they were properly a genre. Each time through the timeline, you gain items, knowledge, and experience that help not only your progress, but the people (and Dekus, Gorons, and Zoras) around you in the game. I dont know much about the history of environmentalism in Japan, but its hard not to look at the game now and see poisoned swamps and eternal winter and polluted oceans and increasingly frequent natural disasters as omen-like, if not an outright political-artistic statement following the climate change conference in Kyoto in the late 90s. I also think Majoras Mask is a more emotionally engaging game than most anything else in the Nintendo Pantheon. I mentioned the emotional attachment one feels toward Terminas residents, but theres a breadth and depth of emotion present that you dont expect from a flagship Nintendo title. Its a sorrowful, weird, unsettling game at times; its charming, joyous, and romantic at others. It feels akin to a horror game much of the time, not just in the sense of impending doom, but in some of the settings you find yourself in - like the dark recessed corners of Woodfall and Snowhead temples - and in the enemies, like the eerily human-faced Goht or the first-person cutscene that introduces Gyorg. Not to mention the Happy Mask Salesman.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/7/AAPnqYAACwfl.jpg

Perhaps its fitting, then, that this game came out the week of Halloween - October 26, 2000. We were still in the house I grew up in then; we would be for four more years. It was an old house in an old city, creaky from years of strong winds due to its location on a sort-of peninsula. It was in that house, in the waning days of fall, in the dark (remember, the clocks changed in October then), that I played Majoras Mask for the first time. My parents were pretty strict, and my time playing video games was generally limited to weekends. But that summer, as a means to gain leverage at his job, my dad changed from second shift to third shift. My mom, a career healthcare worker, always worked first shift. They were both home in the evenings for us, until the three of us went to bed and my dad went to work. I was never good at sleeping. As a kid, I often laid in the dark in my room, listening to whatever baseball games I could find on the radio - in the summer, at night, you could get signals from as far as Detroit, Cleveland, and Cincinnati.

When Majoras Mask came out, it was all I could think about. I would lie in bed, listening to WFNX or WBCN (may they never be forgotten), listening to alt rock and replaying the game in my head, trying to puzzle it all out. I needed to play more, to see what happened, and how. At some point, probably in early November, it hit me: I could just go play the game once my dad left for work. My parents bedroom and the playroom with the N64 were on opposite sides of the house on different floors. Sure, it wasnt a big house, and it wasnt soundproof, but those were details I did not care about because I was twelve and a half. I kept the volume loud enough so that only I could hear it, and I sat too close, Poltergeist style. I vividly remember playing through and beating Snowhead Temple for the first time in the dead of night as howling gusts of wind crashed into our house, as if the eternal winter Id just banished from Terminas north had come for me. I dont think I was ever truly frightened, at least not like I had been with Resident Evil 2 two years earlier, but it was an extra degree of unsettling immersion in a game that was already more immersive than anything Id played before (and most things Ive played since). No game is seared into my memory as strongly and across as many senses as Majoras Mask. Like the residents of Clock Town, it left a lasting imprint on me well after the adventure was over.