The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

“You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” the Happy Mask Salesman – his name both mocking and reinforcing his creepy disposition – asks Link, when we meet him in a strange world, cursed, spooked, and incredibly lost. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask remains to this day the most narratively ambitious game in the franchise: establishing an oppressive atmosphere from the very first few minutes, it presents a doomed world that forces people to come to terms with death and loss.

The story opens with Link wandering through a dense forest covered in fog in search of an old friend. The boy, however, soon encounters an elf-like creature wearing an odd mask, who scares his horse away and causes him to fall into a hole in a tree. When he wakes up, Link discovers that he’s been cursed and taken the form of a creature made of wood, called Deku. Pursuing his tormentor, he arrives in Clock Town by a secret passage, and is approached by a distressed salesman – that not-so-happy fellow – who imparts to Link an important task: the creature, Skull Kid, has stolen an important mask from him, a mask with a destructive will of its own that has put the entire world of Termina in jeopardy. If Link cannot retrieve it within 72 hours, it will make the moon fall and kill everyone there.

The first time we see the Majora’s Mask, it appears out of the fog, twisting on Skull Kid’s face. The boy is a little trickster, acting like a mischievous child playing games with people: when Link wakes up after being knocked down off his horse, Skull Kid is looking at the boy’s ocarina, and when he realizes he’s being watched, he quickly tries to hide the instrument behind his back, fooling no one, just like a child caught in the act. And yet.

His laugh, there’s something off with it. Something uncanny, sinister, lurking underneath: it seems to be formed by two superimposed ones, as if he’s laughing and the Mask is too. His words, although belonging to a kid (“Aww, boo-boo. Why the sad face?”), seem especially cruel in context precisely due to their playful tone. It contrasts with his mask, you see, which twists on his face as if alive. Its presence is eerie, menacing. It doesn’t make us afraid, but something much worse: it makes us uneasy.

The forest that surrounds us seals the deal. It’s not just dark and covered in fog, but evocative in its lack of detail: the ominous shape of dark trees in the background, looking like props of a school play, gives a nightmarish tone to the place. When we’re learning how to fly with our new cursed wooden form, inside a tree, the room we’re in is just a dark bottomless void punctuated by giant tree trunks with no top and no bottom. The secret of Majora’s Mask art direction is that it leverages the N64 aesthetic to the maximum: today, the realism conferred by an HD remake would probably kill the mood – put detailed ground textures and a realistic lightning inside that tree, and we’re not spooked anymore. The vibes are gone. It’s supposed to look otherworldly, almost expressionistic.

Majora’s Mask is marked by its eerie atmosphere, after all, which balances elements of horror with the uncanny. The Happy Mask Salesman is emblematic in this regard, popping up around Link suddenly with his strangely broken movements: he moves between the frames, when we can’t watch, going from one stance to another with a sharp cut instead of with a smooth, continuous animation, as if existing outside of space and time. He carries a mask of Mario on his back, which is welcoming, except it’s positioned between that of the demon from Insidious and the one that surely represents Satan. And we quickly learn these masks are not simple, everyday objects. No, they carry souls. He even wears purple, a color usually related to death, and that is here associated with Skull Kid’s spells and other cursed characters.

Speaking of curses, Link’s own transformation into a Deku takes on nightmarish contours, with the protagonist running in a dark void, surrounded by numerous menacing, gigantic figures. Eventually, we acquire a shield with a panic-stricken face engraved on the back, which will forever face us until the end of the game. We also get masks that transform Link into other creatures, which, of course, lead to an animation where he screams in pain and anguish. Even the grass, man, it shakes when we try to cut it and hops away from us, as if afraid, until it simply bursts into leaves. This place, Termina, is not okay. It doesn’t feel right. At all.

Just like in Ocarina of Time, careful attention is paid to lexical choice, too: in the opening, Link does not simply “leave” Hyrule in search of his friend, he “creeps out” of Hyrule. And to this day, Majora’s Mask still remains one of the rare games that play with aspect ratio, decreasing it with each ring of the bell to a new day, which gradually cages the protagonist in the frame, resulting in a potent claustrophobic effect that is marked by the passage of time.

The game’s many set pieces are also bizarre: in one mission, Link must prevent cows from being abducted by aliens, while in another, he watches mummies doing the Cossack dance inside the ruins of a haunted castle. Majora’s Mask is a game that is as eerie as it is funny.

Since the protagonist ends up in Termina by a hole in a tree, the reference to Alice in Wonderland is clear. And the allegory in Majora’s Mask – which is also evidenced by the suggestive names of its setting, Termina and Clock Town – is quite open, allowing for numerous interpretations, such as the claim that Link is already dead or that it was his friend – probably the fairy Na’vi from Ocarina of Time – who perished.

One of the best analysis available points out how each region in Termina can represent one of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief: most of Clock Town’s inhabitants deny the incoming apocalypse, acting as if everything were normal even though the moon closes in on them each day (we see some politicians that “stick to tradition” claiming that the moon falling is a ruse and that evacuating the town will negatively impact their pockets by ruining the incoming festival). Meanwhile, the Dekus, blinded by their anger, are about to burn an innocent monkey in their palace, a Goron spirit doesn’t hesitate to bargain with Link to help his people, and a Zora singer is so paralyzed with depression that they are unable to speak.

But regardless of the interpretation, Majora’s Mask still builds Link’s image as a warrior fighting against fate, trying to prevent or reverse the inevitable death of those around him. And if he’s able to prevent some fatalities during his adventure – even if just momentarily – others appear to be above his powers: Link can rescue that monkey from Deku Palace or help the witch Koume in the forest, but the Zora he finds in the bay is doomed to die in his arms. Moreover, it’s thematically appropriate that the effects of his actions are inevitably reversed at the end of each 72 hours: to fight death is, after all, a vain struggle.

It’s not a coincidence that the game’s most important system involves the passage of time and our control over these 72 hours: we can never cheat death precisely because time is a linear bitch. Every sixty minutes in Termina equals 45 seconds in real life, making the three fateful days last about one hour of playtime. Fortunately, we can travel through time by playing a special song, which takes Link back to the morning of the first day.

In order to take full advantage of this system, directors Eiji Aonuma (who remained a producer in the series) and Yoshiaki Koizume (who went on to direct the brilliant Super Mario Galaxy) built the game around interactions with NPCs, encouraging us to speak with all Termina’s inhabitants and try to solve their problems – which is impossible in just one hour of playtime.

Most people in Termina, especially in Clock Town, have a dynamic routine during these three days, moving around the town with a different goal in mind and performing their chores every passing hour. While some are working on the preparations for the local festival that celebrates precisely the concept of time, others are arguing with the mayor about the possible end of the world. But most people are simply immersed in their routines, taking care of their business and personal problems, purposefully ignoring the impending disaster: life must go on even if it’s about to end.

These characters often have narrative arcs that need our help to progress. The town’s postman, for example, is defined by how strict he is with work: his agenda is immutable, it can never be modified or ignored. If Link tries to talk to him when he’s delivering the mail, the postman will only complain that he is getting behind schedule and asks us to leave him be. However, the impending fall of the moon puts his principles in check, because evacuating the town would force him to leave his post and abandon his schedule. Since his sense of duty seems to trump the one of self-preservation, it is up to us to arrange a solution that will make the postman finally relax about his work and leave – an empty gesture, as the moon will destroy the whole world and not only Clock Town.

Majora’s Mask, due to its premise, is filled with such tragic characters. The most complex secondary mission in the game, for example, involves the impossible relationship of a young couple: even if Link eventually manages to get them together, either the moon falls right after they meet and kills them anyway, or the hero returns in time, separating the couple again.

And, if you’ve been paying attention, it will come as no surprise that some of these people can be quite weird as well. Take Tingle, an old guy who thinks he’s a forest fairy and sells us maps to help his father, who thinks he’s batshit insane. Tingle often screams “Kooloo-Limpah!” which are “the magic words that Tingle created himself,” as he throws confetti around and refers to himself in the third person, so you know, maybe the guy’s father has a point.

Link’s new fairy companion, Tatl, may look like Navi, but they’re nothing alike. Tatl’s got bite: “If I wasn’t dealing with you, I wouldn’t have gotten separated from my brother” she says, blaming Link for being stuck with him (even though she got separated from her brother, Tael, because she was too busy hitting Link on the face and knocking him down too see Tael leaving with their friend, Skull Kid). “So, uh, it’s nice to meet you or whatever,” she says to Link. She’s not very nice.

The constant reversal of events – like that couple’s relationship getting to square one each time we go back in time – also helps build an oppressive atmosphere charged with hopelessness. Each one of Link’s victories in healing Termina, after all, is annulled by his own hands at the end of each cycle. And to further reinforce this feeling of impotence, the changes we cause in the world are far more evident than in Ocarina of Time. When we heal the land of the Gorons, for example, a blizzard disappears from the region, which enters springtime, coming back to life. The areas we can access there, then, change with the growth of the vegetation, but the effect only remains until Link travels back in time… bringing back the lifeless cold to that land.

But it’s Clock Town, the beating heart around which the rest of the game revolves. Each new area explored, each new mask discovered, each new piece of equipment acquired, and dungeon conquered opens new options for dialogue, conflict resolution, and interactions in the city. One of Majora’s Mask’s greatest achievements is the paradox of managing to constantly provide new content even though it repeats the same events over and over again.

There are several systems and mechanics acting in conjunction with the time cycle to prevent it from becoming frustrating to the player. While time travel causes Link to lose all his money and ammo, for example, his masks and main equipment remain intact when he travels in time. This makes gathering items in the environment always necessary, unlike Ocarina of Time, where we could easily have the maximum amount of both ammunition and money and still be “rewarded” with more of them. Certain songs that Link can learn also make life easier: one triples the duration of each in-game hour, giving us more time to deal with things; another advances Link to the exact time of day that we want (in the original version, it was only allowed to jump every six hours with this melody); and a third one allows fast travel to certain key areas in the map.

As the game’s title indicates, Majora’s Mask also introduces a system of masks, which assume a multitude of functions by granting Link certain abilities. Primarily, they are the tools needed to help people in Termina: we can teach moves to two frustrated dancers with the mask of their former mentor, for example, or leave an old lady very happy that we did not sleep during one of her stories because Link was wearing a mask… that causes insomnia. Other masks are useful for exploration, such as the Bomb Mask, which replaces the bombs – so we don’t need to constantly gather them anymore – but damages Link with each use, and the Bunny Hood, which allows him to move faster. Some masks even transform Link into different species (Deku, Goron, and Zora), allowing new forms of interaction with both the environment – Zoras can breathe underwater, while Gorons are able to roll over steep ramps – and with certain characters, who are only open to Link because they believe him to be someone else.

And since it is a title from The Legend of Zelda series, Majora’s Mask also has special dungeons packed with puzzles and dangerous monsters. Although they come in smaller numbers, compared to Ocarina of Time, the dungeons here make up for it with their complexity. If the ones in Ocarina had most of their puzzles contained in their respective rooms, for example, the dungeons here are more open, requiring us to understand the full extent of their geography and architecture. It is not a surprise, then, to notice that a single dungeon in Ocarina of Time may contain almost as many locked doors as the entirety of Majora’s Mask, which has just nine keys in total.

In Snowhead Temple, for example, the puzzles are not about simple actions like hitting devices, killing enemies, or lighting torches. The puzzle logic here is related to building a notion of space, it’s about getting how to reach certain platforms and certain floors. Moving the immense block to its corresponding place is just the beginning of the puzzle: the main challenge is figuring out how to get on top of it, now that it has become a platform. Snowhead Temple also works with verticality, presenting a central tower that allows for movement between floors by jumping from one to another. The only problem with its design is that every time we misjudge the distance and miss the jump, we may fall to the base of the tower, having to climb back to where we were and losing (precious) time.

The Great Bay Temple, meanwhile, is creative at exploring the idea of ​​manipulating water: sometimes, we are tasked with using it as a lever or with alternating between freezing and melting the ice from a water source, controlling its release, and sometimes we must even change the direction of its currents, creating paths to new rooms. Instead of stopping the player’s advance with innumerable locked doors, like the infamous Water Temple in Ocarina of Time, the Great Bay Temple is built by several connected underwater tunnels, allowing for a less linear design. The chest with the key to the boss, for example, can be opened at any time from the middle of the dungeon. In fact, the room with this key also has two hidden fairies, two chests, and two different types of enemies, besides a door that can only be reached with the dungeon’s special item. It is a pattern of the dungeon design here: rooms rarely contain a single puzzle, but offer many challenges.

The Great Bay Temple also benefits from having two mechanically different secondary bosses, who reward the back and forth in the water with bursts of action. On the 3DS version, however, the fight against the main boss, Gyorg, has been redone, now having two distinct stages: the first with Link and the other as a Zora, where we use his ability to shoot fins at mines, causing the monster to swallow them. Despite being a better fight than the original version, there’s no build-up to the main mechanic – the mines –throughout the whole dungeon, which is a letdown.

Now, an excellent addition to the dungeons in any version of Majora’s Mask is the act of collecting fairies. In each dungeon, there are fifteen of them hidden inside pots, chests, or enemies, which gives us a push to fully explore each nook and cranny of the place. And, unlike the Skultullas in Ocarina of Time, which become useless from a certain point on, saving all the fairies in a temple here always gets us useful rewards, such as having Link’s magic bar doubled.

Another significant improvement compared to Ocarina of Time is the fact that the monetary system here is a bit more useful. The game features a good number of minigames (such as target practice, treasure hunting, and racing) that charge for entrance, and it introduces a bank system that preserves our account balance after time travel (don’t ask how, however, for twisted are the ways of capitalism) and rewards us if we can save more than 5000 rupees in total.

Finally, the soundtrack composed by Koji Kondo is one of his best works. The theme of Clock Town, for example, has three variations. The first is joyful, appropriately unaware of the approaching disaster. As the second day approaches, alongside the rain, the instruments are changed to reflect a more melancholic tone: the percussion comes out and enters the violin and the ocarina. The third version is the most impressive: the pacing of the melody is accelerated, imparting urgency, but the main effect is that of imminent tragedy, generated by a continuous bass chord in the background.

With its unsettling setting, carefully built atmosphere, fascinating systems, and complex dungeons, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is one of the best games in an already excellent series.

December 23, 2024.