The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D

Despite being developed in just one year, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask remains the most narratively ambitious game in the franchise. Establishing an oppressive atmosphere from the very first few minutes, Majora’s Mask presents a doomed world that forces people to come to terms with death and loss.

The game begins soon after the events of Ocarina of Time, 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 a strange 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 at the world of Termina, by a passage in Clock Town, and is approached by a distressed mask salesman who explains what has happened: the creature, called Skull Kid, has stolen an important mask from the salesman, a mask with a destructive will of its own that has put the entire world in danger. If Link cannot retrieve Majora’s mask within 72 hours, freeing the giants from every region of that world, the mask will make the moon fall and kill everyone in Termina.

The game’s most important system involves the passage of time and our control over these 72 hours. 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 Koizumi (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 doing their chores every passing hour. While some are working on the preparations for the local festival that celebrates precisely time, others are arguing with the mayor about the possible end of the world – the moon is getting closer, after all – and calling for an evacuation. 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 Link’s 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 only complains that he is getting behind schedule and asks Link to leave. 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 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.

This constant reversal of events builds an oppressive atmosphere charged with hopelessness. Each one of the Link’s victories in healing that world is annulled by his own hands at the end of each cycle. The developers further reinforce this contrast by making the changes that Link causes in the world far more evident than in Ocarina of Time. When the giant of the icy area is reanimated, for example, a blizzard disappears from the nearby region, which enters springtime, coming back to life. The areas that we can access there change with the growth of the vegetation, but the effect only remains until Link comes back in time, bringing back the lifeless cold to that land.

Clock Town is the heart in which the rest of the game revolves around. Each new area explored, each new mask discovered, each new equipment acquired, and each 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 and reverts situations back to square one.

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 were still “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 melody 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 happy that Link did not sleep during one of her stories because he 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 the protagonist because they believe him to be someone else.

Majora’s Mask is marked by its dark atmosphere, which balances elements of horror with the uncanny. Since the protagonist ends up in Termina by a hole in a tree, the premise’s reference to Alice in Wonderland is evident. And, as in the work of Lewis Carol, the fantastical universe of Majora’s Mask can be analyzed as an allegory for the protagonist’s internal conflicts: his solitude is reflected in the way most characters around him have to deal with the feeling of loss, often manifested in the figure of death.

The allegory in Majora’s Mask – which is also evidenced by the suggestive names of its places, 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 Na’vi from Ocarina of Time – who perished. One of the best theories points out how each region in Termina can represent one of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief: while most of Clock Town’s inhabitants deny the apocalypse, acting as if everything were normal, 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.

Regardless of the interpretation, Majora’s Mask 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 is able to prevent some fatalities during his adventure – even if just momentarily – others appear to be above his powers: Link can rescue the 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 is thematically appropriate that the effects of his actions are inevitably reversed at the end of the 72 hours: to fight death is, after all, a vain struggle.

This adds a macabre atmosphere to the game, which is further enhanced by other elements. Just like in Ocarina of Time, careful attention is paid to lexical choice: in the opening, Link does not simply “leave” Hyrule in search of his friend, he “creeps out” of Hyrule. The encounter with Skull Kid is emblematic: his mask gradually appears in the fog of the forest twisting itself while the character’s laugh seems to be formed by two superimposed ones, generating an uncanny effect. Link’s own transformation into Deku takes on nightmarish contours, with the protagonist running in the darkness, surrounded by numerous menacing, gigantic figures.

Eventually, Link acquires a shield with a panic-stricken face engraved on the back, which will forever face the player until the end of the game. The Happy Mask Salesman is equally scary, constantly moving between frames, popping up around Link suddenly. He carries a mask of Mario on his back and it’s positioned between that of the demon of Insidious and the one that surely represents Satan. The character even wears purple, a color usually associated with death and that here is related to Skull Kid’s spells and cursed characters. The masks that transform Link into other creatures, meanwhile, lead to an animation in which Link screams in pain and anguish. And to this day, Majora’s Mask also 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 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.

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, 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 logic of the puzzles there is related to building a notion of space, being about how to reach certain platforms and how to get to 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 that we misjudge the distance and miss the jump, we may fall to the base of the tower and have to climb back to where we were, losing – precious – time.

The Great Bay Temple, meanwhile, is creative when exploring the idea of ​​manipulating water: sometimes, we are tasked with using water 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 temple’s design: 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 phases: 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 temple, 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, who 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 to store the money collected and preserve the amount during time travel (don’t ask how, however, twisted are the ways of capitalism), rewarding 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.