21st Century Digital Boy

I hereby declare Majora’s Mask to officially be my favorite Zelda game, ever. I’ve just picked it up properly instead of just snooping into it, and it surpasses even Wind Waker for me. I had never even begun to imagine that the Zelda series was capable of creating such a dense, dark and oppressive atmosphere and sheer “what the SHIT” scariness.

Unlike Ocarina of Time and even Wind Waker, time and its passing play more than just a gimmicky role: the time you have to do anything in the game is very limited - three in-game days of about eight minutes each. The KER-TIME-TRAVEL concept from OoT is back, but takes some more getting used to. You can easily travel back in time, but if you do, most of your actions in the world are reversed as well. Important items and the like remain with you, but you lose all of your disposable equipment (bottle contents, rupees, arrows, bombs, EVERYTHING) and people have never seen you before. This means that to get to the absolute end of any quest, you only have about half an hour.

The collectible masks from Ocarina of Time are back as well, but just like the time, they’re not just a gimmick at the side but a central part of gameplay. Many masks are items you get from completing quests and need for others, and three of them allow Link to change shape (accompanied by a horribly disturbing little animation including faces distorted in pain and horrible screaming) for extra abilities.

The plot starts out right after Ocarina of Time, with Link travelling far and wide in an attempt to find his lost companion Navi (HEY! LISTEN), searching for the friend that accompanied him all the way through the trials that were Ocarina of Time, never leaving his side once until the very end, when she finally sacrifices herself to help Link overcome Ganon. A bitter end, and Majora’s Mask keeps it up. The game is overflowing with all kinds of depressing, horrible and outright wrong events, which come back after the next time travel no matter how hard you tried to set them right. All of the heroism seems horribly, depressingly futile when you go back in time and realise for the first time that except for a few very small things nobody will ever noticed, all of your deeds and attempts to rectify the wrongs have never happened, when you walk around the world and notice that nobody remembers you, when you see all of the bad things you worked so hard to help with back where they were, as if you’d never been there.

And then, the game makes you go through that again. And again. And again. And again.

I really have no clue what the writers were on, but dear god it must’ve been horrible.

Which is just what I love about the game - it’s more emotional, more serious and deeper than just about every other Zelda game I’ve played. And I’ve played all but the CD-i ones.

Here’s hoping that Twilight Princess will go down that road again. From last year’s E3 trailer, it looks like it just might.

As an added bonus, let me pimp Machinae Supremacy again - their song Missing Link was inspired by Majora’s Mask.