The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

It’s tempting to split the game down the middle here somewhere to try to rectify its conflicts: overworld versus dungeons, story versus gameplay, even Koizumi’s Clock Town versus Aonuma’s outer villages.¹ Pithy comments like “an official edgy ROM hack” don’t do justice to the staggering depth of the developer’s notebooks, tossing out off-kilter concepts on the fly and slamming them into the game with just months until the game went gold. At the same time, this pernicious crunch led to peaks and valleys in quality, a devastating proposition when building on the bones of Ocarina of Time, which leaned heavily on holistic grandeur and originality to avoid putting the shallow gameplay front and center. The opening hours do this no justice either: the intro and disconcerting warp into the clock tower to meet the Happy Mask Salesman sell the game’s dedication to incoherent spaces and chaotic personalities early, and your jaunt around the town on the first cycle gives a glimpse into the engine behind the emotional core, but it’s seized away just as quickly when it shoos you out to tackle Woodfall, the most forgettable stretch of the entire game. The intricacies of the lives of those in Clock Town and the malignant effects that the Skull Kid has wrought on each will have to wait.

Much of this has to do with multiple interlocking systems that make up mask collection, the game’s secondary objective and de facto True Ending precondition. The effects tied to most masks relate to some problem in the world that will then give either a piece of heart or another mask, effectively spooling out the trade quest from Link’s Awakening and Ocarina of Time into a broader, less linear permutation. However, where Ocarina of Time has its mask trading pre-time skip and then opens up the entire traditional trading quest right after the time skip, when you can get around the majority of the map but don’t have access to each temple yet, Majora gives you that taste at the start yet won’t let you fully dive in until you’ve completed Snowhead, right at the halfway point of the game. Not only is it later than its predecessor, but less of Ocarina’s selling point rides on your enjoyment of the emotional rhythms of its trading quest,² whereas so much of the life of Clock Town and the behavior of the town folk outside of their outward faces only appears once you can get to Romani Ranch. With the left-field aliens quest finished, you gain both Epona and another quest that opens up the Milk Bar, finally toppling the dominoes that will lead to you working through the troubles of everyone in Termina. Once you’ve gotten to this point, the game goes from an unnecessary Ocarina retread to a major conceptual expansion of its formula, putting its dungeon churn on the back-burner to create a richer up-front text… on the back-end of the game as a whole.

The game takes a break around the halfway point to let you explore Romani Ranch, regaining Epona in the process. However, if you don’t protect the ranch from a group of cow-abducting aliens on the first night, they’ll kidnap and brainwash the poor girl living there, leaving her in a trance until you reset time. [src]

This isn’t saying that the only interesting parts of the game can be found in the Bomber’s Notebook; getting Epona also opens entry into Great Bay, the third major area of the game and the best marriage between the game’s core and its rigid “go to area, help the populace, solve a dungeon” structure harvested and hardened from Ocarina.³ Many of the masks you receive are ones you create by “healing” the dead with the Song of Healing, taught to you by the otherworldly Happy Mask Salesman. When Link wears these masks, he embodies their qualities, giving them a way to “speak beyond the grave” and lend their talents to the quest at hand. When you enter Great Bay and start puppeting Mikau’s corpse around the Zora village, it becomes clear that his bandmates in the Indigo-Go’s (including his lover, Lulu) have no idea of his death, making Link’s actions in his guise an occlusion of his true fate. The intimacy that these people share with the supposed Mikau is unearned by Link, with them confiding their true nature into a stranger in a voyeuristic tour of his daily life. Link doesn’t waste the opportunity: by saving Mikau’s unborn children with Lulu, he’s preserving Mikau’s legacy past his death. But whether Link actually reveals the deception to his bandmates is another matter, as he takes the stage for one final show in the epilogue before promptly leaving Termina forever. These moments of future mourning for the Zora are never shown on screen, echoing other unspoken or unseen moments of loss or estrangement: Gorman and his brothers, the Deku Butler’s son, Pamela’s father’s initial transformation.

Although this concept can be somewhat extended to the Deku Mask (all but said to be the Butler’s son), it doesn’t quite hit the right notes during its time to shine in Woodfall, nor with Darmani’s ghost and his Goron Mask in Snowhead. The former is obviously restricted by said Butler not appearing until after Woodfall Temple has been cleared,⁴ and the latter can’t supersede the light-hearted, confused comments of the Goron townspeople, who have already given Darmani a hero’s grave and believe him to have risen from the dead. Instead, the lengthy preamble tied to each of these dungeons becomes all the more apparent. Ocarina’s aforementioned dungeon churn makes its questing in-between relatively sparse,⁵ whereas Majora supplements its lack of dungeons with long pre-dungeon sequences to collect key items and meet the townsfolk. In the first half of the game, this feels especially disconnected from the game’s thematic core, with more traditional “save the princess” and “fix the weather” kinds of sweeping, impersonal tragedy that lack the claustrophobic register or complex inner life of the rest of the game’s inhabitants; beating the Woodfall and Snowhead temples restores unconditional joy and peace to their residents, while the same can’t be said for Great Bay or Ikana. What adds insult to injury here is that, for all I can defend in terms of Zelda adventuring, it’s harder to excuse here when it so heavily cribs from Ocarina. The Lost Woods and guard stealth sections get reused as filler in Woodfall, the Lens of Truth gets abused in Snowhead, and Gerudo Fortress and Haunted Wasteland retreads hide Lulu’s eggs in Great Bay. It’s only by the time you get to Ikana Canyon that the designers of these areas catch onto what the Clock Town writers were cooking: this preamble is chopped up into a loosely connected anthology of mini-quests involving the lingering lives of those who survive after death, eventually pushing Link to splinter off those who gave their lives for his masks into their own hollow bodies again to take him to the top of the Stone Tower.

If the Butler’s challenge has too much downtime with Deku Link, you can always come back with the Goron transformation to jack up the skill ceiling. [src]

What these moments lack in emotional resonance, they make up for in their evolution of Link’s base physics. His regular fine-grain control, momentum conservation, and deep toolkit from Ocarina never gets pushed in either N64 entry, overstuffing and overtuning him for the sake of completeness in a similar way to Mario in Super Mario 64. The transformation masks finally put the flexibility of the base system to good use: from the jump, you’ll find that the Deku Mask carries spin momentum directly into his water hopping, which comes into play in the shockingly open Butler challenge, pitting Link against moving platforms over water, plenty of slopes, and some mandatory mid-race transformations to hit switches and jump over gaps. The Goron Mask and its roll provide arguably the most dense addition to Link’s moveset, negating the tedious traversal while putting the N64’s analog stick to good use in a grippy, touchy handling model. It’s unfortunate that its dedicated movement minigame, the Goron Race, offers a track too wide to highlight its turning characteristics and ricochet trajectories in the same ways as other challenges (such as the timed lava switch challenge in Stone Tower Temple) while straining the limits of the physics engine in its interactions with other Goron racers hurtling down the track. Still, it fares better than the Zora movement, which offers a fluid swimming implementation with a neat surface leap that the developers seemed to not be able to design challenges around outside of perfunctory ring trials. When the preambles or side quests put these to good use, however, they add some new meat on the bones that Ocarina never quite expressed, even when it’s as simple as showing off the Zora Mask’s built-in boomerang through a pot breaking minigame.

At first glance, the toolkit overhaul that each transformation mask gives you seems like the designers’ way to break free of Link’s Awakening dungeon conventions (get single-use item in dungeon, use item to solve rest of dungeon), but they fall back on this premise more often than not, struggling to justify their usage for real tests of execution competence in favor of the tried-and-true lock-and-key puzzles that defined Ocarina. Yet the designers get out over their skis regardless, hyping the dungeons up as interlocking puzzle boxes and straying from Ocarina’s variation in spatial narrative for each of its dungeons.⁶ In the process, each dungeon gets too hung up on a underwhelming, rigid design formula. Each of the Majora dungeons centers around a particular landmark⁷ that Link must alter in order to access the boss’s chamber. Having an architectural element like these that need to be continually manipulated to access different parts of a dungeon can serve as a great source of intrigue in the non-complex puzzle space that Zelda thrives in, but each dungeon falters in this regard: the landmarks serve mostly as virtual one-way valves to a second set of rooms, with continual manipulation unnecessary. Great Bay Temple, the best of the bunch, takes place in an anachronistic semi-electric watermill, where a series of cables run across the temple through underwater tunnels that Zora Link can swim through. The central landmark here is twofold: a waterwheel in one room drives a giant fan stirring water in the next, controlling the direction in which you can swim into the tunnels. Starting a flow through the different cables creates water spouts that can be used as platforms, and with the red one enabled, you can return to the waterwheel and access a switch that reverses the wheel’s direction, changing the rotation of the fan and opening up a new set of tunnels for you to swim into. At this point, there’s no need to alter the fan any longer: you have access to the whole second half of the dungeon, including the boss room. At least this example is spatially contextualized by floating backwards through several tunnels flowing through rooms you’ve previously been in with the cabling showing how each room runs back to the landmark, whereas Snowhead Temple’s giant central pillar just opens the top floors of the dungeon with few other rooms not immediately in its orbit,⁸ and Stone Tower Temple shies away from stressing its gravity flipping concept by only making you flip the entire dungeon once. Go through the temple once, find yourself back at the beginning, flip it, make another trip through, and call it a day. Outside of two self-contained rooms that contain eyeroll-inducing flip puzzles (one where you flip to walk across the ceiling lava and then immediately flip back, the other where you flip a block between the floor and ceiling to get it onto a switch), the spatial complexity they could have wrung out of this concept by making it more frequent or more accessible gets completely thrown away. They even reflect the dungeon horizontally upon flipping it to avoid making you reorient the room layout in your head!⁹

Stone Tower Temple has this central gravity flip gimmick, but it also has to shoehorn in moments for you to use the unrelated light arrows. The result are moments like Gomess, this pace-halting midboss that interrupts the ideas that the rest of the dungeon has so that you can shoot light arrows at it in an empty room. This isn’t the only midboss either; Stone Tower Temple has two other ones as well, one of which is repeated from earlier. [src]

The effect this creates makes their puzzle box nature overtake any sense of their existence in space; the layouts of each dungeon reflect the need to place a series of puzzles around each other, much like Ocarina’s most incoherent dungeon, Shadow Temple, rather than drawing from a higher concept that then has puzzles placed in it. This hurts the usage of the transformation masks as well, which end up having their discrete strengths cataloged and separated for use in application to particular puzzles without ever diving into the nuance of their movement abilities. The bow exacerbates this by giving the designers a security blanket to really tumble all the way back into the aforementioned Awakening design paradigm: get a new arrow type in each dungeon, and apply it liberally to everything you see afterwards. Combining these yields a peculiar regression from Ocarina, which disguised its simple puzzles behind quantity and a heap of pizzazz. Majora instead draws out its lazy puzzles, setting up interesting new concepts and then hedging on them, from the repetitive Stone Tower climb to frequent switches into masks to interact with a flower launcher, ramp, or pool for 15 seconds. One aspect that does give them more room to breathe and build upon their work are the stray fairies, which tighten up the lofty Gold Skulltula sidequest from Ocarina by restricting them to and segmenting them between the dungeons.¹⁰ By making these objectives optional, the designers felt more at ease making players consider the interconnected architecture of each area and use tools that weren’t necessary otherwise. Other puzzles hint at where the designers could had gone if they were willing to push harder. The most glaring example of these, two waterwheels on a single shaft in the first room after reversing the fan in Great Bay Temple, can have the vertical stream of water powering them frozen with an ice arrow to hold them in place, allowing you to use them as platforms to progress and grab fairies. The Japanese version of this room made you time the shot to get a usable angle, which not only disappoints me that they changed it, but also begs the question of whether they could have made different angles useful to accessing multiple rooms or reaching stray fairies. The same follows in the room after, which uses a one-off seesaw interactable with a raised side based on streams of water you can freeze and unfreeze from the ceiling. With Chu-Chus throughout the room that you can freeze, why can’t you use them as counterweights if you lure them to a seesaw? In the most holistically convincing and interesting dungeon in the game, the designers still repeatedly bungle the premise and then throw it away in search of the next puzzle idea. Neither of these involve the Zora transformation at all!

The three-day cycle also scarcely integrates with the dungeons; to make it so you can activate the world effects of beating a dungeon on a subsequent cycle, the game lets you awkwardly teleport to the boss room to unceremoniously rekill the boss and enjoy spring in Snowhead or clean water in Woodfall, for example. Given that you can extend the overall length to nearly three real hours at will and very little outside of Clock Town depends on the time, it should be evident that the cycle itself is less a mechanical consideration and more of an elaborate framing device for the schedule of the townsfolk and the slow approach of the moon. For what it draws your attention to about the game, perhaps this is for the best. Receiving the Bomber’s Notebook and seeing the time slots for interacting with each character belies how many more actions they take over the course of their day: roaming around town, having conversations you can eavesdrop on, and reacting to the different effects of the actions you take throughout the day. Follow Anju around and she’ll tell you about the history of the inn as a restaurant when she’s in the kitchen in the morning, listen to her argue with her somewhat befuddled grandmother when she serves her a meal, and find her defying her family and staying in Clock Town if you give her Kafei’s pendent. Claim the reservation from her from the Goron of your same name, and you’ll find him sleeping outside that evening. Her quest with Kafei alone intersects with the old lady from the Bomb Shop, the postman, Madame Aroma (Kafei’s mother), the thief Sakan, and the Curiosity Shop owner all at different points, with the actions you take changing what’s feasible down the road and what you can obtain depending on events such as Sakan dying early and who you give Kafei’s letter to. It mandates that you take multiple cycles to experience all of the possible timelines, which means that you can’t storm through and route out a way to do it all at once, and yet this favors the game’s commitment to observation triumphing over constant interaction.

The postman’s schedule is one of the richest in the game, varying based on the status of letters tied to other quests, and constantly rotating through his rounds through the town and then his personal activities. Closer examination reveals that he’s compulsively self-soothing through his job, so irrationally lashed to his service to the town that he writes himself a letter begging him to leave. By denying yourself the opportunity to deliver the letter towards the end of the Anju/Kafei side quest, you can let him take a final order that leads to him being able to escape, saving him without breaking his psyche. [src]

Look elsewhere and you’ll find this attention to detail represented throughout the game. Keaton isn’t just a cute mask mascot, it’s an actual creature that can appear in the world to give you a quiz. The masks of many typical enemies such as Gibdos and Stalfoses let you engage in actual conversation with them, progressing the critical path in Ikana Canyon while also clueing you in on secrets in the Oceanside Spider House. My personal favorite involves the Indigo-Go’s again, where their unique personalities shine through when you find an unfinished song from Mikau if you read his diary. Playing this for the bassist will let the two of you jam on it, emphasizing your musical connection, and then playing it again in a different form for the pianist will key in on his insecurity and tendency to bite material, causing him to exchange you a piece of heart for the song. None of this is telegraphed by the game; it merely fleshes out the world and rewards you for engaging with it as if it were real, whether feeding the aggressive fish in the Marine Research Lab or watching the Part-Timer take over the night shift at the Trading Post while his coworkers sneaks on over to his side hustle. Enough effort was put in to make particular fixed effects apply game-wide as well, even when they seem to not matter, such as both title deeds and key letters working when giving paper to the hand in the toilet, or the Bremen Mask leading many animals around even when not at the Cucco Farm. These elements have the kind of focus and care that the dungeons lack, and they improve on the smaller, less connected sidequests from Ocarina in a way that fits that game’s gesturing to character conveyance and vaguely systemic items.

And just like in Ocarina, the Gossip Stones help convey a lot of this information, to an extent much more relevant to getting all the pieces of heart and learning the potential effects of each mask compared to the flavor text that dominated Ocarina’s implementation. Once you obtain the Mask of Truth (theoretically right after getting the bow), you can begin mining information from them and applying it; I enjoy this internal hint implementation because it rewards exploring in its own way, giving you tidbits that unveil some of the trickier or straight-up illogical side quest elements and reminding you of interactions that you may have forgotten in the shuffle. In this way, the unrelated Beneath the Well pseudo-dungeon feels like the one point that the designers actually attempted to build a challenge gauntlet out of the information economy that dominates the overworld portions of this game. By asking you for specific items to open doors, you’re tested on your knowledge of where you can obtain each item, with virtually everything having multiple ways to get it, either through purchase, fulfilling minor objectives, or procurement in the field. It’s not exhilarating, and it solves itself by providing many of the items within the dungeon itself if you navigate the rooms in the right order, but where in a vacuum it’s tedious, it makes sense within the framework that the game is trying to follow.

The game’s ending adds new scenes based on the masks that you’ve recovered, showing life for the characters after Link has solved their problems. While some of it still reflects the grief present in the normal game, it does cop out of admitting that not everyone can be saved on one cycle; instead, your collective actions over the course of the game seem to all instantiate at once, although those untouched by Skull Kid’s powers meet their fate regardless. [src]

Even beyond this, the main appeal of these tasks are the moments of characterization and contextualization that exploring these gives you, seeing how they react to the moon or the personal turmoil they’ve been subjected to, all under highly varied, smeary, motion blur-laden imagery. For the Skull Kid’s backstory to come less from Tatl’s flashbacks, which the writers quickly discard, and more from Anju’s grandmother reading stories to you once you’ve obtained the All-Night Mask indicates a willingness on the developer’s behalf to stow key material away from the critical path and assume you’re willing to dig for it. Once you reach the moon, this all crystallizes: the shock of seeing the Happy Mask Salesman’s face attached to these playing children, all obscured by the masks of the monsters you killed; the idyllic calm of the tree on the plains, slowing the framerate to a crawl while birds swoosh through the branches; and then the boy on the ground wearing Majora’s Mask, curled into a ball and lonely. Of course, once you fork over your masks to the children to signify your commitment of the people of Termina, you’re gifted with some of the laziest execution challenges that they could have possibly come up with; the Zora one being literally a bunch of straight tunnels with splits that lead to separate exits seems like a complete dearth of creativity regarding the mechanic, and yet its infinite looping and seeming lack of access to the outside world gave it a menace that the other, barely superior challenges lack. Their reward being a mask that turns off the final fight makes sense in the same lens that justified the cycle’s inclusion, however. Why bother taking up time on a mediocre boss fight when outcome of your rescue of the town’s populace finally appears afterwards? And that’s even with these scenes holding their cards close to their chest on the final outcomes of some of the most fleshed out characters in the game.