Majora's Mask - A Retrospective

Well, it's that time of year again. That time where the new releases list dries up like a river in the Sahara desert because all the big titles have been shoved back to Quarter 4 for various asinine reasons (I promised to myself I wouldn't mention Rayman Legends at this point oh bollocks). That time of year when we have to fall back on pre-owned titles to get our jolt of adrenaline that comes from money exchanging hands, or play through games already on our shelves just to stave off the boredom that comes with the long wait. And while I'm easily prepared to do the former, my natural state of "cannot be arsed" usually overrides such commitments, whilst my uni life demands I live on a strict budget in order to keep myself in pocket throughout the year, so a Metal Gear Rising review may not happen just yet.

So, fuck it. I'm going to take Option Number 3 - clamp my hands over my ears and gush about a really old game I really, really like!

See, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is not merely a game I think is good. Majora's Mask is my personal reminder that, for all the samey, linear war shooters on the one side and the condescending, half-arsed puzzle games on the other, gaming as a medium is still worth defending. It's solid proof that games can have both an engaging story and good gameplay without selfishly sacrificing one for another, and it's also a sterling example of taking an established trend down a different route can have unexpected and surprisingly outstanding results. Which is a shame, since every Zelda title (apart from Wind Waker, in my opinion) has mostly been stumbling about, trying to emulate the success of the original without grasping exactly why it worked in the first place.

From a non-gushy, cold and critical standpoint, Majora's Mask has actually aged very poorly. This was the days before the Nintendo gurus had managed to work out proper skeletal animation, so all the characters looked like poorly-made origami blobs held together with Pritt-Stick. On top of that, the graphical updates cobbled onto the Ocarina of Time engine meant that use of the Expansion Pack peripheral was mandatory, otherwise you ended up with flat textures, shitty draw distance and zero lighting effects. Gameplay, meanwhile, is barely evolved from OoT's template, and somehow manages to feature the worst qualities of both old and new Zelda's alike - I forgot how bloody annoying getting every mask in the game was, or how much Tatl grated on my nerves. At least Navi didn't call you a spacker every opportunity she got.

Also fuck this guy. Fuck him sideways.

But where Majora's Mask shines is in the story aspect. Think Bastion meets Looper with a smattering of the Sword of Damocles and that's the game's setup - you have a clock at the bottom of the screen that slowly counts away the three in-game days before the fucking moon crashes down onto the land of Termina and kills everything in it. This adds a sense of urgency to the quest that Ocarina  severely lacked - in that game, there seemed to be no real reason to hurry up and sort out the mess Ganondorf made of everything. Here, we have a clearly defined goal that needs accomplishing, bolstered by the threat of an honest-to-buggernuts apocalypse looming over our heads with that horrible, nightmare-inducing gurn on it's face. Either we save the world one dungeon at a time or we all die in a firey blaze of terror and pain.

The result is a surpsisingly dark and heavy atmosphere and tone that most Zelda games don't seem to have anymore. As the days tick away, you get to learn more and more about the people around you and see how they react to the looming threat bearing down on them. Unlike Ocarina, where the NPC's were mostly there to provide silly dialogue, every character has a name and a personality, and it's fascinating to watch how their attitudes and personalities change as the threat of inescapable death grows ever bigger. Mutoh, the head carpenter, grimly accepts his fate, whilst the postman cracks and becomes a sobbing wreck looking for a way out. You become severely attached to the characters as you do your best to prevent their demise at the hands of this terrible force of nature, which is something most modern Zelda's haven't done to me for a while.

And it's not just watching how the side characters react to the changing of days, either. You get to see snippets of their lives as well, building a vast and richly-detailed world in compasion to the almost empty vastness of Ocarina's Hyrule, which to me always felt somewhat depopulated. You also get to interact with them and influence their lives as well, such as solving Enid Blyton mysteries, infiltrating pirate strongholds or protecting a farm's livelihood from bandits and aliens. And the takes on the different races are surpsingly unique - the Deku are xenophobic dicks, the Gorons hold races, the Zoras love music and an entire ancient empire also gets worked in somehow. It's one of the few games where I give a toss about the side characters, and that's rare.

...No comment.

The time travel mechanic adds another layer of depth to the story as well. Giving the player the ability to rewind time back to the first day seems ripe for abuse at first, but then you kick that ripeness out of the way by removing the player's collectables with every jump. Combine this aspect with the relatable characters and the result is a haunting moral dilemma that forces the player to balance emotional attachment with logic and reasoning. Suppose they fail to save Romani Ranch from the aliens - do they carry on, having to bear the failure for the remainder of the adventure? Or do they rewind time to try again, sacrificing their hard-earned progress to try and redeem themselves? Sometimes, you don't need a binary morality mechanic to force the player to make hard desicions - a magic ocarina is often enough.

I was being facetious earlier - while the gameplay is still built on the classic Zelda formula, enough is done to elevate it above the standards set by Ocarina and make it fresh and original. The masks lend themselves to some creative puzzles and solutions, such as using the silly pig mask to sniff out mushrooms for a healing medicine, the Mask of Truth to pick out the winner for the dog racetrack sidequest or the Zora Mask to navigate underwater passages and kill giant eels to save Zora eggs. It's not gimmicky like Skyward Sword's dowsing mechanic which exists only to showcase the Wiimotion Plus - it's woven neatly into the story and never feels out of place. Also the new Ocarina songs are woven well into the narrative, with creative applications such as calming down a giant, ice-breathing Goron or serenading a Zora lady to make her speak again.

And lead a chicken parade, if you had the time.

...Yes, those do sound odd, taken out of context, don't they? I guess it speaks to the wealth of imagination Nintendo had back in the day, and it just goes to show how something like this wouldn't get made today unless it had a feature to showcase it's console's big gimmick. There are some delightfully oddball moments in the game to juxtapose the heavy atmopshere, such as finding some toilet paper for a disembodied hand, staying up all night listening to an old lady's story, or impressing snooty street artists with interprative dance moves you learned from a ghost. That's the kind of wackyness you'd expect from a Paper Mario game, and yet Majora's Mask pulls it off with such gusto you can't help but applaud it. If only Nintendo would try such things again, rather than the endless fetchquests they seem content to make us do nowadays.

So there you go. A game that I would heartily reccomend to anyone in a heartbeat - not so much on the gameplay, as good as it is, but soley on the story aspect. If Ocarina of Time's story was a King Athur story - an epic romp through a fantastical world, then Majora's Mask is a Harry Potter novel - more focused and with greater intruige and better characters. One could perhaps blame it for the mountains of dialogue and sidequest overload of moden Zelda titles, but that's Nintendo trying to ham-handedly capture the spirit of both this and OoT without understanding the subtleties. And in doing so they've been churning out games that, while great on their own merits, can't simply hold a candle to what somebody managed to squeeze onto a now-obsolete cartridge.

So let me clue you in, Ninty - Majora's Mask worked because it was so off-the-wall compared to pervious titles, and perhaps you should try thinking outside the box the same way you did with this one. Ressurrect that old plot for Link's Crossbow Training, where Link jumps into the future Terminator style. Try a steampunk setting so we can ride in airships and have cars powered by coal, or a spaghetti-western with lasso's and shootouts. Or, if you really want to alienate your hardcore fans, go the DmC route - outsource it to a western developer and tell them to recast Link as a dark-haired emo who punches out bodyguards with one hand, knocks back whiskey with the other and takes a drunken piss on the classic Link outfit in the opening sequence.

...On second thoughts, maybe don't do that.