You know, I really liked the gimmick in Majora's Mask.
The idea that you're able to repeat events adds a lot to quests. It allows them to have some sort of gravity and consequence but without forcing the player to reload their game if they mess up. And you can piece together a story in a much more interesting way by being in different places at the same time. It allows you to see the consequences of failure or inaction first.
In other Zelda games, you can start a quest at any time and finish it whenever you want. People will wait for you to help them forever. You can never permanently fail a quest. That takes away some of the significance of what you do because you never see the consequences. Each quest has exactly one ending to it.
In other RPGs, there are multiple ways to solve a quest and multiple endings, but you can only see one of them at a time. If you want to see another, you have to artificially reload the game. This allows there to be gravity to the quests and a threat of failure, but when you actually do fail or get an ending different from the one you wanted, it hurts the gameplay experience because you have to reload the game. There's no appreciation for failure. This has the consequence that most times, people will still wait around for you to help them, because the game needs to be fair when failure is premenant. Otherwise, you could miss out on a quest entirely by being somewhere else when it goes down.
I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas lately. I like the quests in it, but I don't like that I miss out on part of the game. In one playthrough, I only get to see a piece of the whole story. I like that my actions have consequences, but I don't like that I don't get to see the other possibilities. For example, I chose to fight the Powder Gangers in Goodsprings. Now I'll never know their story because they just shoot me. But of course, I wouldn't expect them to suddenly forgive me and then ask for my help. The consequences make sense for the characters in the game and that's great, but as someone outside the game, I'm not completely satisfied. Another thing to consider is, what if I had left Goodsprings and ignored the Powder Gangers? If I had been somewhere else, would they still have attacked? I'm not entirely sure, but I'd bet that they'll be waiting indefinitely to attack the same way that Caesar's Legion is waiting indefinitely to attack Hoover Dam. When applied to all the quests in the game, it means that not a single interesting thing happens in all of the Mojave unless I'm there to affect it in some way.
But if you can travel through time within the game and effectively control an avatar that transcends the world of the game, you can have both. You can have a completely realistic and independent world, full of important events and consequences that happen whether you're there or not. You can have all of that, but without missing any of the content at all. In addition, it allows you to tells stories and organize quests by piecing together information out of order.
Now I don't think Majora's Mask gets all of that right, but the foundation is there. The basic concept is down, and they even add the other dimension of inhabiting the lives of other people. But the thing is, this concept will never be explored in more detail because it came from Zelda, where it really didn't belong, and also because as a concept, it feels like a gimmick. It's hard to approach the idea of this sort of time travel in a way that doesn't seem contrived. For a Zelda game in particular, it would look like they were just reusing the same gimmick even if it was really brilliant.
So it's basically dead. Majora's Mask will be the only Zelda game of its kind and probably the only game of its kind period short of a miracle. But yeah, if I had the ability to choose which direction that Zelda could go in, I'd leave behind Hyrule, Ganon, and the Triforce and follow Majora's Mask
