This is how most of the last hours of this game went in my head:
"The song of time had been played for the last time. Link stared at the clock tower in which 3 days from now he would summon the guardian gods, and hope to stop the end of the world. And hesitated. Had he been the person he was at the beginning of this journey, he would have traveled forward to that moment, 3 days from now, and rushed to stop the moon. And yet, he didn't. He had learned something all those days he'd spent time and time again in Termina. He knew it would be a meaningless victory if the people he saved weren't the people he knew. The ones that had thanked him, the ones with their eyes unclouded by greed, or corruption, or hatred, or shame. The best versions of themselves. He wanted to be the best he could be, too. He pocketed his ocarina and set out to live these next 3 days fully."
---
So, finally a 3D Zelda makes it into my top 5 Zelda games. Majora's Mask is something else, standing so far apart from other Zelda games it's mind numbing to me how it even got made in the first place. It's almost a temporal anomaly itself, existing chronologically between two 3D Zelda games that share many of the flaws that usually stop me from calling them perfect and that Majora's Mask masterfully solves.
Gone is the empty land that other games dare call a worldmap, replaced by a brilliant well-sized hub-world linking visually distinct, lush areas, not to mention tons of methods for fast-travel. Gone are the boring sidequests acted out by copy-paste characters, replaced by stories told by characters with such depth you spend your last 3-day cycle redoing them because that's how much you related to them. Gone is the same copy-paste damsel in distress story of most other Zelda games, and in its place one of the most intentionally profound stories I've seen in a game.
The masks' mechanic is brilliant, and it's a crime Nintendo never bothered to bring it back. In fact, it's like they ignored everything about it after its release, which is a real shame. The fact that each of the transformation masks affected not only what you could do to solve puzzles but also your conversations, how people reacted to you, how you moved and felt turned them into more than simple tools, and considerably reduced the monotony and fatigue of playing the whole game as a single character. Not to mention what a joy it was to glide as a Deku, roll as a Goron or swim as a Zora.
So, that's the important bits of what I have to say about this game. If I had to criticize stuff, which is hard, it would probably be how clunky the Giant's Mask is (that boss battle against the giant worms is a pain) and how boring the Stone Tower switches-sequence to reach the Stone Temple was, specially because you can't skip the small cutscene when creating a wood figure of yourself.
Despite all that, I'm convinced that by playing the 3DS version, I played the best version of the game. It looks and plays wonderfully, the Bomber's Notebook is a godsend and I would have never 100%'d the game or managed to achieve all I did during the last 3-day cycle without it, and that would have been an absolute shame. I hear the complaints about the save system making the game easier, but I honestly never "exploited it" much, from what I can remember. It did save my neck one time I accidentally took the cart out of the 3DS while playing though
Anyway guys, if you haven't, play this game, there's no excuse. And if you have, did you also try to make as much (or at least some) people happy during those last 3 days before the moon came crashing down? here's what I accomplished (spoilers, of course!):
- Saved Pamela's dad
- Restored the four areas
- Saved the deku princess and the monkey
- Taught the troupe girls that crazy dance
- Saved Romani from the alien invasion
- Stopped the discussion at the Mayor's Office
- Gave milk to the troupe leader
- Made the chicks in Romani Ranch grow up
- Saved Cremia from the bandits
- Jammed with the Zora band
- Saved Koume
- Saved the soldier's ghost in the pirate fortress
- Gave Kafei's mom his letter
- Completed the business scrubs' trading sequence
- Made Kafei reunite with Anju
Finally, some discussion ideas:
I'm curious about how you guys interpret the credits sequence. Everything seems to have been fixed, even if you did rush to the moon in the last cycle without helping anyone like I did. Assuming a player did nothing but beat Majora in that last cycle, how did that happen? Did beating Majora magically solve everything, in such a powerful, reality-distorting way that things that didn't happen in the past (like all the missed Kafei quest events) came to happen? Did things just get fixed on their own eventually, without any sort of intervention other than the general curses being gone? Did all 3-day timelines collapse in such a way as to create a perfect timeline?
What do you think are the chances we'll see the mask system return in a future Zelda game? Personally, I'd love to see it implemented in a classic top-down Zelda game, as those are usually the ones I enjoy the most.
Would you like to revisit Termina, or find out more about the masks' salesman (do you think there is more to him than just being a quirky Termina inhabitant)?
I would also ask about the chances of seeing a Zelda with as much emotional depth as this one, but I doubt that's ever going to happen. I'm just glad we got this, and that it got the attention it deserved in the form of this 3D remake so I could play it.
"The song of time had been played for the last time. Link stared at the clock tower in which 3 days from now he would summon the guardian gods, and hope to stop the end of the world. And hesitated. Had he been the person he was at the beginning of this journey, he would have traveled forward to that moment, 3 days from now, and rushed to stop the moon. And yet, he didn't. He had learned something all those days he'd spent time and time again in Termina. He knew it would be a meaningless victory if the people he saved weren't the people he knew. The ones that had thanked him, the ones with their eyes unclouded by greed, or corruption, or hatred, or shame. The best versions of themselves. He wanted to be the best he could be, too. He pocketed his ocarina and set out to live these next 3 days fully."
---
So, finally a 3D Zelda makes it into my top 5 Zelda games. Majora's Mask is something else, standing so far apart from other Zelda games it's mind numbing to me how it even got made in the first place. It's almost a temporal anomaly itself, existing chronologically between two 3D Zelda games that share many of the flaws that usually stop me from calling them perfect and that Majora's Mask masterfully solves.
Gone is the empty land that other games dare call a worldmap, replaced by a brilliant well-sized hub-world linking visually distinct, lush areas, not to mention tons of methods for fast-travel. Gone are the boring sidequests acted out by copy-paste characters, replaced by stories told by characters with such depth you spend your last 3-day cycle redoing them because that's how much you related to them. Gone is the same copy-paste damsel in distress story of most other Zelda games, and in its place one of the most intentionally profound stories I've seen in a game.
The masks' mechanic is brilliant, and it's a crime Nintendo never bothered to bring it back. In fact, it's like they ignored everything about it after its release, which is a real shame. The fact that each of the transformation masks affected not only what you could do to solve puzzles but also your conversations, how people reacted to you, how you moved and felt turned them into more than simple tools, and considerably reduced the monotony and fatigue of playing the whole game as a single character. Not to mention what a joy it was to glide as a Deku, roll as a Goron or swim as a Zora.
So, that's the important bits of what I have to say about this game. If I had to criticize stuff, which is hard, it would probably be how clunky the Giant's Mask is (that boss battle against the giant worms is a pain) and how boring the Stone Tower switches-sequence to reach the Stone Temple was, specially because you can't skip the small cutscene when creating a wood figure of yourself.
Despite all that, I'm convinced that by playing the 3DS version, I played the best version of the game. It looks and plays wonderfully, the Bomber's Notebook is a godsend and I would have never 100%'d the game or managed to achieve all I did during the last 3-day cycle without it, and that would have been an absolute shame. I hear the complaints about the save system making the game easier, but I honestly never "exploited it" much, from what I can remember. It did save my neck one time I accidentally took the cart out of the 3DS while playing though
Anyway guys, if you haven't, play this game, there's no excuse. And if you have, did you also try to make as much (or at least some) people happy during those last 3 days before the moon came crashing down? here's what I accomplished (spoilers, of course!):
- Saved Pamela's dad
- Restored the four areas
- Saved the deku princess and the monkey
- Taught the troupe girls that crazy dance
- Saved Romani from the alien invasion
- Stopped the discussion at the Mayor's Office
- Gave milk to the troupe leader
- Made the chicks in Romani Ranch grow up
- Saved Cremia from the bandits
- Jammed with the Zora band
- Saved Koume
- Saved the soldier's ghost in the pirate fortress
- Gave Kafei's mom his letter
- Completed the business scrubs' trading sequence
- Made Kafei reunite with Anju
Finally, some discussion ideas:
I'm curious about how you guys interpret the credits sequence. Everything seems to have been fixed, even if you did rush to the moon in the last cycle without helping anyone like I did. Assuming a player did nothing but beat Majora in that last cycle, how did that happen? Did beating Majora magically solve everything, in such a powerful, reality-distorting way that things that didn't happen in the past (like all the missed Kafei quest events) came to happen? Did things just get fixed on their own eventually, without any sort of intervention other than the general curses being gone? Did all 3-day timelines collapse in such a way as to create a perfect timeline?
What do you think are the chances we'll see the mask system return in a future Zelda game? Personally, I'd love to see it implemented in a classic top-down Zelda game, as those are usually the ones I enjoy the most.
Would you like to revisit Termina, or find out more about the masks' salesman (do you think there is more to him than just being a quirky Termina inhabitant)?
I would also ask about the chances of seeing a Zelda with as much emotional depth as this one, but I doubt that's ever going to happen. I'm just glad we got this, and that it got the attention it deserved in the form of this 3D remake so I could play it.