OoT3D is a great remake and is easily the better version of the game. It has a few
slight faults here and there, but it's improved enough that I'll never replay the original again.
The same can't be said for Majora's Mask 3D. I almost hate MM3D for letting me down after waiting so long... it feels like a game made for people who
weren't fans of the original. I understand that Nintendo wanted to broaden the game's appeal, but they did it at the expense of hardcore fans. Major things I loved about the game (Zora swimming, song of time save system) were carelessly discarded, and dozens of little things- like the Deku scrub's momentum, the notebook intrusions- were changed for the worse with absolutely no reason at all. They also severely nerfed the difficulty- and yes,
they did nerf it. Captain Keeta and Odolwa are jokes now. They also missed opportunities to fix things that actually did need fixing, like the inventory system- why wasn't most of the D-pad used for anything at all? Couldn't the transformation masks have easily been put there? Also, not doing anything about the Ikana gorge/elegy of emptiness segment was pretty baffling, considering the streamlining everywhere else.
In the end, it didn't seem worth it. I still see tons of people complaining about the game saying they hate the time system in the same way as ever. A lot of the remake just feels "off," as if this isn't the Majora's Mask 3D I always envisioned. Even the music is a little botched.... they added a lot of unwelcome reverb effects and generally lost a lot of the music's power. Hear the difference here:
Astral Observatory (original)
Astral Observatory (3ds)
I actually noticed this long before the remake, when club Nintendo released the MM soundtrack CD. It should have been obvious then that the remixed versions meant a remake was underway.
In short, it's a shitty remake. Some people will consider that hyperbolic, since it does look great and detractors of the original obviously feel the changes are for the better. But I say it's a shitty remake because it shits on the original game. It treated Majora's Mask's mechanics like they were
problems rather than assets. A great remake should embrace what made the original great and build on it, like Resident Evil remake did, rather than water down and alter the original to appeal to more fans. I guess the analogy here would be to image REmake having more ammo and unlimited typewriter saves to placate critics.
If it had preserved the original game in some way- like letting you choose an N64 mode that kept the song of time saving- I'd be a lot happier with it. Or if they had implemented the Zora swimming in a less terrible way. But even then, there would still be barrage of little changes for the worse everywhere. I do love the visuals. They really went all out and made the game gorgeous to look at. The gyro controls are also amazing. That's about where my appreciation for the game ends.
Haters of the new swim controls in MM boggle my mind. You banged into walls all the damn time in the Great Bay Temple in the original and it was awful. They actually fixed that and made that temple manageable. You still can do the dolphin swimming in the Bay.
You can't. At least, not without running all of your magic down and being left with no refills whatsoever. I tried zora swimming to get to the pirate fortress on my first playthrough... even swimming there as directly as possible, I ran out of magic before getting there, and then couldn't use the lens of truth to talk to Shiiro. The fact that they didn't add any magic pots to the bay at all means that you can't swim to travel, which is a major problem considering that the bay was designed around that fast swimming ability. Unless you go through the trouble of buying some romani milk just to fuck around, the environment is broken. To me, the fun of the zora swimming wasn't just aimlessly swimming around, it was a legitimately fun way to travel. I think once you learn how to control it, it's not hard to get by without head bumps. And even when they do happen, I don't really care. The swimming is too damn fun for me to care. The new swimming is nice to have as an option for when you only want to move a small amount, but there was absolute no reason to fuck up the old swimming in order to have that. Even if you like the slow swimming, it was a terrible implementation. There's no excusing it.
I don't like Link's model and animations, but they are incredible versions of the games.
For some reason I think the ingame character models is better on the N64 aswell. Less obvious anime.
The character models are much closer to the original designs, so what you're seeing is what they were always supposed to look like:
I personally prefer seeing the characters this way much more than the blocky, polygonal abominations that the N64 hardware mangled them into.