The Moon is Down: Games of the Decade (#4)
Majora’s Mask
2000
Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Wii
First, a small lead-in: Zelda games sort of suck. They’re a victim of their own success. Actually, correction, they are victims of Nintendo’s unwillingness to take their balls out of their purse and try new concepts. Actually, correction, they are victims of Nintendo’s inability to craft compelling new concepts effectively and truly push the series in any new direction. And there’s really no excuse. Metroid Fusion pushed its series in a fundamentally different direction. The closest thing Zelda has for that is Wind Waker, but its flawed execution and the utter amount of muddled bullshit that permeates the game does not push the series any direction but on its face. Twilight Princess is the tale of a two world Zelda game retold yet again.
Damn it, Nintendo, take risks. Like you did ten years ago.
Ocarina of Time will never be matched in the minds of gamers who stayed up all night in the late 1990s at their friends’ house. To be a preteen and see an entire world unfold in front of you and be part of a vast epic that spans time and space—man, there’s nothing better than that. Sure, the game had essentially been done before with a Link to the Past, but Ocarina of Time more or less redefined what Zelda games are, it reordered the Zelda mythos, it taught us all how games ought to operate in three dimensions, it brought us into its world, chewed us up and spit us out.
And nothing will be better, and nothing will be the same.
Majora’s Mask essentially gives a middle finger to the entire idea of Ocarina of Time. Link is not trying to save Hyrule, he is not some kid mixed up in an epic adventure across his homeland. He’s already a Hero (capital H!), but nobody knows it. Hell, he is not even really emotionally invested in the beginning. He’s just trying to find his friend. Link’s life did not end in junior high, boys. It kept going. And we caught up with our buddy right before he took everything we liked about his last adventure and turned it upside down.
The greatest thing that Majora’s Mask does is screw with the Zelda formula. We saw this seven years earlier with Link’s Awakening, but the great change in the formula for that game was not in the gameplay but in the narrative. The slow revelation of the story’s darkness that lies beneath the fun and bouncy atmosphere is the greatest cognitive dissonance in a videogame yet. The existentialist questions it poses are pretty deep for any game, especially a Zelda game. The inconclusive final scene wins Best Ending Ever.
Sorry.
Majora’s Mask! Like I as saying, its strength is that it turns the entire Zelda formula on its head. Just four dungeons. A doomed world. The time mechanic. The parallel universe. Masks. The strength of the side-quests. The fact that you can beat it in 38 minutes. I don’t have to explain the three day cycle mechanic to anyone now that its ten years later but what I can do is purpose that we should all agree that it was the best way to differentiate this game and may very well be the best time-based mechanic in a videogame ever.
I have beat Ocarina of Time over twenty times. I have only beat Majora’s Mask four times. I like Majora’s Mask better than Ocarina of Time. Every time I play through Ocarina of Time it is the same–there’s no way to go through the game differently.* The same is definitely not true about Majora’s Mask. You can beat Majora’s Mask casually, picking up items whenever you can and just keep pressing forward, discovering as you go. You can beat the game 100%, which means two dozen masks, tons of side-quests and 52 heart pieces. It takes a more than a few hours. Or you can beat all four temples and defeat the final boss in one three-day cycle and do it all under an hour. The game is widely different depending on which approach you take, but the real value in the game is what it’s meant for me personally.
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Games grow with us. They mark out lives in specific ways. I’ve grown up with Majora’s Mask in a few ways. I beat it just months after arriving in Ohio after living in Colorado for a decade. The first time I went through the game, my little thirteen-year-old brain was blown. I’d find myself just staring up at the moon from all over the game world. From Termina Bay to Snowhead Temple to Woodfall to the upside-down Stone Tower Temple. The moon is always there, just staring. The game is weird like that-you always, ALWAYS see the impending doom, and all but once you know you’re not going to stop it. And yet, you never get depressed while playing. As you get to know the citizens of Termina, you begin to feel for them and their plight. Talking to any character in the final hours on the Third Day shows their despair. But yeah-you never get depressed because you know in the end you’ll set everything right. To a kid who just moved a thousand miles away and knows nobody, there’s something special in that message.
It took me six more years to play Majora’s Mask again. I don’t know why it took me that long. I don’t know why I began. I think it was because this kid down the hall wanted to see it played and I was happy to oblige. At the time, I knew that I had done all I could to get my transfer paperwork in order so I could go to the school I knew I had to go to. That was winter semester of my freshman year in college. After studying and socializing, I’d link up with my friend and I’d sit on his bed and play through Majora’s Mask as he ghostwrote for ESPN.com. He talked to me about March Madness and I learned what I could. We talked about our dads and how they motivated us to be who we strove to become. We talked about life, about happiness, about finding the right girl and getting married. I talked to his fiancé countless times over the phone while he was trying to finish articles that nobody would ever knew he wrote. I’d always start playing around midnight and I wouldn’t stop playing until I was completely exhausted. The problem was that this guy had sleepachnia, so he never saw the purpose of sleeping. His body just didn’t recover with sleep. But something funny happened as I was playing through the game on those winter nights. I began to collect things. Everything. I wanted to not just get all the masks like I had done years ago; I wanted to get all the inventory upgrades, I wanted to fill out all the Bomber’s Notebook, I wanted to get all the heart pieces. And so I did. I got everything single thing completed in the game before I went to The Moon. I guess I didn’t want the game to end. I wanted that experience, and that life, to last forever.
I beat Majora’s Mask again last year on a whim. I had no particular aim: I just wanted to play it, and play it a lot. I didn’t get all the masks. I didn’t get all the items. It was okay. I wanted to go back to Termina just to be back. It was right on the foot heels of completing Ocarina of Time: Master Quest and after being so humbled, I felt it was right to go back to what I knew. I was in-between a lot of things, then. It was blah. It was overshadowed by everything else going on, but it was a nice break. I don’t think I actually ever wound up being Majora’s Wrath on that playthrough, though I got all the way to the Moon.
These past few weeks, my friend and I have completed the famed “3-Day Challenge,” which is to complete all required objectives in the game within one 3 day cycle. Well, it’s actually two cycles, because the first cycle you just run around as a Deku Scrub and do a lot of nothing. It has been by far one of the hardest things I have ever done in a videogame (and I have completed all the Lost Levels and beat Mega Man 9 on Super Hero Mode, which I guess are benchmarks of some kind) but it definitely makes the game feel a hell of a lot different. Now, the game world isn’t something immersive, it’s just a set of obstacles. It’s a racing game, it’s an autoscrolling platforming game. All the side-quests don’t matter. Heart pieces are a luxury you worry about if you have time. In a lot of ways, it is a lot like the Lost Levels. See, in some of the latter parts of that game, the platforming elements transform to make Mario into a rhythm game. Majora’s Mask is the same thing. You get in a rhythm. Guiding Goron Link up the Snowhead Temple path without falling becomes a matter of rhythm; you just have to feel the game. But in making it a speed challenge, Majora’s Mask is no longer an experience–just a game. You’re just pushing buttons on a controller.
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So why is the Fourth Best Game of the Decade? Because it turns the series on its head. Because it’s so fucking confident in what it’s doing. Because the people who crafted it really did care about what they were doing and they knew what they were not doing and they were fine with that. They knew Ocarina of Time would eventually have a “sequel” (rehash), but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be this game. It takes balls to take a series in a new direction, even if it is just for a single game. The reason why it belongs in the Best Games of the Decade list is because it redirected how a Zelda game can unfold and presented an alternate vision of how adventure games can be crafted. For the first and only time in the series, the majority of the game’s content is optional. More importantly, the main point of the game does not lie in collecting the Important Items from going through dungeons but rather it lies in everything outside of it. Adventure games no longer have to be about pure action and saving the world and defeating monsters but rather it can be about figuring out the puzzles of characters’ lives and figuring out how to help make the world a better place, even if it is just for that three day cycle. In short, Majora’s Mask is a landmark title because it rejects the linearity created by and the heavy emphasis on dungeons. The focus of Majora’s Mask is on the characters–the dungeons just happen to be there and the items inside of them help unlock more areas of the game.
Ocarina of Time might have been the more revolutionary adventure game in terms of mechanics. Z-Targeting, clever 3D dungeons, the time travel, the sheer size and length of the main adventure all shaped the genre and set the course for a lot of 3D gaming. Majora’s Mask builds on that and revolutionized the genre in terms of how the adventure unfolds. In some ways, it’s more open-ended nature foreshadowed the prevalence of the sandbox games and the drive for nonlinear adventures that grew over the course of the decade. While Majora’s Mask is hardly a sandbox game and its unknown how much of a real impact it had, there has been no game quite like it before or since. Eiji Aonuma began his claim to the Zelda series with his Water Temple. He came into his own with Majora’s Mask, a game that was the result of a challenge from Shigeru Miyamoto, a challenge to craft a successor to Ocarina. Aonuma won the challenge, crafted a new way forward for adventure games, and then promptly retreated back to the more comfortable ground of the established Zelda formula. Ten years later, we’re bored with the series. We’re still waiting for a game that is this game’s worth successor. We want a game that connects with us, that has feeling.
I don’t want another Majora’s Mask. I can’t go back to being the new kid in Ohio, I can’t go back to playing this for no reason on my friend’s bed. I want new memories that I cherish. I wasn’t sitting around praying for a new Link’s Awakening before this game out, I was praying for something incredibly different. I want this series to get its head out of its ass. This game proves it can be done. So far, the series has generated one bizarre, wonderful oddball game per decade. Here’s hoping I’ll still be playing videogames when the next one is released.
