Games I Played in 2026 - The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
Console: N64
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Release Date: October 26, 2000
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is an action-adventure game with a focus on puzzles, sidequests, and time management. As one of the last first-party games on the N64, Majora's Mask is surprisingly complex mechanically, featuring a 3 day time loop with NPCs that all have their own schedules and multiple interweaving yet simple sidequests and events. Though technically a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time that even reuses a majority of its assets, Majora's Mask feels like its own unique game, not just from it's predecessor but the rest of the series. While I had played a fair bit of Ocarina of Time before, I only first finished it about two years ago; despite being a huge Zelda fan, I had never played Majora's Mask, but seen a friend play it and watched videos and playthroughs on it before. Therefore, this was pretty exciting for me: playing the last major 3D Zelda game I have never played.
A TERRIBLE FATE
Deku Link standing in Clock Town, the game's main hub. |
Majora's Mask's plot is one that's famous: Link, while searching for Navi after the events of Ocarina of Time, winds up in a forest and has his ocarina and horse, Epona, stolen from a Skull Kid wearing the titular Mask, and after giving chase ends up in the odd land of Termina and turned into a Deku Scrub by the Skull Kid. With three days before the Moon falls on Termina, Link has to use his regained Ocarina to manipulate time and use this period of three days to free the Four Giants, save Termina, get his horse back, help Tatl (a Fairy that used to be Skull Kid's), and stop Skull Kid.
Even today, while many games have been inspired by games like Ocarina of Time, Breath of the Wild, and A Link to the Past, it's rare to see a game try this Groundhog Day-esque approach to a game's structure. In fact, even within the Zelda series, Majora's Mask stands out as experimental and weird. It's ambitious, especially for being a game made in under two years, and yet it somehow, someway, manages to not only stick the landing but excel at what it's trying to do.
I do feel like I have to push back a bit on the game's reputation as being "the darkest" Zelda game, though. There's no denying that Majora's Mask deals with tragic and morbid events, tackling subjects like death, impending doom, and accepting your inevitable fate; you get to see the ways NPCs deal with their coming deaths: some try to take refuge, others stubbornly defy it, and some just curl up in a ball and cower. What helps is that, unlike Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask is very well-written, with characters having loads of personality and having their own "voice," as opposed to the previous game's stiff writing, and the game is also designed with the intention of having the player interact with NPCs constantly to piece things together.
Putting an entire princess in a tiny bottle she definitely doesn't fit in. |
However, Majora's Mask is also a game that is deeply aware of its own dreariness, and it feels like there's quite a bit of goofiness to balance it out. While it does create a bit of an offputting juxtaposition at times, I'd argue that it's not as weird or dark as people say it is. Rather, it's more of a somber experience, as things are just rarely happy at all. Ocarina of Time leaned more in the direction of horror than Majora's Mask does, being more outwardly macabre. Still, that doesn't change the fact that Majora's Mask is a dark game, I just think its reputation as one is overblown, and it's not a game that's dark 100% of the time like I'd been led to believe.
It's a rare game where I feel like the intended experience is to do all the side content, because the NPCs are wonderful. Some are quirky, others are surprisingly complex for an N64 game, and others are one note but funny. A majority of them are returning designs from Ocarina of Time, but used in a completely different way. It's an obvious way to cut on dev time, sure, but it's actually done really well and it's not something that hampers the game at all. It's written so well that it's an effortless thing to accept, eclipsing Ocarina of Time's stilted writing. The text also scrolls by faster, which I instantly noticed, and it just feels better overall. A clear upgrade is also Tatl, Link's Fairy in this game. While I've never been a Navi hater and feel like it's completely overblown, Tatl just blows Navi out of the water by being an actual character with a sharp tongue. She's probably one of my favorite characters in the series.
Clock Town, the game's hub, is one of the best hub cities in the franchise in my opinion, being easy to traverse and with key locations in places that don't make the game's sidequests tedious to get to. The game's biggest sidequest, the Anju & Kafei storyline, is also pretty genius in how it's drawn to the player's attention: the first thing you see upon starting a new cycle is a masked Kafei delivering a letter, and you can't interact with him or the postbox. This creates an instant mystery that can be tackled in multiple ways even before you understand what's going on. The game's full of these sort of designs, and it's wonderful to play through.
The Anju & Kafei sidequest is pretty clearly the game's peak as far as storytelling goes; taking an entire three day cycle to complete, the most steps and progress needed, and it's got a strong narrative hook. The other sidequests are all quite good too, granting you a look into these NPCs lives and tragedies. Helpfully, there's a Notebook you can get very early on to track key characters' schedules and get a stamp if you've done everything possible for them. The game's actual "story" is very simple and by-the-numbers, by comparison, to the point that key characters are not really interacted with outside of the intro and ending. These sidequests are the heart and soul of Majora's Mask.
TERMINA'S UNIQUENESS
Link running around Termina Field. As the map indicates, it's essentially just a big circle. |
Termina, the game's setting, is unique in the Zelda franchise because unlike every other Zelda game I can think of, Majora's Mask eschews going for a sprawling overworld and instead goes for a more compact, dense world. Termina Field is no Hyrule Field, and it's essentially just a circle that leads to the game's four main areas, which are very obviously delineated by some classic Nintendo environments: a swamp, an icy mountain, a beach and a desert. Each area is only a few screens and feels pretty bare, all things considered.
This kind of makes sense considering the game's time loop mechanic; areas being too big and complex would make things tedious and perhaps too long in general. There's things to do and find in these areas, for sure, but they don't feel particularly iconic to me. Instead, they are vehicles to have more puzzles to figure out, namely to gain access to the dungeons.
Majora's Mask plays basically identically to Ocarina of Time, with Link feeling the same except he does some flips when he jumps now. Your arsenal is also basically the same, and the main thing that's added are the Masks, with three of them being transformation Masks: the Deku Mask, Goron Mask and Zora Mask, which transform Link into said species and completely changes how he plays (and disables to use of most other items). These forms are all very fun to use and spice up the gameplay tremendously; they're a highlight of this game for sure. They even get unique instruments when using the Ocarina!
Majora's Mask's dungeons also more or less follow the compact but dense formula that the game's generally going for, as they're closer to the Young Link dungeons in Ocarina of Time than the adult dungeons. There's four dungeons, which is nearly half of what the previous game had, but it doesn't feel like a low amount. I liked three of them (with some caveats for one) and disliked one, the Great Bay Temple. I found it confusing and just generally unfun to explore. The Woodfall and Snowhead Temples are great fun, and Stone Tower Temple is a mixed bag. While being the strongest temple thematically and also from a gameplay perspective, it's also very tedious to explore due to its reliance on playing a song multiple times in a short span to create statues... that you can't move. It's not great, but I can't deny that its vibes and concept are top notch for the series as a whole.
Deku Link acquiring an optional Mask, the Mask of Scents. |
To counteract these dungeons' relatively short length, each one has a side objective inside: gathering the 15 Stray Fairies. If not doing this side objective (and I think you generally should; the rewards are quite good), the dungeons are very breezy and a lot of the chests inside can be ignored. It's both a positive and a negative: it's fun to do and makes dungeons more interesting, but it also means that the dungeons themselves are pretty bland and a bit dull without the Stray Fairies there to spice them up. They're just kind of short and don't really do much new outside of the Stone Tower Temple. At least, they do feel somewhat unique to this game due to mostly being based around the new forms, but it feels like putting a band-aid on the issue instead of actually fixing it.
The bosses are also noticeably some of the worst in the series, being both extremely simple and extremely easy. Unlike most (if not all) 3D Zelda bosses, they're not designed to be defeated with the dungeon's item or even a specific strategy, and instead are more open-ended battles, kind of like a big enemy. While cool on paper, it makes them really easy to brute force, and I consistently felt underwhelmed after fighting them, wondering if I missed the "intended" way to defeat them. There's no denying that they look cool and are actually pretty memorable in design, but they're so weak that often the dungeon's minibosses are a little more interesting/involved affairs (except when they're reusing the same one for the third time). The final boss is more what you'd expect from a Zelda game, but is still quite easy.
Something else that really stands out as odd compared to other Zelda games is the dungeon items, or lack thereof. While in other games you'd get things like the Boomerang, Hookshot, or a unique tool like the Spinner, Majora's Mask's dungeon items are just the Bow and the three types of Arrows. There's no real focus on anything else, though that's not to say nothing else is used, but it's kind of disappointing. This is also likely a concession made for the new forms, as they tend to be the main focus of the dungeons, and they can't use Link's items. At that point, I wonder if it wouldn't have been wiser to make the dungeon item a form upgrade instead in some way. It's also worth pointing out again that Link's arsenal of items is basically the same as in Ocarina of Time, with only one very situational addition that's a bit of a pain to acquire.
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
A creepy cutscene explaining that aliens come down on Romani Ranch every year, a key event in the game.
When resetting the cycle, you won't lose any key items, but you *will* lose all your consumables (Arrows, Bombs, even Rupees), though there is a bank that allows you to keep your Rupees through cycles. However, naturally, any event will be reset, no matter what it is, requiring you to do it again if you need to. This does include dungeons, but with a caveat: if you've defeated the boss (and obtained their unusable Mask), you can simply use a teleporter at the start of the dungeon to refight the boss. You also do not keep a dungeon's Stray Fairies if you reset before handing them all back to their Fairy Fountain, so they must be found in one go.
This is made even easier when you take into account that, extremely early in the game, you can learn the existence of two secret songs: the Song of Double Time and the Song of Reversed Time. The former allows you to skip to the next day or night, while the latter slows down time by seemingly half, if not more. This also slows down in-game events that are tied to time, such as the Postman's walking speed and similar things. These are optional and indeed secret: you'll never see them in your pause menu and they are tied to your memory. It's a really cool thing to have in the game and it makes the game feel deeper, though there aren't really others.
Going deep underwater in a sea snake den. Watching a friend play this is when I first became aware of my thalassophobia.
You also see some cracks start to form in the game's structure when events take place at odd times. Each day starts at 6AM, and the Song of Double Time will skip to either 6AM the next day or 6PM the same day, depending on what's next. That means that for a sidequest that takes place at 1AM, you're stuck waiting until it happens starting from 6AM. While you can absolutely multitask, at some point you run out of meaningful things to do as you complete sidequests. There's an NPC that allows you to skip 2 hours forward as well, but it's a bit awkward in practice and I found myself never using her. You'll also have to redo some pretty time-consuming events if you want every Mask (including the big one), especially if you've missed follow-up events.
Majora's Mask is a game with no real set length due to its puzzley nature. If just doing the main dungeons and figuring out key events to progress, it'll be pretty short, but assuming a lesser-skilled player not using a walkthrough (like a child, maybe), I can see how the game can take up a monstrous amount of time. It's open-ended in a really appealing way, and even beating the final boss lets you keep going back to get more things in a sort of post-game state. There's a lot of cool details scattered throughout the game that makes it a joy to explore, talk to the NPCs and see how the world changes.
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
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| You can't just say that to someone, Mr. Scarecrow! |
Just like Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask's fantastic soundtrack was composed by legendary composer Koji Kondo, but with the three battle themes being composed by Toru Minegishi, most known today as one of the incredible composers for the Splatoon series (and the sound director in general). Unlike Ocarina of Time, though, Majora's Mask is more typical Zelda fare in terms of music, with strong, catchy melodies instead of intimidating ambiance, even in dungeons. This time, the areas around the dungeons are more ambient than the dungeons themselves, but they still have memorable melodies instead of being strictly ambiance. Naturally, some tracks are also reused from Ocarina of Time, but not as many as you'd assume from a game with so many reused assets.
Majora's Mask has some of Kondo's catchiest work in the Zelda series in my opinion, especially Clock Town and the Deku Palace which I've found myself humming to myself for months on end. Clock Town having three different tracks, one for each day. The dungeon tracks are creepy, yet pretty catchy all the same, and all of them are excellent and unique; the one that's closest to Ocarina of Time's stylings is Snowhead Temple, but it's still got a stressful little staccato melody on piano that doesn't make it as oppressive as it would be without it. Final Hours, the theme that plays when only six hours are left before the Moon crashes into Termina, is the most foreboding piece in the game, and is also iconic in its own right. Minegishi's contributions are also some of the best general battle themes in the Zelda series, I'd say.
PROS AND CONS
PROS
• Excellent writing: a clear, massive improvement from Ocarina of Time.
• A tangled web of sidequests that are fun and satisfying to figure out.
• Great soundtrack all around with some of the catchiest music in the series.
• Despite reusing so many Ocarina of Time assets, the game feels distinctly unique.
• The three new forms are a blast to play around with.
• Good, somber story with excellent atmosphere the whole time.
• Mostly fun dungeons with a cool side objective that makes them feel more substantial.
• Playing around with the three day cycle is actually fun!
CONS
• Very weak bosses.
• Short dungeons don't feel very memorable.
• Most of the Masks have a single, niche use.
• Fun events can become tedious if you have to replay them over and over again due to missing things.
• No real new items outside of the transformation Masks.
• Extremely Bow-centric dungeons in general, with all the dungeon items being tied to it.
• Sometimes you just have to wait for multiple minutes to progress a sidequest, which can be annoying over time.
• Stone Tower Temple is somewhat tedious to explore fully, and Great Bay Temple is on the confusing side.
• Really didn't need yet another Gerudo stealth section.
• The camera gets in the way in some key moments, especially as a Goron.
WORTH PLAYING?
Majora's Mask is beloved for a reason, and having finally played it for myself, I think it's one of my favorite pre-Breath of the Wild Zelda games. It's designed with such care that it's hard not to be charmed by it. It's also a really unique entry in the series, not just with the time limit but its entire structure being based in density instead of openness like the rest of the games in the franchise which makes it stand out even more. The more puzzle-focused design of it all is wonderful, and it being essentially based around sidequests is very much my kind of thing, too. I liked it a lot more than Ocarina of Time overall. Its reputation for being so dark is well-earned, but a little overblown too: you'll still get some wacky Zelda moments in the midst of all the angst and impending doom.
Just as easily as I can see someone dropping the game after a quick playthrough, I can see someone obsessively playing through the cycles over and over again to find every little secret, odd interaction and item. Even for an N64 game, it's written and designed in a way that still feels fresh over 25 years later, which is an incredible achievement. Not that many games have really tried to do what Majora's Mask tries and succeeds at doing, and that's really to the game's benefit. I almost feel ashamed at not having really played it before this year.
It's worth playing just for the novelty, and yet it stands the test of time if you can tolerate the N64 era's controls. Otherwise, the 3DS remake might be more your speed, though it's a fair bit different from what I understand, with the boss fights being a bit different and the Notebook being more detailed/easy to use, as well as allowing you to skip time more precisely. Just don't get too stressed out by the time limit, it's really not an issue, and is more fun than stressful or tedious most of the time. It's also a great follow-up to Ocarina of Time!
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