Majora's Mask

Majora’s Mask is the sequel to Ocarina of Time where Link enters a parallel world and has to stop the eponymous Majora’s Mask from crashing the moon to kill everyone. It is wildly innovative, incredibly dark in tone, and has great memes.

Everything is done in a three-day cycle when Link has to constantly reset time to have enough time to do everything. The time is very generous, although that constant time limit can definitely give you anxiety about the whole thing. Generally speaking you really don’t have to worry too much about losing progress to the time-loop if you prepare a bit.

The fact is that while this game has a lot of cool ideas, it executes them very poorly. There are only four dungeons (but several mini-dungeons) so a lot of what I love about Zelda is de-emphasized. The first two dungeons are honestly pretty mediocre, and that’s half of them. Instead the focus is on the wealth of side-missions within the time-loop.

The problem with the side-missions is that you need to both be in the right place and the right time to find things. When I first played this game, I never found the lady getting robbed. I missed it entirely. So I never got the bombs and was cut off from a lot of the game. If you don’t happen to stumble upon things at the right time and the right place, you miss out on most of the game. You may get a very general when or a very general where, but never enough to actually deduce what you need to do.

In my subsequent attempts, I beat the game only to realize I only filled out like 3/20 entries in the notebook. The rest of the entries, which is most of the game basically, I had to use a guide.

Let’s talk about the notebook, because it is a good example of terrible execution. It’s supposed to record when things happen during the timeline. It doesn’t tell you where things occur, leaving out pretty significant information that you just have to remember. It’s whole purpose is to keep track of things!

But worse, you don’t get an entry until you’ve already accomplished the mission in the vast majority of cases. So the entry is moot. There are only a few that are more complex that require interrelated actions, and those are the ones where you really need location information about where/what events are occurring. It’s honestly pretty amazing how entirely useless the notebook is in this game.

The game has cool ideas but doesn’t do them well. It ends up being incredibly mediocre and frustrating experience. I don’t recommend this game.