Despite being developed in just one year, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask remains the most narratively ambitious installment of its franchise. Establishing an oppressive atmosphere from the first few minutes of gameplay, Majora’s Mask presents a world full of darkness, that is defined by the way those who inhabit it are related to the concepts of loss and death.
The game has its beginning soon after the events of its predecessor, Ocarina of Time, with the protagonist Link wandering through a forest in search of an old friend. The boy, however, soon encounters an elf-like creature named Skull Kid, who, wearing a strange mask, scares his horse away and causes him to fall in a hole in a tree. When he wakes up, Link discovers that he was cursed and took the form of a creature made of wood, called Deku. Pursuing his tormentor, he arrives at the world of Termina, by a passage in Clock Town, and is approached by a mask salesman who warns him about an important setback: if Link cannot regain Majora’s mask within 72 hours, freeing the giants from every region of that world, the moon will fall and kill everyone in Termina.
The game’s most important system involves the passage of time and the control of those 72 hours. Every sixty minutes in Termina equals 45 seconds in real life, making the three fateful days last about one hour of playtime. Fortunately, the player can go back in time by playing a song, which takes the protagonist back to the morning of the first day.
The directors, Eiji Aonuma (who remained as producer of the series) and Yoshiaki Koizume (who came to direct the brilliant Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey), do not miss the opportunity to develop this system, stimulating Link to interact with all the inhabitants of the place and solve their problems. As the player encounters too many characters to deal with in just one hour of playtime and many are performing actions at different points in the city at the same instant, the system of time cycles is crucial to allow the player to know everyone without the common sacrifice of verisimilitude in other games, in which the characters’ routine is static in time.
Most people in Termina, especially in Clock Town, have a dynamic routine during these three days, moving around the city with a different goal and doing their chores every passing hour. While some are working on the preparations for the local festival that celebrates precisely time, others are arguing with the mayor about the possible end of the world and calling for an evacuation, and the rest are simply immersed in their routines, taking care of their business and personal problems, unaware of the impending disaster.
These people often have narrative arcs that need Link’s help to progress. The city’s postman, for example, is characterized by the strictness with which he deals with his work: his agenda is immutable, and can never be modified or ignored. If Link tries to talk to him during his work, the postman only complains that he is being late and asks him to leave. However, the fall of the moon puts his principles in check, because evacuating the city would force him to leave his post. It is up to the player, therefore, to arrange a solution that will make the character free of his obligations.
Majora’s Mask, due to its premise, is filled with tragic characters. The secondary mission with the most prominence in the narrative, for example, involves the impossible relationship of a young couple: even if Link eventually gets them together, either the moon falls and kills them anyway, or the hero returns in the time, separating the two again.
This constant reversal of events builds an oppressive atmosphere charged with hopelessness. Each one of the protagonist’s victories in curing the ills of that world is annulled by his own hands at the end of each cycle. The developers further reinforce this contrast by making the changes that Link causes in the world far more evident than in Ocarina of Time. When the giant of the icy area is reanimated, for example, a blizzard disappears from the nearby region, which enters springtime. The accessible areas change with the rejuvenation of the vegetation, but the effect only remains until Link comes back in time again, bringing back the ice.
Clock Town is the center in which the rest of the game revolves around. Each new area explored, each mask discovered, each equipment acquired and dungeon conquered, makes new options for dialogue, conflict resolutions, stores and possibilities of interaction become available in the city. Thus, one of Majora’s Mask’s greatest achievements is the paradox of often providing new content even though it repeats the same events continuously and reverts the situations back to what they always were.
There are several systems and mechanics acting in conjunction with the time cycle to prevent it from becoming frustrating to the player. While time travel causes Link to lose all his money and ammo, his masks and equipment remain intact. This allows for a more rewarding gathering of items, unlike Ocarina of Time, where the player often had both ammunition and money maximized and was still “rewarded” with more of them. Certain songs that Link can learn also make life easier: one triples the duration of each hour, giving more peace of mind to the player, another advances Link to the exact time of day that he wants (in the original version, it was only allowed to jump every six hours with this melody) and a third allows teleportation to certain key areas of the map.
As the title of the game indicates, Majora’s Mask also introduces a system of masks in which they assume the most varied functions. Primarily, they are the tools needed to help people around Link, whether teaching two frustrated dancers with the mask of their former mentor, or leaving a lady happy that Link did not sleep during one of her stories because he wore a mask that caused insomnia. Some, however, are also useful to the exploration part, such as the Bomb Mask that replaces the bombs – dispensing with the constant need to gather them, though it does damage to Link – and the Bunny Hood that allows him to move faster. Other masks even transform Link into three different species (Deku, Goron and Zora), allowing new forms of interaction with both the environment – Zoras can breathe underwater, while Gorons are able to roll over steep ramps, for example – and with certain characters, who only are open to the protagonist because they believe he is someone else.
Being a game about adventure, Link’s actions and the places he visits are the most varied possible. In one moment he is sneaking through a Deku Palace to save a little monkey from being burned unjustly by a mad king, in the second he is bargaining with spirits to help a people who is about to be frozen to death and, in the third, he is pretending to be a guitarist and playing in a band formed by aquatic creatures.
And since it is a title from The Legend of Zelda series, Majora’s Mask has the progress of the player marked by the conquest of special dungeons full of puzzles and dangerous monsters. Although they come in smaller numbers, comparing to Ocarina of Time, the dungeons here compensate that in their complexity. If the ones from that title had most of their puzzles contained in their respective rooms, here they are more open for exploration and require the player to understand the full extent of the place’s architecture. It is not a surprise, for example, to notice that a single temple in Ocarina of Time contains almost as many locked doors as the entirety of Majora’s Mask, with its miserable nine keys in total.
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