This week, I’m reviewing The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Zelda fans will need to bear with me a bit because I’m a relative noob to Zelda games. My only other experience with Zelda was playing a few hours of A Link Between Worlds. And while, I enjoyed A Link Between Worlds, at some point I got stuck, and I wasn’t engaged enough in the game to go back and redo a whole bunch of stuff, so I abandoned it. (This almost happened again in Majora’s Mask, but more on that later.)
When I saw the trailers for Majora’s Mask, I knew I wanted to give a Zelda game another try. The trailers looked dark, and I love a good dark story in a game. And, Majora’s Mask didn’t disappoint on this front. I found many of the characters super creepy (no spoilers, but you can see some of this in the trailers), particularly the big, creepy moon. Many of the landscapes and characters work well with the dark story line, which is basically that you have 72 hours to save the world from an ancient evil.
I gather from my research that Majora’s Mask is a remake, and I’ve read that it’s one of the more complicated Zelda games. I don’t know if that’s true or not, of course, but while I did find it complicated, I didn’t find it hard per se. That is, when I first started playing, I just jumped right in. As I’m pretty new to the series, I really didn’t know what to expect or what I should be doing, so I just started wandering around and talking to people. I carried on this way for a while, checking walkthroughs when I got stuck, but I wasn’t really following any walkthrough, I was mostly just exploring. This method of play worked out ok for a while; I was able to progress through the game, and get through several boss fights. But, then something happened that made me think I had really messed up and the consequence of that was going to be losing hours of real-time progress. I then proceeded to spend a couple of hours somewhat frantically trying to figure out how to undo what I thought I had done so I wouldn’t lose the progress. As it turned out, I was fine: I didn’t lose the progress; I just didn’t understand how the game was played.
As a new player of the series, I realize I probably should have just read up on the game a bit before jumping right in, at least enough to understand how it works. During my frantic research, I came across this article lamenting the lack of instruction manuals in new games. The inclusion of a quick overview or guide might have saved me a lot of frustration. But, as someone pointed out in the comments, many games today spend the beginning teaching you how to play the game, which is true of Majora’s Mask. But while the game taught me a lot in my initial wanderings, somehow I missed a critical piece of information. I think my experience here and my willingness to work through the frustration speak to my engagement with this game and its narrative. I love it and I want to keep going, despite the fact that it’s sort of complicated. You need a pen and paper handy to play this game. (Zelda fans probably already know this.) But, complicated doesn’t necessarily equal hard. I didn’t find the gameplay itself or the boss fights particularly hard.
I’m also playing Majora’s Mask on the new 3DS, so I thought I’d talk a bit about my impressions of the console. I was initially completely against getting the new 3DS, but after reading about it, I wanted to give it a try. I know a lot of people dislike the 3D aspect of the system, but I like playing with the 3D on. On the old system, though, the 3D gave me a headache after a while. The new 3DS doesn’t give me a headache at all, and the super stable 3D function gives a much better play experience. The new 3DS also loads much faster (which I really appreciated in my frantic attempts to not lose progress).
I love this game. If you are a Zelda fan, you are probably already playing it. If you are not a Zelda plan and you like dark narratives, definitely pick it up (along with a pen and paper and a lot of patience). I can already see that I will be happily doing a lot more grinding in this game than I typically have the patience for.
