I’ve been a Zelda fanboy from back when I stumbled upon my father’s NES game collection and picked up the shiny golden cartridge that was The Legend of Zelda. Admittedly, I had no idea what was happening, but the bright colours, open world, and heroic music hooked me from the very first moment. I’ve followed the series from platform to platform, saving Hyrule more times than I can remember, but my favourite game in this long running series has always been Ocarina of Time. The music, combat, and story remain relevant even today, thanks to the 3DS remake that came out a few years back. And while most entries in Legend of Zelda are loved and admired in one form or another, there is one that is often overlooked – Majora’s Mask.
“Bitch please. I’m the Hero of Time.”
Majora’s Mask is the forgotten Zelda game, the cast off cousin who shows up at a family reunion sporting some new face tattoo that keeps everyone away but when you actually sit down and talk to them they’re pretty damn cool. It doesn’t have same story we are used to. This isn’t the tale of a young man learning to become a hero: Link is already a hero and has saved the world once already. Now he is on a journey across the land that will never understand the danger he saved them from trying to find his fairy who disappeared at the end of the last game. This is a darker, more psychological game than Ocarina or really most games in the series and, though it did ship an impressive number of units during its initial release, it never quite reached the same levels of its predecessor.
This is why I have been so excited to replay the 3DS remake of Majora’s Mask. I’ve always felt that it was an underappreciated game, the kind of game that would break the series out of its rut and force it to shake itself free of the habits of a lifetime. Now with its rereleased on hand, I’m happy to say that this is a game that probably holds up better than even Ocarina of Time. Gaming has grown up a lot in the last fifteen years. What used to be too dark and scary is now the mainstream. What used to be too high concept is now simply par for the course. What gave us nightmares as kids are now our bedtime reading. We’re proper grown up people now.
Graphically, there has been a pretty significant step up with this edition of Majora’s Mask. The original was released in an era when polygons were the biggest indicator of a game’s graphic quality, but the 3DS makes all those unsightly angles disappear. Animations are smooth and loading times are nearly non-existent even while the colours remain bright and cheerful. The biggest difference between the original and the rerelease is here and it has been well worth the investment of time.
The rest of the game is fairly similar to the original. There is only so much change you can make to the classic music of Legend of Zelda before fans revolt. Combat feels smooth and well balanced. All the controls are pretty similar to what we saw in Ocarina of Time 3D, so fans of the series shouldn’t have too much difficulty adjusting.
I’ve talked before about how important it is for remakes to add something to the original that we didn’t have before. It could be a new level or two, a retranslation, or just an improvement graphically, but you need to be able to look at the two and see a difference without it feeling like an entirely separate game. Majora’s Mask 3D, outside of the graphics, has only a few minor touches that make it feel like a new challenge for fans. Boss battles, a staple of the series since the very beginning, receive both a graphical and strategic upgrade over the original, meaning that fans who have mastered the timing of some of the more significant battles in the game can’t sleep their way through them.
While if that is a significant enough change to justify an entirely new edition of the game is debatable, I would argue that Majora’s Mask 3D is more worthy of a remake than any other game in this series, even Ocarina of Time. Everyone had played and loved OoT. Unless you no longer had your old N64 and hadn’t heard about this little thing called “emulators”, you’d picked it up before. Majora’s Mask never got the same kind of love and needs a bit of a push to remind fans that it exists. Hopefully this will be enough to convince fans of Zelda that many of the things they claim they want the series to change have been done before – they just weren’t paying attention.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D is out now worldwide for the Nintendo 3DS.
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An American trying to infiltrate and understand English society, Trent is a writer of novels and player of games. He has a serious addiction to JRPGs, the weirder the better, and anything that keeps him distracted from work.
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