Majora's Mask Review

An in-depth review of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for the N64. This video contains spoilers for the entire game.

Discussion of the game's atmosphere begins at 27:12.

[dsilva]

Watching "Dawn of... a new day " show up on my screen at the end of the game was possibly the single most rewarding moment I have ever experienced playing a video game.

[homelesspaladin]

Majora's Mask is great because the mere fact that it exists is a miracle. All things considered this game should have ended up terrible. It was made within a year using assets from Ocarina of Time, but instead of just churning out some rehash Nintendo created a game that's completely distinct from the previous entry while retaining everything that made OoT good.

This is truly a remarkable game and it will never happen ever again.

[TheRepty]

I actually think that they don't dwell too long on Link's successes is part of developing Link's character. Link isn't doing this to be considered a hero, he's just doing it because it's in his nature to save people. This is exemplified here even more than in OoT because Terminia isn't even his home. He has no ties to this place and yet he cannot just leave it to die. 

Also I liked the fact that he takes on the image of the dead when saving towns. This is another way he avoids taking credit for being the hero of this town. Instead the townsfolk all believe that their own (Gorron or Zora) hero was the one who came back and saved them. 

But one of the biggest reasons this game is special is because it had themes not of Good v Evil like 90% of game out there. The themes of this game were of death, the meaning of true friendship, the strength of forgiveness, and acceptance.

[MNGoldenEagle]

Actually one of the reasons the N64 was able to handle 3D so well back then was because it was able to offload most of the rendering from the CPU to the RCP, which was essentially an early GPU that supported the predecessor to OpenGL (and was extremely similar in the way it worked). If it had more texture memory and CD storage, the games could have been much more visually rich, especially towards the Majora's Mask era where a lot of the graphics code was really optimized (the earlier opcodes for the RCP, which games could reprogram if they so chose, were designed by SGI and were woefully inadequate, as they transferred polygonal data slowly between the CPU and RCP and made the display lists twice as large as they needed to be, which made draw time and the polygon limit worse than it needed to be). Majora's Mask actually did a lot of neat visual tricks because it had more texture memory to play with, which is why it had blur effects, richer textures, and larger textures.

The main limitations with the N64 really were several factors: 1) storage, both on the cartridge and in RAM, were phenomenally cramped which made making an expansive 3-D game difficult at best, 2) the RCP/GPU did not have direct access to the cartridge and had to receive its data from the CPU, which put more work on the CPU than there needed to be, 3) the CPU still had to deal with audio rendering, AI, and game processing, and the AI in Zelda did a lot of clever tricks to keep its cycle counts low, and 4) the physical hardware added latencies that made it difficult to get the best possible optimizations, specifically the Rambus RAM and the main system bus which linked the CPU to the RCP.

Despite all of this, overall the N64 was an impressive piece of hardware from 1996, especially compared to the Sega Saturn and PlayStation. The Sega Saturn lacked a dedicated GPU and instead utilized multiple CPU sockets, which were difficult to code and even harder to keep in sync, especially when they tried to work with the same regions of memory. The PlayStation had a weaker CPU and GPU-equivalent compared to the N64 and wasn't really optimized for 3-D rendering, especially in the texture department. Most games for the PlayStation had a hard time getting past Mario 64 level of quality on the polygonal side of things; the PlayStation's real saving grace was it's ability to combine pre-rendered content with polygonal content simultaneously. If the N64 had been equipped with a CD drive, it probably would have dominated that console generation.

[Nate_the_Nobody]

I think one of the creepiest things about the mask salesman is that he retains memories even after a reset

[Criken]

This is a spot on review. Especially the bit about atmosphere was very well done. The impermanence of your actions and inevitability of failure is such a bold theme for a game let alone a Zelda one. The music, as you mentioned, illustrates the tone of each zone expertly as well. For example the music that plays in the Zora beach zone sounds so bleak and barren despite being a vacation spot for most of the population. It totally fits the incident of the princess losing her eggs.  

[evangelion]

This is definitely one of the best games I have ever played.

[UNIVERSALS]

The developers intentionally made the game in such a way that Link would not be able to help EVERYONE on the 3 day cycle.

...Sounds like real life...

[Figgy]

I LOVE the astral obervatory music, it's beautiful and sounds a little sad as well as nice somehow.

[UltraPrimal]

Majora's Mask is a true masterpiece. It's shame no game since has created a world that feels as deep and alive as Termina. Even games like World of Warcraft and Skyrim, though they have a lot of lore and backstory to them, don't feel like there's anything to them beyond that you see. They feel like worlds inhabited by mannequins. You walk up to them, push a button, and they spit out a pre-recorded response. The characters in MM felt like characters and not just mindless automatons on a track. Even though that's really what they were.

[siphillis]

Hard to ignore the parallels of the time pressure for Link to save Termina, and Aonuma's team to finish this game in about a year. The steady march of time must have been a constant source of anxiety throughout its entire development.

[mightyNosewings]

A couple of things I've noticed about this game.

The Anju/Kafei sidequest is sort of the center of all the character-based sidequests. If you go through the Bomber's Notebook, you'll notice that a lot of the people listed there are closely related to the Anju/Kafei quest, and most of them are at least indirectly related. The Anju/Kafei sidequest is so central and involved that you could almost consider it to be Clock Town's temple, just in sidequest form.

Also: considering how prominent the theme of death is in this game, it's interesting to note that there are _four_ dungeons. Japanese culture traditionally associates the number four with death, since the words sound similar in Japanese. Also, the game ends when you reach the _fourth_ day. I'm sure this was intentional, though I'm not sure what we're meant to take from it.

[bigfella]

This review holds up phenomenally well - even 7 years later.

The audio quality is still crisp, and the editing is incredibly solid. Your review felt very genuine, and everything you explained was very coherent.

[Genji_Glove]

24:16 - Iron Boots concept is fine, but the slow execution *drags it down*.

What you did there. I see it.

[FoodLiquorCool]

For all the people who are saying "this is what happens when you put full confidence in your developers' vision" or something as absurd as "short development cycles create a great game" etc, you need to look up "survival bias". Not every game subject to those conditions is a remarkable achievement. Just because you know of one or two games that had those conditions, that doesn't mean you're not ignoring the hundreds that were subject to the same conditions that ended up sucking that we don't talk about because no one likes them.

Correlation, no causation, ladies and gentlemen.

[crono]

I honestly like this game more than Ocarina of Time. More creativity, less generic objective, characters that I actually gave a shit about, it's an impressive game. The 3D version of the game is nice too.

[noobpower]

Majora's Mask scared the shit out of me when i first played at the age of 7 or 8 (not sure any more). I played it for one evening, didn't really achieve anything apart from being scared off for good from the freaking Moon/Skullkid and the stress i felt from being put under a timelimit. Only later i replayed it and loved it. The Trauma stays though...

[chickenheelnakano]

"Majora's Mask is the first direct sequel in the Zelda series"

Adventure of Link says Hello.

[BackslideDan]

30:58
Since the ending sort of meshes all your victories into the ending, I like to imagine that when you complete the game, every copy of the three days merges into one, painting a full picture of a hero.

[ZtotheMills]

This is a very small detail, but its another thing i've always adored in Majoras Mask, which is Young Link's growth. not only can he now carry equipment locked to his older self, but he can also hold his shield fully upright, and when jumping he shows a bit of confidence, flair, and maybe even a bit of playfulness by doing a flip or two.