Among my few goals during this break was to drag out the dusty Nintendo 64 and finally finish playing through The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask after all these years.
After a few hours of playing I sort of remember why I never finished it: it’s one hell of a stressful game. Majora’s Mask is one of the most admirable mainstream video games I can think of, and one that I’ve always had a hard time rationalizing as a genuinely great piece of gamecraft. The fucked up thing about it is that its biggest flaws are also its most original qualities, and they are necessary in order for its greatest achievements to occur. But before I get into that I should provide some context as to why this 8-year-old toy is important:
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Every guy around my age remembers Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Even if you were a Playstation kid, it was an event. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen before. Actually, that’s not true: it was very much like the old Zelda games—maybe even less complex and difficult than the previous one, A Link to the Past for the Super NES—but flawlessly transmuted to 3D. It was amazing—to this day I’ve yet to see a video game as perfect an exercise in interactive narrative. It sold all the copies; it won all the awards. ’98 was a pretty landmark year for the industry, and Ocarina dominated most of the dialogue. (I never actually even bought the original cart; I just played through the game—more than once—at a friend’s house when it came out, though I’ve since owned one or two of its several re-releases.)
So when Majora’s Mask came out in the fall of 2000, it was rightfully a big deal. And while it’s undoubtedly less well regarded than its predecessor, it received pretty fair acclaim. But its conception (and reception) highlights a sometimes-illusory perception of the nature of innovation in this medium.
Instead they gave us some weird cartoon bullshit:
People were pretty pissed. “The Legend of Cel-da” was one of the biggest controversies of the year, but the fuss all turned out to be for naught; the eventual product, The Wind Waker, is one of the most beautiful games ever made, and not an unusual Zelda game in any regard other than its visuals. But the post-script
to this story is the next game in the series, Twilight Princess. This, Nintendo seemed to insist, was the one the fans had been waiting for, the souped-up, grown-up heir to the throne of Ocarina. And, well… it was. Twilight Princess is near perfect, but the problem, I guess, is that it was exactly what everyone hoped it would be. There was very little to be surprised by; this was the epic, grown-up (so to speak; the game was just as silly easy as Wind Waker) experience that the fans had been waiting for. Don’t get me wrong: Twilight Princess was an incredible game, one of the most amazing ever made. But when I finished it (in three weeks, somehow—that was a long one) I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was missing something, some spark of joyful experimentation—the very ideals of exploration and discovery that are the series’ foundational hallmarks.Which brings me back to Majora’s Mask.
It was originally referred to as "Zelda Gaiden," a kind of sequel/side-story to Ocarina, and the sentiment holds up. The gist of the game is that young Link has been transported to Termina, a world in an alternate universe of his home of Hyrule. Termina is very similar to Hyrule, but one unique, important issue facing this place is that it’s fucked: the moon is falling, and in three days (two hours or so in real time) everybody is going to die. The story, while less gravely epic and way weirder than past games in the series, serves the same function as any: to encourage the player to go explore the world, kill monsters, collect some magic doodads and save everyone. The key difference here is that they’ve instilled a sense of urgency in the player by including an underlying time limit in which he must complete his task. This idea is, from a conceptual standpoint, a stroke of genius, the solution to the problem of how to enhance the player’s engagement with the story and his suspension of disbelief. But in an expansive, exploratory genre like this, it generally doesn’t work by itself: giving the player a finite amount of time in which to complete the entirety of the adventure is pretty intolerable, a type of pressure that few developers have the balls to impose on their eventual customer. (This is not to say that some haven’t tried: Nintendo’s own Pikmin for the Gamecube tasked the player to complete the game in 30 short in-game days, a requirement so arbitrary and unfair that I stopped playing what was otherwise shaping up to be a beautiful and fascinating game after the first level. And I understand Xbox 360 players had a similar experience with Capcom’s Dead Rising, a zombie game that forced players to restart from the beginning if they missed certain time-sensitive events.)The solution to this, of course, was to introduce a mechanic that allowed the player to rewind back to the start of the three-day period, and this was no problem; Zelda had all kinds of time-travel shit it could whip out of the bag o’ tricks. They didn’t even have to come up with a new magic song for you to play! And so the basic mechanic was set: do what you have to do, then turn back time to delay the destruction of the world. And save your game.
What this also does, however, is allow the developers to give the game’s world a very specific and cohesive routine that you have to observe and interact with in order to progress. This mechanic affords Majora’s Mask an amazingly cool Groundhog Day sort of element in its overall structure, and the player, repeating the same three days again and again, must refer to this structure to solve many of the game’s major puzzles. (One elaborate side-quest forces you to follow complex interconnecting routines so that you can influence the events and actions of several townspeople over the three-day period—very Groundhog Day.) The result is that the puzzles and quests of Majora’s Mask are far more ornate and satisfying than those of the other games. But it also makes them more stressful, which often makes you not want to bother. As I said, it’s fucked up.
The reality is this: we say we want innovation; we want experimentation; we want new ways of looking at things and experiencing entertainment. But how much of that is just an attempt to accrue liberal cred? At some point, we just want to sit back and let the screen suck us in, as opposed to actively engaging ourselves in the world it depicts. This dichotomy is well expressed in Zelda games: they’re not especially diverse, but the diversity that is present in the series conveys the vast nature of interactive entertainment very clearly; maybe this is why the series is such a vanguard of the medium. Or why it used to be, at least.
I thought I liked Majora’s Mask more than I maybe do, and maybe I liked it for different reasons besides its polarizing time mechanic: its diversity of gameplay, or the whimsical, insouciant weirdness and melancholy darkness of its story. But I think when I finish it I’m going to replay The Wind Waker, the Zelda game of which I am most fond. I remember Wind Waker to be not much more than a series of gorgeous, exciting set pieces, an interactive animated adventure whose beauty and originality are wholly and unapologetically aesthetic. I remember that game being very light-hearted, very soothing, and none too stressful. Cool stuff just happens to you. Would that it were like real life.
