"You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"

Majora's Mask is a game which I consider to be a genuine masterpiece, one last hurrah for the N64-era of Zelda games.
It is a game where the mechanics tell the bulk of its story and themes, accompanied with a haunting soundtrack that has never left my frontal temporal lobe ever since I first played this game in the year 2000.
It's jam-packed with interesting story ideas bringing forth a vibe that is like nothing I've ever experienced before or probably will ever experience again. It's evidently a depressing game with a profound tinge of melancholy and deep, almost neverending sadness. And I'm still debating myself whether all of this was intentional or just the result of a string of random circumstances.

So let me unpack all of this just to get a sense of what I'm talking about.

BE WARNED THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, widely considered to be one of the best games of all time, if not the best game of all time. It was a seminal piece of work, one of the biggest adventure games in 3D-gaming. It set the standard of what an adventure game should be and how things like exploration and combat should work in a 3D-space. It inspired a lot of games for decades to come and it's still revered to this day.

So Nintendo had big shoes to fill for the eventual sequel. And what they came up with was lightning in a bottle, a sequel that retained a lot of elements from Ocarina but deviated rather drastically in terms of structure, scale and atmosphere.

In the beginning of the game Link gets ambushed by a creature known as Skull Kid wearing the eponymous Majora's Mask. They are accompanied by two fairies, Tatl and Tael. They steal Epona, the horse we rode on and our precious ocarina of time. As we give chase, we fall into a hole. Skull Kid is waiting for Link and he changes him into a Deku Scrub. Skull Kid flees, Tael follows them but Tatl gets left behind with Link.

Together they venture forth and they come across an odd tree-like figure with a face.

It looks like the lifeless corpse of a Deku Scrub. The creature looks sad, almost as if it's been through a great deal of pain and agony. As a sidenote, this becomes really important later. It also sets the tone right away and the game doesn't shy away from injecting a lot of heavy themes and messages into the story.

After a while they come across The Happy Masked Salesman, an individual who will be familiar if you've played Ocarina of Time and this is where he will utter the game's most recognized quote:

"You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"

Now he's a tad unhinged and a bit menacing. He begs Link to retrieve Majora's Mask, the mask that Skull Kid is wearing. Skull Kid stole the mask from him and he warns Link that the mask is incredibly dangerous and is capable of inflicting a lot of damage to the world and its people. He can also help Link get rid of his transformation if he retrieves his ocarina. But Link only has three days time. After that, the moon crashes into the world killing everything and everyone. The game ends.

And thus you set foot in Clock Town, the largest city in Termina and the game finally begins.

You can't use your sword, people are kinda racist against you and you can't leave the town because the guards view you as a defenseless child.

You as the player know that that's not true, you've proven yourself in the previous game to be more than capable of defending yourself. But the people only look at the mask. Not what's behind it.

Eventually Link retrieves the ocarina of time just before the moon crashes. You reset the timeline and everything goes back to the way it was, right before you enter Clock Town. The Happy Mask Salesman teaches Link the Song of Healing and he turns back to his human self. You obtain the Deku Mask and you can turn back into a Deku Scrub whenever you want. From there you're tasked to travel to the four corners of the earth to find the Gods to help you put a stop to Skull Kid. Or more fittingly, put a stop to Majora's Mask.

That's the basic plot of the story. But everything gets much deeper than that.

From what I remember when this game came out, I get the feeling that it was liked by some but hated by others. For some it deviated too far from the established formula and forced players to play by pretty stringent rules. There is a three day time limit and everything in the game unfolds by a strict schedule. Things happen or don't happen depending on your actions. People move and according to set schedule and you can interact with NPC's in certain ways to influence their actions thus changing the flow of time. When three days have passed according to the in-game clock, your time is up andyou have to "reset the timeline", bringing you back to square one. Everything you did will be undone. It is like you were never there to begin with. Everything and everyone lives on borrowed time in this world.

Saving the game is now a rather elaborate affair. What was once a quick and painless push of a button to save your game is now a game mechanic. You can only, truly, save your game when you play "The Song of Time" and resetting the timeline, basically undoing all your progress. You can, however, save at certain Owl Statues but be warned that this is only a temporary quicksave. If you quit after you've saved at said owl statue, the game starts right after your last time reset.

There are also only four real mainline dungeons, probably the fewest in any Zelda game although I'd argue there are a few mini-dungeons sprinkled in. Some people also took issue with the fact that you're playing as Kid Link and not his adult counterpart.

In some sense, you can view these rules and restrictions as a detriment to the game. Every problem you fixed gets undone.

In truth, they are the game's biggest strength. Every action you take or don't take has its varying degrees of consequences. Almost every character has a name, a story to tell and have relations to other characters in the game. With this the game can differentiate its numerous NPC's and give them real purpose. You really start to feel for these people. The focus of the game isn't to save the princess like the game's predecessors. It is to save the world and its people. This is also where the masks come into focus.

A new set of collectable items in this game are the masks. There were masks in Ocarina of Time but they were only there for a short sidequest. There are three (technically four but I'm not opening the can of worms called "Fierce Deity Mask") that allow you to turn into other characters. There's the aforementioned "Deku Mask" but we also have the "Zora Mask" and "Goron Mask".

As alluded to before, these masks contain the spirits of people who lived and died in the land of Termina. Darmani was a Goron who lived in Snowhead, revered as a hero but died prematurely when he tried to save his people from a calamity. Mikau was a Zora, a guitarist for a music group who died while trying to rescue the eggs of the group's singer Lulu. You play the "Healing Song" to ease their burden and heal their sorrow.

But their work is not done. It is sad to say but they failed in their mission. And now it is your turn to carry on their legacy. The people from their respective habitats look at you as if you are Mikau or Darmani. But you're not. You're just masquerading as them.

Who's the Deku Scrub you might ask? Well we never learn his name. But later in the game there are clues to his identity if you're willing to commit to one of the many sidequests the game has to offer.

To me, this Majora's Mask bread and butter. The ability to tie its story into the gameplay. We can find various themes in this game like identity, dealing with mortality, existentialism. What would you do when faced with the end of the world? Would you help other people? Would you run? Cower? Every character deals with this in a certain way. And it's all tied to their distinct personalities.

These aforementioned masks are not the only ones you can collect. There are a plethora of other masks, each with their varying functionality. There's the returning "Bunny Hood" that lets you run faster, there's the "Bomb Mask" which detonates basically used as a standard bomb and thus blowing yourself up. Some masks are just used once just to collect a Heart Piece.

So I've extensively written about the story and what makes it so good, what about the gameplay?

It's about the same as Ocarina of Time, you travel the land, collect a key item at the end of the dungeon that you will need to complete the game. It's that typical satisfying Zelda formula of collecting items in order to progress to the next area or unlock upgrades from previously visited areas. To be honest, there is not a lot to talk about here.

The game has some interesting dungeons, most of them will rack your brain more than in Ocarina of Time. Take the second dungeon for example, Snowhead. You have to progress vertically via several rooms all situated around a giant ice pillar. You have to increase or decrease the size of the pillar to progress. The bosses are mostly fought with the masks you use to transform yourself into the other species. It's a unique deviation of the Zelda formula where you would normally fight a boss with the item you obtained in the dungeon.

There are four unique areas ranging from a swamp, a snowy mountain, an oceanside and an area that's filled with ghosts, mummies and zombies. It's all very intriguing and unique.

Let us not forget about the music. The music sets the tone for every location and situation perfectly. Take for example, Clock Town's theme. On the first day, the music encapsulates the mood of a large bustling town with a lot of things to do. People are getting ready for a festival, it's upbeat and lively. As the days go by however, the music gets more frantic, there's a sense of foreboding, the atmosphere gets more dark and gloomy as the moon inches closer and closer to the world. The Song of Healing is maybe one of the most haunting melodies ever composed, an achievement considering it's such a simple melody. The Deku Palace theme is also one of my favorites, perfectly encapsulating the mood of a kingdom in disarray.

If you get the sense that I'm gushing more about this game than critiqueing it then I guess your right. I love this game. Are there flaws? Yes plenty. Most of which are a product of their time, wonky camera-controls, low framerate. But I can't help myself. I just love this game so much.

If you want to play Majora's Mask, you can't fail with the original of course, playable on the Switch NSO. You can play the remake on 3DS, but it changes a lot about the game and I would personally not recommend to play the remake as your first playthrough. I would recommend that excellent Recompilation. It runs at 60FPS, looks incredible, there's widescreen support and there is a fully functioning 3D-camera. It's an incredible achievement.