Majora's Mask is very novel for its tight use of integrated systems and narrative to explore themes of alienation, despair and hope. It's one thing, I think, for a game to have high level themes, it's another thing for those themes to be directly illustrated by elements of its underlying systems, like it's ticking clock, temporal loop mechanic, the deliberate inability for the protagonist to meaningfully save or help everyone. The latter of which isn't forced upon you by the narrative structure of the game, there's no unseen writer telling you that someone can't be saved other than the fact that you simply don't have enough time. In a lot of ways, I think Majora's Mask is uniquely tempocentric in an art form mostly structured around games which center around the agency and freedom of players. It's a world that is moving on its own clock with characters who are interacting to their impending demise in their own ways, the player is reduced to an interloper and is not the central pivot point for the story, they are merely a vessel to experience it.

I also think Majora's Mask is a game that, in an ideal world, should only be played once. The way Majora's Mask rations time means that you're forced to choose, ultimately, to make sacrifices between doing "right" by individual characters and doing "right" within the context of trying to save the world to the point that even thinking about some of those choices however much time later still tugs at me. By helping some characters resolve certain traumas and unresolved pain, you're quite literally choosing to give them a measure of peace above quite literally everything else, above the existential security of the entire world. To me, that's almost the definition of selfless love, and it's incredible that any medium could find a way to convey that using such a simple mechanic as the ticking clock.

The truly powerful thing that helps make Majora's Mask a masterpiece, is that all these choices emerge through gameplay, it's your trade-offs, your time to ration, the game doesn't tell you how you should manage your time, the game doesn't even mandate you save the world, as far as Majora's Mask is concerned, you can let the world die while using all the time you have to comfort the dying, to help them move on and let go and that's fine. I feel bluntly that there is something truly beautiful in that.

Majora's Mask as a game that has come closer than any game I have played to having a truly holistic design. Everything about the game from the sound design, mechanics and direction is expertly crafted around the underlying philosophical and social premise it is trying to convey and to me, that's just incredible. Very few games come close to ever achieving that level of integration of systems, ideas of disempowerment, alienation, loneliness and a sense of hopeless struggle or futility. These are some of the most difficult themes to address in gaming, a genre all about choice and a perception of agency, and yet the game knocks it out of the park just on mechanical construction alone. Majora's Mask is a bad Zelda game, I should say that bluntly. It does not fit the series tone or its normal gameplay cycle in any way, but by god I'm glad it is one. If you go into Majora looking for something else, what you find is a game that has mastered the gameplay narrative balance to create a game that will forever hold up as a masterpiece in my eyes and something I feel very strongly everyone should be able to experience in full atleast once in their lifetime.