On a stop in my three day journey, I approached an open field. Grassy green-yellow knolls overtook most of my vision. Trees and cliffs formed an edge to the background, isolating the rest of the world from me. A familiar tune played, reminding me of a previous adventure I once took many years ago. It was now a distant memory. As I made my way uphill, I was met with the sight of a farm house and it's barn; both plain looking yet homely in their design. They looked oddly familiar.

Seated upon a wooden crate in front of the barn was a young girl. Long red hair, a protruding nose, she was around the same age as Link. I tried to speak with her, but coherent words failed to come out of her mouth. She stared vacantly, muttering to herself as if she were asleep, yet her eyes were still open. It was like she wasn't there.

Confused, I headed into the barn door to the young girl's left, only to be met by a young woman inside. Her back was turned towards me, but her body language read that she was deep in thought. She was distraught, talking to herself about how she wished she could have done something. She finally noticed me and apologized, but she couldn't speak with me right now. So, I waited outside.

Dawn turned to dusk, and the two girls headed into their home. Curious, I decided to follow them. As I walked inside, there they were in their dining room. They sat across from one another, both slumped in their chairs. There was a deep anguish to their faces. It was genuinely upsetting to see. I spoke to them, but their words felt like they were speaking in tongues. It was English, but it was hard to wrap around the meaning of their usage. The context felt lost. From what could be parsed through though, along with the minimal context of their distraught faces, it was clear that they had... given up. They fell into despair.

I decided to check upstairs, only to be greeted with a sight that I didn't expect. What looked to be an entire family greeted me, colorful only in their age groups, all of them women. A middle aged one sat on a bed, left with the hope of her husband to come home, only to be met with the distained loneliness caused by the reality of his absence. Another older, but still middle aged woman sat on a bed across from her, afraid for her life. She was woeful from the regrets she had made in life. An old lady sat in a rocking chair next to them. She was riddled with dementia, believing that I was her late husband, (or perhaps grandson), come to greet her. They all seemed lost in a haze of thoughts. I felt like I was invading a private moment where I didn't belong.

I didn't stop to say good bye. I ran out the door back to the outside world. The sky was now filled with hues of purple, pink and blue, flooding the entirety of the world above. Dots of light littered the painted sky scape. I could make out Orion's Belt from the constellations. It reminded me that I was still on planet Earth. It sunk my stomach, thinking of how tangible it all felt.

Then, the ground began to shake.

I looked over towards the moon. The nose of it's monstrous face was edging closer and closer to the ground. I kept staring at it. I moved to a higher vantage point atop the roof of the now broken home just to keep a better view of it's grotesque face. It continued to fall.

And fall.

And fall.

The world shook once again and music began to play. Music that cemented that the world around me was ending and that there was no stopping the inevitable. Time began to count down.

Five hours.

Four hours.

Three hours.

Two hours.

One hour.


All I could do was stare. I was lost in the dream.

This moment in Majora's Mask was incredibly vivid to me. It was like peering into a dream broadcast onto my computer monitor.

... Though, the reality of the moment wasn't as flowery. I was in a voice call with friends where jokes and general chatter were had amidst 3 separate discord streams, including my own. At one point we began talking about in detail of a quest line in Old School Runescape where you turn into a monkey and trick a baby monkey that five bananas are actually twenty bananas. This transcribed as I stared at the moon slowly come down. Life is rarely full of perfect picturesque moments.

But the silly nonsense surrounding this moment didn't effect the impact it had over me. I was never taken out of the moment. It still felt like I was witnessing a dream unfold right in front of me. Whether it was my own dream I was witnessing or someone else's, I'm not sure. All I knew was that I felt like I was an observer within it, yet I was also present within reality. Like there was a bridge between the unconscious and the conscious and I was standing in the middle of it. It was a vividly surreal feeling. Aptly enough, this might be the best way to describe Majora's Mask as a whole.

Even before I played Majora's Mask, the game had already made quite the impression on me as a kid. Over at a friend’s house many moons ago, I witnessed him use the Deku mask, and watched on in horror as Link screamed in shrilling pain as he became this lifeless husk of what I thought was a wooden doll. His eyes were forever instilled with these sad, horrified look to them. It filled my 5 year old brain with absolute terror. Viewing through the portal of the CRT, I could see a world that slowly died right in front of me. Above was the look of the moon's ever peering, forever piercing gaze, stabbing directly into my soul and imprinting into my memory. Amidst all the horror, a clock sat directly in the middle of the screen, counting down until your demise was met, only to be saved by a time loop. A time loop of repeating the same three days, day after day, doomed for the world to end.

This absolutely, positively scared the shit out of me. Around this time, I had also listened to Linkin Park's "In The End", and had an outright existential crisis. As silly as it is, I had put the pieces in my head that the lyrics were (in part) a metaphor for death, and had an anxiety attack from this while in the back of my mom's SUV. I would stay up at night having anxiety attacks about eventually dying and never being able to do anything ever again. Death was something that always terrified me, and to see it so strikingly portrayed like it was in Majora's Mask left me scarred.

You would think it would end there as a scary, yet fleeting childhood memory. But those scars didn't seem to ever heal. Majora's Mask has stuck far into the recesses of my brain and has firmly implanted itself there. It's haunted me throughout the years, much more than I've ever realized up until writing this. And yet, it's also aided me when I felt I've needed it most.

This is quite a personal story — one I'm not sure I'm too comfortable even sharing in a public setting — but maybe it's worth stating simply to showcase the impact this game has had over me.

When I was in high school, I had pneumonia. It was hard to breathe, I could feel the weight of my lungs gasping and wheezing from the amount of mucus in them. I was eventually hospitalized for a day, with my mother worried sick about leaving me in the hospital for a night. It was the first time something like this had ever happened to me, but I was taking it in strides. I was self satisfied with the apple juice and pre-baked pretzel sticks the hospital provided. I didn't feel scared.

During the night, I kept waking from the nurses coming in to check on me. I clearly wasn't going to get a good night's sleep. It didn't help that the bed they provided was like an air mattress, which it made it feel like I was floating. So for a while, I just laid there, looking up at the ceiling, warm light vaguely illuminating it from a crack under the door. I let my mind wander for a bit. And then, very suddenly, the reality of the situation began to sink in; if it weren't for the medicine being put in my veins and the oxygen being pumped up my nose, I would have probably died.

And just like that, a vision blew over me.

I could see a tall tree up atop of a large hill. Beautiful pink flowers scatter around the ground, with a light green grass making a circle around the tree. It was reminiscent of Skull Kid siting under the tree towards the end of the game. I had walked towards it, and sat on the ground under it. I looked over to my right. There I saw a dog. It was my childhood dog Meeko, who I had held in my arms as we put him down not two years before, a traumatic experience that had haunted me. But he didn't look like himself, back how he looked during that final moment, with his muscle atrophied hind legs and his boney spine protruding from his malnourished body. His eyes didn't carry the same blank, lifeless look that I had accidentally glimpsed at as the vet took away his lifeless body. His body wasn't limp from his heart beat stopping. He looked more of a puppy, fluffy on the face but a bit curly in the back. His white and light brown fur shined under the shadow of the tree's branches. He was big for a Shih Tzu, but this version of him was tiny. It was a version of him I don't believe I've ever seen before. If I had, it must have been when I was very, very young. He sat with his head laying in his paws, nice and snug between them. As I looked at him, I began to gently pet him. His fur felt soft. It was almost tangible.

And then the image went away.

It was a deeply personal moment for me. I was conscious, but I could very vividly see this happen. I'm sure part of it was me wanting it to happen. Part of it was just being exhausted from the nurses checking in on me numerous times throughout the night. It felt like a religious experience, but I could tell it wasn't. It was more just memories and images drawn from the past that had stuck out to me, creating a story to comfort me. I had seen that moment in Majora's Mask, and my brain decided it was important enough to recall it. But it was a moment that felt like closure. Like Death itself was right there next to me, showing me a vision of what I thought heaven looked like. Saying good bye in the moment, but perhaps a glimpse at an eventual eternity to be with my dearly departed pet and best friend.

... And mind you, this is all without having played the game for myself. A poser even within my own "religious" experiences. God kicked me out of the vision and said "you're not coming back until you've at least played Majora's Mask, nerd".

So let's correct that.

Much like with my Pikmin playthrough, this has been a long time coming. I had joked in that review that the anxiety from even attempting to play Pikmin was a feeling of "childhood trauma", but I'm beginning to realize, in part, there's some truth to that. Obviously not to the same extent as someone facing horrible abuse, but an acute version of that. One caused by pre-existing fears manifesting into avoidance. Abstract fears that's bled into real life instances of feeling as if timed pressure was akin to the literal end of the world. I have relearned the lesson from my Pikmin play through: the reality of being timed is a lot less dramatic than in my head. The days go by quickly, sure, but you're equipped with tools to mitigate that ever ticking clock. Performing the song of Inverted Time slows everything down, giving you plenty of time to both experiment and accomplish longer sections of content within a single day, and a reasonable amount of wiggle room to boot. In fact, there are even moments where you'd want to move forward in time. This was something I had initially thought would be terrifying if I had to do while playing the game, mortified at the prospect of accidentally moving too far forward and triggering the end of the world. However, humans adapt to the situation given to them, and I habituated to the time loop. If I messed up, I didn't worry, I picked myself back up and kept going. There were times I even stopped and smelled the roses, waiting for an event to proceed. I had become a time management expert.

Most of the gameplay comes down to choosing your time between traditional style Zelda dungeons and tackling a side quest with one of the many denizens of Termina. The Zelda dungeons are the meat of the game, bringing about puzzles and gimmicks that built upon the formula brought about by Ocarina of Time. My major problem with Ocarina of Time dungeons has been the game's focus on looking around an environment. This was meant to get players used to thinking about how 3D spaces work, having them need to look around a dungeon for opportunities to unlock doors, solve puzzles, or whatever was needed to progress. For the first of it's kind, it does a great job at helping the player think within a 3D environment. As someone who already knows how to and has been aware of how to for years, I found the puzzles to be lacking. No other game puts quite as much emphasis on this aspect, and I've never meshed well with it. Majora's Mask, for me at least, remedies this by having dungeons that are more focused on their centralized gimmicks — the mask transformations and the multitude of key items — and using those abilities to reinforce the level design.

This can result in some hiccups, however. Switching between items that can only be accessed with 3 buttons at a time means you'll be in your menus a lot, and with the addition of masks, this issue becomes far worse than in OoT. Dungeons are built on more complex ideas, whether it be a vertical tower you need to work your way up, or a series of complicated underwater pathways that require the entirety of the dungeon to be changed. This can result in the player having to repeat loops if they by chance fall down to areas below, or get lost in the complexity of the dungeon.

The central time mechanic is a fantastic novelty, but it means that it is a very real possibility you may not have enough time to finish a dungeon. This can be slightly annoying. On the same token though, I adore this. It's nearly unwavering in it's commitment to it's central concept, and makes for a game that feels more cohesive as a result. It's not completely brutal mind you: you keep the dungeon's key item even after returning to the start of the loop, which acts as a checkpoint. This helps me become confident to continue rather than distraught at the progress I've lost.

... Unless the game crashes, in which case, it is NOT fun retreading the 3 or 4 objectives I just spent doing in that cycle. This happened to me twice and it was a nightmare. It's a drawback to the save system, but it's a system that I wouldn't want changed. It helps sell you into the time loop, having to commit to the day or to restart the day to progress. The system isn't perfect, but I'd much prefer the game constructing a specific feeling rather than washing out what made Majora's Mask interesting in the first place. Not to name any names. Ahem.

Like any other Zelda game, dungeons are topped off with bosses. The bosses in Majora's Mask I mostly enjoyed, the Goron boss "Goht" especially, since it makes great use of Goron Link's roll abilities and tests your mastery over it. But god almighty, do I hate the stupid fish boss. All his patterns feel so random for when he decides to chase after you. The floppy fish fuck will randomly decide if he wants to chew you now and take a third of my health or wait 15 seconds after you've pumbled into him. It never feels like you can predict or control the fight, and it's by far the worst part of the entire game.

The floppy fish fuck doesn't have his maw dragging down the overall experience, especially when even the side quests to the game are impeccable. Majora's Mask is half made up of these side quests. They are often about impacting the lives of the denizens of Termina in positive ways. Some of my favorites have to be both Romani and Cremia's quests. Romani is the little girl from the beginning of this review that lost her mind, which as the game unfold, I discovered this was due to her being abducted by aliens. The poor girl just wanted to save her farm and the cows they'd abduct every year.

Her older sister, Cremia, mourns for her sister's mental well-being if you neglect to save her. Saving Romani prevents Cremia from completely falling into despair, as she tries to keep a positive attitude even within the face of tragic death. She accepts her fate but wishes to keep strong for her little sister. It's genuinely touching character work and I'm in love with it. The idea of losing this side quest pumped me chalk full of anxiety. The thought of this poor, sweet, innocent little girl losing her mind because of MY inaction tore me up inside, and the notion of putting her sister through all of that only added to those feelings. Majora's Mask is way too skillful at drawing out my emotions, I swear.

One of the major side quests involves the characters Anju and Kafei. Their story plays out like a tragedy. Anju works at the Stock Pot Inn and is searching and waiting for her lost lover, Kafei, to return. Kafei hid himself away from everyone he knew, for he was cursed by Skull Kid who transformed his body into that of a child's. Kafei feels like he's unable to face Anju again due to his current form, as well as the fact that he's lost the one thing to bond them for their wedding ceremony, the Sun Mask. After jumping through the many trials and loops to obtain the mask, Kafei and Anju perform their wedding ceremony together, with only an hour on the clock counting down remaining. The two simply sit in their darkened room in the Stock Inn motionless, Anju bending down on her knees and holding Kafei in her arms like she was consoling a child. If you speak with them, they urge you to find shelter as the two of them continue to hug. I almost broke down crying.

This tone is spread all throughout Majora's Mask. The rich, deep melancholy exuded from the game fills almost the entire atmosphere. You start the game in a brooding forest, looking for your previous fairy friend Navi. You get flung off your horse and pick pocketed by Skull Kid, who orchestrated this to happen. You chase after Skull Kid and he bestows a curse onto you, transforming you into a Deku Scrub, a grimly sight. You reach the end of the cave and you're met with the fate of the body you inhabit, frozen dead in place. You later find out is the son of one of the Dekus you later come across. You eventually meet the Happy Mask Salesman, and his entire demeanor sends shivers down my spine. He barely has animations, he instead cycles to different poses in dramatic, unexpected cuts. His movememts are extremely jarring, giving off the impression that he may not even be a real person. You have trouble trusting him, but the salesman agrees to help you if you return the mask Skull Kid took from him.

Even as you set foot in Clock Town, where things are relatively at their most normal, something just always feels off. Clock Town's mostly cheery music helps to make the town feel more homely, but the town's denizens are rather strange. During the day, jugglers prance and speak in small riddles of the end times, the night comes and dancers perform ritualistic dances for at first, seemingly no reason. In the laundry pool, a man cranks his instrument and goes off on a bizarre rant about a bunch of dogs, reliving the story in his head and becoming furious at the idea as he recounts it. The Mayor's office is in discord from a town meeting, arguing if it's even okay to do a carnival, let alone stay in town if the moon is going to fall. That very moon follows you everywhere you go, looming over you with it's omnipresence. Wherever you go, death lingers in the background.

Whether it be the iconography or the music, so much of this game paints the walls of my mind. The Song of Healing's motif being one in the same with the Mask Salesman's theme paints this hauntingly beautiful track of releasing the searing pain from a soul with each variation. It plays in moments of healing, my favorite example being that of when a young girl is reunited with her father after his body had transformed and mummified into a redead. The eerie murmuring of the ambient synth mixed in with the chime of bells tolling make up the beginning of the Final Day theme. Calming synth chords roll in and establish the mood that yes, this is it, this is the end, hope itself sapping away from you as you continue to listen. Changing the tune, the almost magical feel to the Astral Observatory theme fills me with awe and makes me feel like magic is real.

The imagery to accompany these tracks like with The Giant's theme bring about such an ambience. A dense gray fog envelops the world as Link stands atop of a lone pillar. Whirlwinds litter this world of fog and storms as giant unfathomable gods opaquely seen afar call out to you in a language you cannot comprehend. The Great Sea Bay uses a synth that makes you feel uneasy to journey into the desolate sea in front of you. The Zora hall matches the relax, sublime mood of the sea side concert auditorium. A parade of colors and sea shells almost glimmering off the serene beds of water.

Areas by themselves bring about unbelievable moods. Locations like the Stone Wall Temple seem impossible and foreboding, looking as if apocalyptic sky scrapers surround the walls of this place. The snowy plains of the Goron Village capture my heart with it's pronounced love of snow levels. The Great Sea contains a section similar to Mario 64's Jolly Roger Bay eel, and it legitimately made me yelp. That same Sea contains recognizable iconography that's stuck with me, like the Lab's hook like shape and the Sea Turtle's island upon it's back. Inside the Moon, dear God, inside the moon. I've already described it, but what I left out were details like the slight delayed shimmering blur added to everything. How you start off from far away and have to run all the way up the hill. The beautiful baby blue sky above. The figments of Skull Kid wear masks of the fallen bosses, asking you to play as well as questions about what it's like to be happy and have friends. Further on, you encounter Majora. The demented forms that Majora takes during his climactic boss fight are nothing but alien abominations, each form of his shape-shifting and morphing akin to The Thing as he tries to destroy you. It's all just so visceral.

Majora's Mask feels deeply personal. Everyone I've met has described their own entangled relationship with the game. Stories and memories integrating the game and themselves together. In the best possible way, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is like a nightmare you had when you were young. You remember the feelings you had when it happened. How you felt in the moment. How you reacted when you woke up. How shook you were to your core. How you'll never forget what you saw. It's reminded you that one day, you may not wake up again. You'll be forever lost in a dream. A dream no one knows the boundaries or limits of. A dream that's eyes may truly be as black and void as you fear in the waking world.

I just hope in the dream, I'm sitting underneath a tree on top of a hill.