For the past few years, I have thought about writing a "walkthrough" for this game, repurposing that format to make something more tailored to this game's distinct structure than a typical essay or review. I still want to do that, but until then consider this a loose sketch of the primary ideas:
Western pop culture since the debut of Star Wars in 1977 has become obsessed with Heroes, their Journey, and their One Thousand Faces. In the 21st century, interpretations and explorations of heroism have largely become addicted to Joseph Campbell's monomyth structure by way of its diluted Hollywood cliffnotes versions from Christopher Vogler, Dan Harmon, and their like. What began as a loose interpretive tool for comparing existing myths and stories across cultures has become a rigid instructive tool for constructing and reconstructing the same stories over and over. Entries in the Legend of Zelda series have often employed this structure. Compelling as it is, it's the sort of truth you get from telling a lie often enough. Majora's Mask strives to be more honest about heroism.
Link is already The Hero when you start the game and though his journey was completed, time travel erased it from history. It now exists only in Link's memory (and yours, if you played that game first). Already we are in a textual knot: the hero's journey is shown to be entirely optional due to the overwhelming power the goddesses bestowed on Link and Zelda, but it did have to happen in the first place in order for it to then never have happened. The Hyrule fantasy in all its iterations is a rigged game, the Triforce having so many failsafes to prevent it ever being wielded for evil and always resulting in a two-on-one showdown. Majora's Mask swiftly plucks Link out of this dynamic and drops him into a new world called Termina.
Termina does not have a bucolic time of grace to fall from, but it has a sense of history culminating in a contemporary-feeling society. It has no divine order preserving it, but instead a singular core evil seeking to destroy life. People are not standing still waiting for the Hero to rescue them, but rather are in-fighting and exacerbating a bad situation through prejudice and selfishness. There are Heroes aside from Link, but they have failed. Similarly, the problems plaguing each region and Termina as a whole are not static: they worsen day by day until they become catastrophes. In prior games and later games people's situations were binary, being in peril until Link flipped their switch to rescued and caused them to say the same dialogue for the rest of their existence.
Like everyone currently alive in our reality, Link is born into a world that won't necessarily survive and not for lack of trying by well-intentioned people. The two powers that distinguish Link from those people are remembering and trying again; save and load. Every other verb necessary to succeed is either something anyone could do (listen/observe, communicate, exchange) or is a power given to Link by someone else. And each power allows you to solve the problem of another, making you a medium between people who cannot interact for lack of knowledge or who failed in the attempt. Everywhere you go, Link is just finishing a quest someone else started and by extension everyone you meet is a potential hero.
That is, until the game introduces Ikana. Ascending, inverting, and saving Stone Tower is not possible by any person you've met, not by any single form Link can assume: he must use shells of his forms to stand in the right place at the right time in order to progress, he must swap between all forms, and he must grow. No one person can save the world.
In a sense this was also true of Ocarina of Time or Link to the Past before, with the Sages/Maidens and Zelda assisting in defeating Ganon. One can play Majora's Mask like those games, such that Link prevents the primary apocalypse and everyone is in a roundabout way saved. Doing so would mean the Deku princess remains trapped and the monkey is still imprisoned; that Lulu does not perform again; that Romani Ranch is devastated; that Anju and Kafei never reconcile.
It also cannot be understated that no one helping Link or being helped by Link is a higher being chosen by fate. They have no magic, not even a magic of friendship as they will forget you in due time. They are all the people that in the prior game stood around helplessly and waited for you to solve their problems for them, feet nailed to the ground. Now they move and try but fail, only able to try the once. They are never in the right place at the right time until you use memory and communication to guide them there. If they could remember and try again, they could do it themselves. You were not chosen by fate, you are not a component of a formula, you are merely the person who remembers being a hero and is willing to try being one again.
If you play Majora's Mask like a conventional Hero's journey, jumping from region to region and vanquishing monsters, you arrive at its final challenge poorly equipped. The manifestation of evil will tell you plainly that you "only have weak masks". It can be defeated this way, and the conclusion is satisfying if you wanted a story about a hero narrowly defeating evil through their own cunning and some supernatural aid. When the credits roll, you will be shown the masks you didn't collect. Characters will be conspicuously absent from the celebrations of your victory over evil.
If you play the game caring about people and learning from them, you gather a number of masks to wear and identities to assume. Help everyone you can and bring their memory with you and give that memory to others, and the manifestation of evil will call you "the bad guy". You gain a new power that lets you steamroll over evil easily. The ending adjusts accordingly, and you see everyone you helped making each other happier.
Evil in Termina in not a person or demon, but a mask worn by the frightened to justify acting on their worst impulses. Throughout the world you learn of the direct damage Skull Kid wrought under the mask's influence, and the indirect damage forms a shadow of that same cruelty cast on other faces. Wear the evil mask to convince yourself you're good, and call someone wearing its opposite bad. Goes on so easily, grips so tightly. Just as anyone here could be a hero, anyone here can (and sometimes becomes) a villain.
Link's Awakening introduced the trading sequence to Zelda, and many games that follow incorporate it as a side quest. The structure is simple: you find something someone needs, you give it to them, out of gratitude they give you something someone else needs, repeat. Majora's Mask proves this is ultimately the only quest worth doing. Go among people and link them. Link as many people as you can, make them happy, make them willing to help each other, and evil finds nowhere to take root. You will never be picked by goddesses to go save the world by collecting crystals or medallions or triangles, so stop waiting for your journey to begin.
I played this game when I was six years old and it was new. I replayed it as a teenager, in my early twenties, in my late twenties; it had aged but was not old. When I began exhibiting symptoms of chronic illness around the age of 8, I would have good days and bad days. I found that after three days of feeling good or bad, my body forgot what it was like to not be how it had been for the past three days. When depression manifested later on in my life, I found a similar cycle. Three days in it and I feel like I will never be happy again, and fear I never was before. My mind needs to remember what my matter cannot. I come back to this game to strengthen my remembering; that every time I wake up facing three miserable days in which my world could fall apart, I can fight that off and maybe make for myself or someone else three better days. After all, I am at least waking up.
"And sure, if fate some future bard shall join
In sad similitude of griefs to mine,
Condemn'd whole years in absence to deplore,
And image charms he must behold no more;
Such if there be, who loves so long, so well;
Let him our sad, our tender story tell;
The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint 'em, who shall feel 'em most."
Western pop culture since the debut of Star Wars in 1977 has become obsessed with Heroes, their Journey, and their One Thousand Faces. In the 21st century, interpretations and explorations of heroism have largely become addicted to Joseph Campbell's monomyth structure by way of its diluted Hollywood cliffnotes versions from Christopher Vogler, Dan Harmon, and their like. What began as a loose interpretive tool for comparing existing myths and stories across cultures has become a rigid instructive tool for constructing and reconstructing the same stories over and over. Entries in the Legend of Zelda series have often employed this structure. Compelling as it is, it's the sort of truth you get from telling a lie often enough. Majora's Mask strives to be more honest about heroism.
Link is already The Hero when you start the game and though his journey was completed, time travel erased it from history. It now exists only in Link's memory (and yours, if you played that game first). Already we are in a textual knot: the hero's journey is shown to be entirely optional due to the overwhelming power the goddesses bestowed on Link and Zelda, but it did have to happen in the first place in order for it to then never have happened. The Hyrule fantasy in all its iterations is a rigged game, the Triforce having so many failsafes to prevent it ever being wielded for evil and always resulting in a two-on-one showdown. Majora's Mask swiftly plucks Link out of this dynamic and drops him into a new world called Termina.
Termina does not have a bucolic time of grace to fall from, but it has a sense of history culminating in a contemporary-feeling society. It has no divine order preserving it, but instead a singular core evil seeking to destroy life. People are not standing still waiting for the Hero to rescue them, but rather are in-fighting and exacerbating a bad situation through prejudice and selfishness. There are Heroes aside from Link, but they have failed. Similarly, the problems plaguing each region and Termina as a whole are not static: they worsen day by day until they become catastrophes. In prior games and later games people's situations were binary, being in peril until Link flipped their switch to rescued and caused them to say the same dialogue for the rest of their existence.
Like everyone currently alive in our reality, Link is born into a world that won't necessarily survive and not for lack of trying by well-intentioned people. The two powers that distinguish Link from those people are remembering and trying again; save and load. Every other verb necessary to succeed is either something anyone could do (listen/observe, communicate, exchange) or is a power given to Link by someone else. And each power allows you to solve the problem of another, making you a medium between people who cannot interact for lack of knowledge or who failed in the attempt. Everywhere you go, Link is just finishing a quest someone else started and by extension everyone you meet is a potential hero.
That is, until the game introduces Ikana. Ascending, inverting, and saving Stone Tower is not possible by any person you've met, not by any single form Link can assume: he must use shells of his forms to stand in the right place at the right time in order to progress, he must swap between all forms, and he must grow. No one person can save the world.
In a sense this was also true of Ocarina of Time or Link to the Past before, with the Sages/Maidens and Zelda assisting in defeating Ganon. One can play Majora's Mask like those games, such that Link prevents the primary apocalypse and everyone is in a roundabout way saved. Doing so would mean the Deku princess remains trapped and the monkey is still imprisoned; that Lulu does not perform again; that Romani Ranch is devastated; that Anju and Kafei never reconcile.
It also cannot be understated that no one helping Link or being helped by Link is a higher being chosen by fate. They have no magic, not even a magic of friendship as they will forget you in due time. They are all the people that in the prior game stood around helplessly and waited for you to solve their problems for them, feet nailed to the ground. Now they move and try but fail, only able to try the once. They are never in the right place at the right time until you use memory and communication to guide them there. If they could remember and try again, they could do it themselves. You were not chosen by fate, you are not a component of a formula, you are merely the person who remembers being a hero and is willing to try being one again.
If you play Majora's Mask like a conventional Hero's journey, jumping from region to region and vanquishing monsters, you arrive at its final challenge poorly equipped. The manifestation of evil will tell you plainly that you "only have weak masks". It can be defeated this way, and the conclusion is satisfying if you wanted a story about a hero narrowly defeating evil through their own cunning and some supernatural aid. When the credits roll, you will be shown the masks you didn't collect. Characters will be conspicuously absent from the celebrations of your victory over evil.
If you play the game caring about people and learning from them, you gather a number of masks to wear and identities to assume. Help everyone you can and bring their memory with you and give that memory to others, and the manifestation of evil will call you "the bad guy". You gain a new power that lets you steamroll over evil easily. The ending adjusts accordingly, and you see everyone you helped making each other happier.
Evil in Termina in not a person or demon, but a mask worn by the frightened to justify acting on their worst impulses. Throughout the world you learn of the direct damage Skull Kid wrought under the mask's influence, and the indirect damage forms a shadow of that same cruelty cast on other faces. Wear the evil mask to convince yourself you're good, and call someone wearing its opposite bad. Goes on so easily, grips so tightly. Just as anyone here could be a hero, anyone here can (and sometimes becomes) a villain.
Link's Awakening introduced the trading sequence to Zelda, and many games that follow incorporate it as a side quest. The structure is simple: you find something someone needs, you give it to them, out of gratitude they give you something someone else needs, repeat. Majora's Mask proves this is ultimately the only quest worth doing. Go among people and link them. Link as many people as you can, make them happy, make them willing to help each other, and evil finds nowhere to take root. You will never be picked by goddesses to go save the world by collecting crystals or medallions or triangles, so stop waiting for your journey to begin.
I played this game when I was six years old and it was new. I replayed it as a teenager, in my early twenties, in my late twenties; it had aged but was not old. When I began exhibiting symptoms of chronic illness around the age of 8, I would have good days and bad days. I found that after three days of feeling good or bad, my body forgot what it was like to not be how it had been for the past three days. When depression manifested later on in my life, I found a similar cycle. Three days in it and I feel like I will never be happy again, and fear I never was before. My mind needs to remember what my matter cannot. I come back to this game to strengthen my remembering; that every time I wake up facing three miserable days in which my world could fall apart, I can fight that off and maybe make for myself or someone else three better days. After all, I am at least waking up.
"And sure, if fate some future bard shall join
In sad similitude of griefs to mine,
Condemn'd whole years in absence to deplore,
And image charms he must behold no more;
Such if there be, who loves so long, so well;
Let him our sad, our tender story tell;
The well-sung woes will soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint 'em, who shall feel 'em most."
raisingcanes
6 months ago