If this were a review, there would have to be talk of Majora’s occasionally wayward camera. It would have to tut over the shortage of ‘proper’ dungeons and lament that Link’s later transformations – to Goron and Zora respectively – aren’t used as fully as his Deku persona. It would express reservations about the series’ reliance on fetch-and-carry quests, on mazes and follow-my-leader. But this isn’t a review, so those concerns can be gleefully sidestepped. Instead, what matters is what Majora got right, and it’s only fair to say that a fair proportion of what it gets right was pinched from its older brother. Once the initial stages of the game are complete, there is certainly plenty of Zelda-ing to be done. Although the four main dungeons aren’t as meatily pleasing as the best in Ocarina, they are home to puzzle rooms and boss fights of a standard few games have since bettered. Mini-games, horseback archery, Skulltulla quests and heart piece collecting – if all you were looking for was an Ocarina add-on patch, there is much more familiarity here than first meets the eye.



In fact, the familiarity allows a better appreciation of the game’s core achievements. No longer reeling from Ocarina’s three-dimensional revolution, Majora gives you time to enjoy the tiny details. To revel in the animated perfection of Deku Link’s pirouette, or the way the imprisoned monkey claps his feet together. To savour the way familiar tunes become warped with a carnival hysteria as the end of the world approaches. And the grandeur of Ocarina’s epic tale is the perfect foil for Majora’s love of the absurd. There’s nothing like an encroaching armageddon to make you appreciate the daftness of scottie-dog races and alien cow abductions.

However, for most, what they remember of Majora is its people. The repeating cycle of three days and three nights allows the game to introduce you to the citizens of Termina in an organic and believable way. Rather than being met by lumps of text or awkward speeches, you find out about people by seeing how they live, meeting them as they circle again and again through the last few days of their lives. Even the most incidental characters – the town guards and the officious Deku traders – let slip little human details which add enormous emotional weight to the game. And, as Link does his rounds, his place in the gameworld changes. At the start, you are the very definition of an outsider, wandering lost and wordless around a strange and uncaring town. By the end, you are privy to everyone’s most personal secrets. You know what they’re going to do next even before they’ve decided for themselves. Saving the world is the easy bit. You’ve done that in nearly every videogame you’ve ever played. In Majora’s Mask you save the world by saving the world’s people, one flawed, fragile and fascinating person at a time.



As your familiarity with Clock Town grows, the real reason for its name becomes clear – the whole town and everyone in it resolves into a giant clockwork machine – and you know every cog. From taking in a sinuous acrobatic performance in the cool night air to sharing Anju’s heartbroken midnight vigil, your actions have the power to mend, change and shape these people’s lives. Just because the game achieves this sophistication simply, with a few well-chosen lines of dialogue and a scrap of elegant animation, it doesn’t lessen its impact. Solving all the subquests and collecting all the masks is the absolute opposite of an empty, 100 per cent complete-a-thon. Instead, it’s a real emotional imperative, and finishing each person’s story makes the game’s final sequence a genuine delight. For a game with such a bleak beginning, it has perhaps the warmest ending ever crafted.

It’s hard to over-emphasise Majora’s emotional achievements. Four years on, few developers have dared take on the lessons that it teaches about how to handle story and character in games. However, it’s only the beginning of what the game has to teach. There are other essays to be written, on how it should have revolutionised game-saving systems, but didn’t. On how delicately the subquests influence the way the main quests are played (try infiltrating the Pirate Fortress with and without the Stone Mask). On Anju and Kafei and what may be gaming’s greatest love story. On how the game has influenced later Zeldas and how much blame it must bear for unleashing Tingle on an undeserving world. Then there are tales to tell, of frog-collecting and curse-lifting, of spider-catching and fairy-herding, but the best way to discover them isn’t to read information in magazines. Instead, let the game tell you its story, whether for the first time or for a second, third or tenth. Ocarina may have been close to perfect, but Majora’s Mask is twice as revealing – a link to the future as well as to the past.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in E143.