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Game Debate #152: The Legend of Zelda - Majora's Mask


Reed Rothchild

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40 members have voted

  1. 1. Rate based on your own personal preferences, NOT historical significance

    • 10/10 - One of your very favorite games of all time.
    • 9/10 - Killer f'ing game. Everyone should play it.
    • 8/10 - Great game. You like to recommend it.
    • 7/10 - Very good game, but not quite great.
    • 6/10 - Pretty good. You might enjoy occasionally playing it.
    • 5/10 - It's okay, but maybe not something you'll go out of your way to play.
    • 4/10 - Meh. There's plenty of better alternatives to this.
    • 3/10 - Not a very good game.
      0
    • 2/10 - Pretty crappy.
      0
    • 1/10 - Horrible game in every way.
      0
    • 0/10 - The Desert Bus of painful experiences. You'd rather shove an icepick in your genitals than play this.
      0
    • Never played it, but you're interested.
    • Never played it, never will.
  2. 2. Next week's poll



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man, i LOVED OoT. will forever be on my favorite games list. Was super hyped for MM. preordered it the first day possible. Picked it up day 1. played it. didn't really get it. bought a strategy guide. played through it (i always feel like i finished the game, but looking back, i highly doubt that). have never even considered turning it on again. it was fine, i guess. the weirdness wasn't for me. the lack of traditional Zelda dungeons and etc. put me off. 

i'm giving it a 4/10. 

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I'm with @Webhead123 but it hit me earlier, the declining interest happened with Ocarina not after.  I didn't get the appeal with some design choices and so on with it to where I quit on the game for at least 4-6mo cold, then one day I got annoyed on break leaving it alone as the first I'd dropped.  I sat for an afternoon and plowed through the desert colossus and there rest clear to the ending of the game.  Never repeated it since, many false starts where I'd get my fill and bail hours or so in.  Wind Waker was the one exception that played like a gem to me, enjoyed that ride as an oddball stand out that appealed to me despite being 3D more like the old games and I've repeated that one once or twice years ago.  BotW was the one that changed things as I was spent on it otherwise.

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Administrator · Posted
36 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Never repeated it since, many false starts where I'd get my fill and bail hours or so in.

This happens to me every time I play Ocarina, I get to the Forest, Fire, or Water Temple at best and just give up out of boredom. Which sucks cuz I literally don't recall anything at all about the later temples so it'd be like playing them new for me, but it feels like a slog getting through those earlier three. Honestly I always enjoy the kid Link parts.

Part of why I like Majora may very well be the compact nature of it, I can dip my toes in and clear the game quick, or I can choose to go mask hunting/side questing, whatever I happen to have the time for, and it's always thoroughly enjoyable for me.

The atmosphere and characters really carry it pretty far for me, it really feels like everyone is actually being impacted by the impending doom, which I didn't feel so much with many other games of the time. Playing RPGs for most of my life, it was always weird to me that sitting in the end times, store clerks would greet you cheerily to sell you some apples or whatever; in Majora the moon is just outside their door and they KNOW it, and they fear the outcome, or some have accepted it and await doom, while others have fled entirely (like the Postman). It was, for me, one of if not the first time the characters in a game all (almost) universally acknowledged and were thoroughly impacted by the events of the story.

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@Gloves That's exactly about where I get to and just don't care anymore.  The water temple is kind of an annoyance easily turned around but the 3DS version cleaned up that bit, and yet still I don't get anywhere deep into that version either.  It's a good game for its time, grossly overrated as the 'best rated game everz!' you see online along with the equally blown over FF7 from the Sony side.  Hive mind doesn't always meet reality when you have to remember it was the golden era of getting free stuff for glowing reviews.  Not an excellent 10/10 game but not bad either, better than many of the 3D Zelda games but is that saying much?  Probably not.

I found the dark atmosphere of TP fantastic story too, but the wide empty open boring slow to navigate places eventually got to me.  Also the backwater to SNES era saving mechanic, anything you save only saves before the last doorway/cave hole/dungeon entrance you passed so things go missing which stunk in something so vast and slow.  WInd Waker had a great story, presence, moved at a better pace, and kept the entertainment value up quite a bit more, even on the open seas given how navigation worked.

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Editorials Team · Posted

All this talk about false starts and restarts has me curious about my own Zelda inventory...

  • The Legend of Zelda - completed 1x
  • Zelda II: AoL - completed 1x
  • Link to the Past - completed 10x+
  • Links Awakening - completed 1x
  • Ocarina of Time - completed 5x+
  • Oracle of Ages - never played
  • Oracle of Seasons - completed 1x
  • Majora's Mask - completed 1x, been meaning to play the 3DS version for years, 2026(?) backlog game
  • Wind Waker - completed 1x, been meaning to revisit
  • Minnish Cap - completed 1x, been meaning to revisit 
  • Four Swords Adventure - partially complete as a rental, unsure how to play this in modern day
  • Twilight Princess - played a portion, but gave up on it for unknown reasons, 2024 backlog game
  • Phantom Hourglass - completed 1x
  • Skyward's Sword - never played, 2025 backlog game
  • Spirit Tracks - completed 1x
  • Hyrule Warriors - completed 1x
  • Triforce Heroes - completed 1x
  • Link Between Worlds - completed 1x
  • Breath of the Wild - completed 1x
  • Links Awakening Remake - completed 1x
  • Cadence of Hyrule - completed 1x
  • Age of Calamity - completed 1x
  • Tears of the Kingdom - TBD

So, I really want to play Majora again, and revisit, but if I only have time for 1-2 Zelda games a year it still becomes hard to ever get the it.

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Editorials Team · Posted
Just now, DoctorEncore said:

I think Ocarina is great and still holds up today, so I'd love to give this a shot at some point. Does this play well on Switch Online or is the input latency as bad as the NES/SNES games?

I heard mixed things.

Also, strangely, none of the NES and SNES games felt laggy to me, and games like Pilotwings 64, F-Zero X, and Goldeneye felt fine to me.  But Yoshi's Story seemed nearly unplayable.

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The first part of the game is just too brutally slow and boring. I really want to like this game and love some of the ideas, but it's way too slow/tedious for me. I beat it back in the day and tried to get into it a number of times before dragging my ass through the 3DS version which I felt obligated to complete. 5/10

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On one hand, there is the novelty factor of its post modern premise, looping in the same time period and changing it's outcome over and over again. On the other, the game practically pioneered the idea of fedex quests, and is less about action and more about uncovering space opera subplots.

I remember dumping a lot of time into it back in the day, but remember not figuring out something basic about the ice level and giving up on it. That's on me though.

Edited by Optomon
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It's hard for me to talk about Majora's Mask and judge it properly and just list all the things I hate about it. Actually, hate might be a strong word. Yeah strongly dislike, I'll save the hate for Skyward Sword 😛  I strongly dislike the 3 day cycle thing and constantly having to rewind and find key events and characters and doing dungeons only to get to the end and run out of time and have to go back and do it all over again. The dungeons were overall subpar despite the novel idea of the masks (which is the one thing I really enjoyed about the game). I don't think it's a bad game. I think there is just too much tedium involved. Really the 3 day cycle resetting everything every time you go back is what kills it the most. Great concept but frustrating in execution. In the end I give it an 8/10 because it's Zelda, it's got the core concept of the franchise right, it's still good during the good parts, it's just one of my lesser favorite Zeldas.

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To me the mask gimmick was more tiring than the time gimmick.  I didn't really like playing as fish man, rock man, or wood boy.  Oot at least starting getting really fun after the water dungeon.  I played the crap out of it when it came out, but haven't really touched it in about 20 years.

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It's a great concept with the three day cycle, but it's not really very fun to play. Majora's Mask has amazing story, dialogue, characters, music, mood, and unsettling imagery. Most of the time doing the objectives though, it's bothersome and annoying to play. 3D Zelda struggles to make exciting gameplay, and I think Ocarina of Time does a better job of making interesting individual rooms and puzzles.

If you like story and can put up with frustrating gameplay, than Majora's Mask is one of the best games ever. For gameplay it's hard to recommend.

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On 5/2/2023 at 5:46 AM, Sumez said:

I love Majora's Mask. The unique eerie atmosphere of a doomed town and all the inhabitants who are gradually either coming to terms with their own demise, or desperately trying to block out the truth, is second to none - and in a Zelda game no less.

The 3-day loop where you can follow people's going throughout the town as different events happen depending on the progression of time, and time of day, is a really interesting way to generate a believable living town, which far outclasses the typical approach of having NPCs move throughout town even randomly, via AI, or in repeated patterns.
And the Bombers' Notebook which is used to track certain relevant people and things you can do to interact with them and solve certain puzzles throughout the time loop is a stroke of genius which both helps track everything, and give a purpose to the whole structure.

I have absolutely no issue with the typical complaint of the "time limit". You learn the slowdown song very early in the game, and it gives you more than enough time to do pretty much anything you need to do, while the ability to rewind to Day 1 at any time removes any actual pressure. It's perfectly manageable with only a minimum of dedication towards figuring out how things work.

Where the game does fall short is in all the basic Zelda gameplay connecting all the good bits. The areas are kinda boring, there's only four dungeons in the entire game, and none of them are particularly memorable. The transformations are mostly one-trick gimmicks that don't really add much to the game despite trying to carry major parts of it. All that stuff is just sub-par in terms of general high "Zelda standards". But I love the game despite it. 7/10

 

I think this sums it up well for me. If it wasn't a zelda game, and if I wasn't showing up expecting monster fights and dungeons and treasures, then I would be much more into it. I'd probably rather watch someone else play it, but I would appreciate it. MM is just sorely deficient in the stuff that I care about when I play zelda games. Plus, it's got a lot of setup and repetitive parts when you're on a new game. I really wish it had a mode where you could skip the beginning after you've done it once.

I played through it a bit and it didn't appeal to me. I'd probably think higher of it had it been some esoteric PSX adventure game with miniscule combat elements. Would honestly feel more on point as a Swery69 game.

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