The year is 1998, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time just released for the Nintendo 64 and is receiving perfect reviews from every major review outlet. Despite the troubled development cycle, Nintendo wants to strike while the iron is hot. Thankfully, a lot of Ocarina of Time’s development was spent learning how to make a game of this type in 3D and building the technology to do so. So what do you do?
Obviously you commit to making a sequel that will only take a year to develop and reuse much of the assets and code from Ocarina of Time.
Or so you think.
Thats what director Eiji Aonuma pitched to Nintendo for a direct sequel to the highest rated video game of all time. What followed was a rushed development hell that required creative thinking to solve and created an environment that bled into the story so much that none of the original team understands why they made a game like that. While crunch is often considered a bad thing, in this case, it breed an extremely interesting and innovative game that no one has really surpassed or even fully understood since.
Development
Not much is known about the development of Majoras Mask but what is known is rather interesting.
Ideas for a sequel to Ocarina of Time where getting kicked around from the moment it launched in 1998. Real development for Majoras Mask started in January 1999. The team was smaller than Ocarina of Time’s was and the deadline was to be finished in about a year. Considering its release in April of 2000 and the massive lead time to make cartridges, its safe to assume the deadline was pretty close to 1 year on the dot.
The games biggest change, its 3 day cycle, was actually inspired by this tight deadline. The idea was to “make the game data more compact while still providing deep gameplay”. The end goal of the project was to “make a refined, compact successor to Ocarina of Time that would allow players to have a different experience each time they played”. The 3 day cycle, the stress it added, and the schedules of various NPC’s accomplished this goal in such a creative way that I’m surprised no one else has tried copying it.
Release
When Majoras Mask released, it received similar, although not as high, praise as its predecessor. The game sold over 600,000 copies by the end of 2000 and is considered one of the best games on the N64. Reviewers loved the 3 day cycle, as well as its dark story. Some reviewers disliked that it was more difficult than Ocarina of Time but otherwise, it was a very successful and well loved game that released at the tail end of the Nintendo 64’s life cycle.
Legacy
While future titles like Windwaker and Twilight Princess would outsell it, they where very controversial for their design changes. Majoras Mask has mostly maintained a spotless reputation among those who played it. Every future Zelda game continues to be hotly debated about how good they actually are and opinions constantly change as the years go on.
For example, Twilight Princess launched to near universal acclaim and was far more hyped than the Windwaker. As it aged, people started saying it was a less than perfect reimagining of Ocarina of Time and the much hated Windwaker, was considered the far superior game. After enduring a stained reputation for years, Twilight Princess has been making a comeback as a game we where all too harsh on and with many saying its secretly been the best traditional Zelda game. This debate is still raging and being argued daily. Every Zelda game after Majoras Mask has had a similar cycle of changing opinions.
The games that came before it also have a somewhat rocky history, albeit far less extreme. Ocarina of Time is still a beloved game that while its reputation has largely stayed the same, there is intense debate over whether it deserves to still be the highest rated game of all time and much energy is wasted discussing if it holds up 25 years later.
The 2D games haven’t been safe either. They still rank very high in peoples mind but how well they age has changed with the growing acceptance of 2D games. They where considered pinnacles of their craft but where rapidly aging as 3D games took over. As 3D went on to become mainstream, this made many consider them old and boring. Finally, as the indie scene took off and more people saw that 2D is more than just an era, its a style that is still fun today, their acceptance has rose and more people than ever are trying them.
How has Majoras Mask fared? It has shockingly maintained maybe the best reputation of its brethren. It never hit the same high as Ocarina of Time so it managed to avoid all the people looking to tear down and analyze old things that people loved, but it didn’t do anything as controversial as its younger siblings. Instead, its reputation has slowly gotten better with time. When it was new, the internet was still a fledgling so many of us didn’t know a lot about the game and its strange story. As more of us got on the internet and people started discussing games in larger groups, all of the little story elements began to be analyzed. The story discussions began to filter out in essays and YouTube videos that normal people saw. As it aged, more people began to appreciate it for what it is. Many hold an opinion that its “secretly” the best Zelda game despite how well it sold.
Looking towards the future
You didn’t click on this just to get a short, wikipedia level article about the game did you? You saw the title and are probably wondering about that. The game sold very well for an N64 game, is fondly remembered, and frequently discussed. Why is no one copying it? To answer that, we need to break down the innovations that made it great.
The 3 day cycle
Majora’s Mask is a stressful game. When the story isn’t making you feel sad about the state of the world, it is replaced by a constant ticking as you near the end of the world and your own death. The theme of time is so prevalent that the single largest hud element is a clock in the bottom center of the screen. The game also has clocks all over the place so that you can hear the ticking and watch your run inch to an end.
Every thread you pull, every activity you do, needs to be completed before midnight of the third day. Now you can’t spend hours in a dungeon, or talk to every NPC in a town. Every fuck up, every wasted second, is eating away at how much time you have left. Getting lost or being slow is now extremely punishing.
And it gets worse as you play. At the start of the first day, you don’t feel it as much. Since you have so much time. By the time it hits the 3rd day, if you aren’t done, you are sweating now. Every mistake is magnified as the cycle goes on. I remember one run, I tried to do the first dungeon after taking care of stuff in town since I had played the game before and this should be easy right? Having not played since I was a kid, I was relearning the dungeon almost from scratch and towards the end, I was swearing as the ground rumbled and I had mere minutes to finish the boss fight before all my progress reset. This meant that despite winning it, I would have to complete that dungeon again on the same save file because I didn’t have enough time to do any of the content that opens up after you complete a dungeon.
This level of stress is only reproduced in survival games or extraction shooters where the more time you spend in the world, the more you have to lose when you fail. The only game that has made me nearly as stressed was DayZ. Spending 20 hours on a server and attaining the best gear only to hear a gunshot nearby is perhaps the closest feeling to watching your progress get so close to being undone because you took too long.
The 3 day cycle also facilitates a living breathing world that even modern games struggle to achieve.
The world runs on a schedule
Early on, you get an item called the “Bombers Notebook” that keeps track of peoples schedules as you interact with them. The schedules are rigid and have strict requirements that seem archaic by todays technical standards, and yet they where so well integrated that it still feels ahead of newer games.
Its important to remember that this wasn’t entirely new. The jump to 3D necessitated a lot more horsepower than the 2D generation that came before it. This power was experimented with to do a lot of things that have become standard now. Ocarina of Time had a simple day/night cycle. It was very simple by Majoras Mask standards by just having 2 states, day or night, that it switched between. Shops closed at night and people went into their homes to sleep. It didn’t add too much to gameplay but it helped it feel more immersive.
Majoras mask one upped its predecessor by giving everyone a fixed schedule for all 3 days. Almost every NPC is moving around the map, doing different things, and only available for quests at certain times. For instance: to get the hotel room at the Stock Pot Inn, you must walk in and pretend to be someone else before the Goron entering town gets there. You have only couple minutes of real time to get there before that is permanently locked off. In the same building, are multiple optional triggers for a quest that require relatively precise timing to achieve. If you want to see Anju open the letter from Kafei, you need to be in that lobby at exactly 2:10PM on the the first day.
This schedule is Majora’s Mask true bread and butter. On paper, its the shortest game with only 4 dungeons compared to Ocarinas 12, but whereas Ocarina of Time had short quests to unlock the dungeons that you then spent most of your time in, Majoras mask asks you to interact with the world as more than just a place to sight see while on the way to the next adventure. Especially if you want a completionism ending, you will be spending far more of these cycles trying to do quest lines in the over world that all have strict time requirements. Depending on where you are in the game, you can do multiple quests per cycle but this can make it much harder as you have to hit precise schedules for multiple quests. This strict schedule to do quests also propels the games writing forward.
The writing
There are a lot of essays about Majoras Mask’s story and how its darker than any Zelda game. This is maybe the most discussed aspect of the game but to me, its only helped by the other systems and the story it tells.
A TLDR of the story. An imp named “Skull Kid” steals a mask with powerful magic. He then uses the mask to pull the moon down and if you don’t stop him, it will crash into the world at midnight on the 3rd night, killing everyone. I’m skipping a lot of little details but I would encourage you to experience it yourself if you want more.
The people in the world notice the moon falling and grapple with their own mortality in different ways. Some try to carry on, some bury their head in the sand, and some are changing plans immediately. Many of them though go through all 5 stages of grief throughout the 3 day schedule. You as the player interrupt that and usually help them accept or make the most of it. For instance, if you reunite Anju and Kafei, Anju will stay in town and have an impromptu wedding instead of hiding out on her families farm. She decides to spent the last of her time on earth with the person she loves instead of waiting in terror
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This leads to some very rewarding stories that are very hard to top despite the age and presentation. Compared to the usual quest to defeat the big bad that will eventually make everyone happy, you feel much more in tune with the world and its inhabitants as you noticeably improve their individual lives.
Its interesting to see how this style of padding out the gameplay has evolved with time. Whereas Majoras Mask made many of these quests important and all of them required to get the best ending, future games would recycle this style of gameplay to make filler quests. Games like Skyrim are littered with little quests like these that have their own self contained stories, but most of them are junk thats just done so you have something to do no matter where you are. Majoras mask by comparison, dedicated significant writing to these side quests that make them all feel impactful.
A living, breathing world
All 3 of these come together to do one of Majora’s Mask’s greatest tricks, it makes the world feel alive. While there are far larger worlds with more things to do, more people to talk to, and new technologies to make it feel more immersive, many struggle to feel as alive as Majora’s Mask did. People move around the map, have goals for their end, and have self contained stories that speaks not just about their character, but the world they live in. This makes the world feel lived in.
There are games that feel more lived in, but they usually accomplish this with time, money, and other resources that many of us just don’t have. Take Skyrim for instance. The world is way larger with multiple cities to explore that are full of people, many of whom are on schedules. And yet the world feels paper thin by comparison. Many NPC’s say a few default lines with their entire schedule being walk around the market, go home, and sleep. Their schedules are never as detailed as the ones in Majora’s Mask and few have any redeeming stories. Skyrim feels more lived in by sheer scale, graphics, and technology; none of which are feasible for a smaller team.
These stories and schedules also lead to a level of interactivity that few have achieved since. When you step in and change a characters story, they are on a completely different path until the end of the cycle. Compare to Skyrim again where most characters do the same thing except they now have a new voice line where they thank you and maybe comment on how their life has changed.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
The concept of a time loop is popular in fiction. While many cite 1993’s Groundhog Day as the progenitor, it’s existed in fiction since the early 1900s. For a western audience, Groundhog Day may be the one that popularized it, but unlike Majoras Mask, Groundhog Day is still cited by directors as inspiration for their films like 2020’s Palm Springs. Its even more popular in Japan where it’s frequently used as a trope in anime and has been popular since the 1970s.
Time itself is has also been explored as a concept in games like Braid and even by the latest Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, where every physics object stores its history so a player can rewind it back through time.
And yet, this condensed Time Loop has barely been touched in gaming. Majora’s Mask was made by a tiny team in a year while 3D videos games where still being figured out and when processing power was a fraction of even the cheapest Android Smart Phone. The tools to do it better have been available since the N64 and have only improved with every subsequent console generation.
Why has no one done it
While there is lots of areas to improve, how do you differentiate your game from just being Majoras Mask 2? Time Loops, while fun to discuss, don’t leave a lot of room for narrative. Most stories have their protagonist simply trying to escape the time loop. Majora’s Mask is one of the only time loop stories I know that doesn’t have the protagonist simply looking for a means of escape. Link is resetting the time loop himself instead of being trapped in it so he can learn more about the world and gain the tools to stop it. The only other media I saw that had fun with the concept was 2020’s Palm Springs. They still tried to escape it but it starts after the protagonist had tried numerous times and has just accepted his fate. The opening bit of the movie is the just him trying to make the most of it by doing something different every day. And because its an adult movie, most of that is trying to sleep with different people in the loop. The TLDR still ends up being the same as most other time loop narratives. The protagonist simply wants to get out of the loop so they can go back to a normal life.
This shows that while the concept is very interesting, there isn’t a lot to do with it. Unless you want to stay in the loop, the story has to somehow leave the loop. The opening of Palm Springs shows the only real narrative you can have if you don’t escape the loop. He gets drunk and sleeps with everyone, how well can you translate that into a video game? Maybe a return to the old arcade days of high scores except there is lore as to why you keep trying again? Majoras Mask, at least as far as I’ve experienced, is the only one that did something different. The TLDR can still be described as Link escaping it, but it puts the entire loop in the in the players hands.
Many players won’t even feel the same kind of Time Loop constraints since they reset the loop whenever they want. The only reminder that you are stuck here is if you run out of time. You get a bad ending and then are sent back to the first day. It’s almost more like a game over except its a completely different screen that usually sends you further back than if you die. The story almost implies that he can leave when he wants too but isn’t because he’s a hero that feels the need to save these people before continuing on his quest.
This poses a serious challenge to everyone else. How do you make this interesting. Palm Springs only got as many rewards as it did because it added some debauchery that was in a way humanizing while not doing anything new in the genre. Video games make that even more challenging. Not only can you not take the cheap path that Palm Springs did by using sex, you also need to build out the trees for every event the player can change. Movies are easy because you only have to write one story, in a game, you can’t pick how the player interacts with the world. Especially in an RPG like Majora’s Mask, the player can run off and do something you never intended instead of following the story.
Ask any group of players about their play through of an RPG and you get vastly different results. One guy ran off into the woods, one guy immediately sided with faction 1 while the other ignored both factions, and the last guy is parkouring up a mountain to get to the end early. You now have to think of all the consequences and make every quest stronger to hold up to the fact a player might have to do it multiple times in a play through. Skyrims worst fetch quests are tolerable because you only do them once in a potentially 100+ hour play through, how many of them could withstand a player doing it again 30 minutes later?
Finally, back to the narrative. How many compelling reasons can you make for getting stuck in a time loop and how many solutions can you write for getting out? Being stuck in a cycle weighs heavily on the main narrative as well. It’s hugely limiting to how you write your story while also putting said narrative under much scrutiny. Whereas many RPG’s can have a weak narrative since a player can run off and do other things, how do you keep someone coming back to a world that is resetting itself so frequently? You need a strong narrative that takes this limited sandbox and makes the player want to get out. Majora’s Mask made it work by playing as a legendary hero that needs to prevent the apocalypse. Thats a kind of dangerous and limiting narrative choice. So many non time loop games and media have the hero trying to stop Armageddon. So now you need to compete with them. A lot of the solutions in movies don’t work because they don’t translate to games. Some movies make the characters get bored of having fun in the same circumstance. Making a stretch of your game purposefully boring so that players will want to break out and have fun again is a good way to get bad reviews and have no one finish the game.
Some of the best games are one off
In my article about Bomb Rush Cyberpunk, I discussed how some of the best games are one off and even mentioned Majora’s Mask. While that article focussed more on sales and how it affects the art of creation, sometimes the art itself is reason to leave it as a one off. Majora’s Mask did something difficult extremely well and for that, it created a plateau that no one wants to climb. This is something that is constant in many franchises and sometimes, good sales are the only reason we get more like it.
When Hideo Kojima made Metal Gear Solid 2, he felt he was done with the franchise and didn’t have more to add. He wrote a compelling post modern narrative that deconstructs our own desire to see finished works be continued. He was done with the franchise after Metal Gear 2 but was tempted to make Metal Gear Solid as basically a remake in 3D. When Solid sold well, he was basically required to make a sequel. And yet, MGS 2 sold well and its narrative went over players heads so they wanted more, going so far as to send him death threats. This happened for every subsequent Metal Gear game where he says he’s going to quit, but the success forces him to come back some how. And yet, Metal Gear Solid 2 still stands as a unique game, especially considering how much the game was imitated and copied. It’s story is something that can’t really be retold thanks to the time and place it was developed in.
Other games like Deus Ex where successful enough to warrant sequels that while good, fail to capture the magic of the original. Bungie famously wanted out of Halo after 3 but pushed out 2 more games so they could finish their contract and be done with the franchise. Sometimes, we as fans want things that we shouldn’t. We want the properties and franchise we enjoyed to continue no matter what. And Zelda did continue. Its developers tried something new with Windwaker before retreating to the familiarity of Ocarina of Time’s gameplay in Twilight Princess. The series experimented but stayed largely similar until the 2017 hit Breath of the Wild which completely rethought how a Zelda game should play.
Sometimes its good to resurrect old ideas that still have life in them like with Bomb Rush Cyberpunk or Xcom. Other times, its best to let the dead rest. I look forward to the day someone successfully tackles everything that made Majoras Mask good but I’m not holding my breath for it. The game still stands the test of time and gets to remain on its pedestal. Perhaps its a good thing no one has attempted to copy it yet. That just means we’ll all be ready for when someone finally nails it. Until then, I’ll just keep replaying Majora’s Mask.