Mr Durand Pierre
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Update: So I finally got around to playing Majora's Mask again and beat it. And here are my updated thoughts:
Majora's Mask is simultaneously the best and worst Zelda game ever made. You'd think that would make it average out as being a middle of the road Zelda game, but nope, it's still the worst.
This is mainly due to the time system. It's not quite as bad as I had initially anticipated with the most boring first hour or two ever in a videogame (it will most likely take you at least 2 tries, each an hour long, to figure out how to even get out of the town you start out in and start weilding your sword). But it gets better. I realized you don't even have to replay dungeons due to warp pads that take you straight to the bosses provided you've conquered the dungeon before. But I still say the time system is annoying as hell. Frequently I had no idea what to do next and I'd have to resort to looking up hints online or my time would run out and I'd have hours worth of progress to retrace.
A good example of this is a sub-quest you must complete before the third dungeon. The quest is that you have to rescue 7 Zora eggs. There are 4 in one location and 3 in another. After a couple hours of work I managed to retrieve the first 4, but had no idea how to even get to the area where the other 3 were. given enough time I'm sure I could have solved this, but the clock was ticking and I didn't want to replay the first half of the quest again. There were other frequent annoyances too. I spent hours on another side-quest, but would frequently miss the next step in a sequence and have to start all over before eventually giving up. The time system is interesting in that people act more like they would in real life, but in terms of gameplay it really just makes it a lot harder to get anything done. If you start out on a quest you damn well better finish it before time runs out. I prefered Ocarina's system where you can come and go from side-quests as you like.
But I did say this was in many ways the best of the series so I'll write about what makes it so good.
For one Termina is deffinitely the most interesting Zelda world we've seen. It's not a far cry from Hyrule, but it does certainly feel different. Just about everything in Majora's Mask is creative. The 3 creatures you can turn into, the concept of wearing several different masks (some with superpowers), and all the wacky creatures you run into aren't the typical kind you'd find in an adventure game. A lot of the subplots are endlessly creative too. For example: one side-quest involves you trying to protect cows form being abducted by aliens. Another quest has you trying to save a man who's turned into a half-zombie and is taken care of by his daughter. There's also a gaint turtle, a zora rock group, a graveyard where a wandering ninja once fought, and even some surreal forest on the moon... or something. The design of many of these landscapes is pure genius. I found Ocarina's Hyrule just your basic dungeons and dragons knights and elves universe, but Majora's Mask felt altogether different. It keeps just the right amount of Zelda nostalgia (most of the items have been in the Zelda franchise from the beggining), but offers a fresh spin on things.
Special mention should be made of the games music. There's one tune you'll be hearing A LOT in the game, basically anywhere on the world map during the daytime, and yet it never gets old. It's just a slow repetitive haunting theme which was the perfect blend of making you feel off balance and not annoying you or being too obtrusive. There was a lot of other great music in the game oto, but I don't know any of their titles, so discussing htem any further would be pointless.
I also really liked the layout of the world map. You start out in a town, and you can go North, South, East, and West, and each of these areas is very distinct and opens up in a semi-linear manner. It's a difficult game to get lost in. And the warp points are all real convinient too. I wish other Zelda games coult take a hint from this.
Still for whatever genius was put into Majora's Mask it is a frustrating experience. While normally opposed to walkthroughs I feel that looking up hints is almost crucial to enjoying the game. In many ways Majora's Mask really is a work of art, and it made me sad I wasn't enjoying it as much as I was appreciating it.
And this was my original review for anyone who cares...
(Note: I never finished Majora's Mask. Find out why...)
The best thing I can say about Majora's Mask is that it makes me respect Ocarina of time a lot more.
Though I didn't particularly care for Ocarina, it was a work of genius compared to Majora's Mask. I'll start with what I hated about this game.
First and foremost, the time system is the work of the devil. The game takes place over the course of 3 days which last about 50 minutes total, but you can slow hem down to roughly 5 hours. After the 3 days are over the game resets. Luckily, you have the ocarina of time, which can take you back to dawn of the first day with most of your inventory (all of the important items anyway) and it saves your progress. Unfortuneately, the game DOES NOT save your progress if you just let the time run out. The game makes these rules pretty unclear, since both methods take you back to dawn of the first day, but one of these methods resets your progress from the last 5 hours. Perhaps this was my own stupid mistake, but it's still the responsibility of the writers and programmers to prevent shit like that form happening. The fact that it's even possible ot lose 5 hours of progress in a Zelda game is beyond me.
The other way to save your progress is using these owl statues. but they only save your progress if you save and quit. And then when you reload the game, your save gets erased. So if the game crashes (which I've heard of happening, though have yet to experience) you can easily lose several hours of progress. It's beyond me why they created save slots like this, and wouldn't just let you save and keep playing.
The time system is ripe with possibilities for sidequests, though most of these start the same way doing the same tedious quests over and over again. For example, there's a deku scrub near where you start the game and you can do some stuff to get the deed to his land. Later in the game you can sell his deed off for rewards. But everyime you startthe three days over you have to go through the same sequence to get his deed. t's not fun. It's not a puzzle. It's just plain tedious. And there are A LOT of subquests like that, where you have to complete the same tasks multiple times. In fact, a lot of stuff will open up after you beat a dungeon, but before the 3 days are up, so if you want to partake in any of these sidequests you best hurry. The game is anything but relaxing.
I did apprciate the options for so many sidequests, but these could have been done without the aid of the time system. I prefer the wind waker and how it has several islands with subquests that you can complete at your own leisure. I like open endedness, but only if it's relaxing. Feeling rushed bothered me to no end.
The game also has only 4 dungeons. I only played through the first two, and they were fine. Ocarina of time quality at least. That's a plus, I guess.
One good thing about MM is that you can get a lot of items right off the bat (like the bow and arrow, or bombs). The game is more like an add-on in that respect, and I dug that. I also liked it's strange story and how it diverges from the usual boring simple Zelda mythos.
Hardcore fans of OOT will love MM. I realize I am in the minority who doesn't. The game looks and plays like OOT (which I kinda liked. see my review), and that's fine, but its supposedly revolutionary time system is just and exercise in stress.
5/10
Majora's Mask is simultaneously the best and worst Zelda game ever made. You'd think that would make it average out as being a middle of the road Zelda game, but nope, it's still the worst.
This is mainly due to the time system. It's not quite as bad as I had initially anticipated with the most boring first hour or two ever in a videogame (it will most likely take you at least 2 tries, each an hour long, to figure out how to even get out of the town you start out in and start weilding your sword). But it gets better. I realized you don't even have to replay dungeons due to warp pads that take you straight to the bosses provided you've conquered the dungeon before. But I still say the time system is annoying as hell. Frequently I had no idea what to do next and I'd have to resort to looking up hints online or my time would run out and I'd have hours worth of progress to retrace.
A good example of this is a sub-quest you must complete before the third dungeon. The quest is that you have to rescue 7 Zora eggs. There are 4 in one location and 3 in another. After a couple hours of work I managed to retrieve the first 4, but had no idea how to even get to the area where the other 3 were. given enough time I'm sure I could have solved this, but the clock was ticking and I didn't want to replay the first half of the quest again. There were other frequent annoyances too. I spent hours on another side-quest, but would frequently miss the next step in a sequence and have to start all over before eventually giving up. The time system is interesting in that people act more like they would in real life, but in terms of gameplay it really just makes it a lot harder to get anything done. If you start out on a quest you damn well better finish it before time runs out. I prefered Ocarina's system where you can come and go from side-quests as you like.
But I did say this was in many ways the best of the series so I'll write about what makes it so good.
For one Termina is deffinitely the most interesting Zelda world we've seen. It's not a far cry from Hyrule, but it does certainly feel different. Just about everything in Majora's Mask is creative. The 3 creatures you can turn into, the concept of wearing several different masks (some with superpowers), and all the wacky creatures you run into aren't the typical kind you'd find in an adventure game. A lot of the subplots are endlessly creative too. For example: one side-quest involves you trying to protect cows form being abducted by aliens. Another quest has you trying to save a man who's turned into a half-zombie and is taken care of by his daughter. There's also a gaint turtle, a zora rock group, a graveyard where a wandering ninja once fought, and even some surreal forest on the moon... or something. The design of many of these landscapes is pure genius. I found Ocarina's Hyrule just your basic dungeons and dragons knights and elves universe, but Majora's Mask felt altogether different. It keeps just the right amount of Zelda nostalgia (most of the items have been in the Zelda franchise from the beggining), but offers a fresh spin on things.
Special mention should be made of the games music. There's one tune you'll be hearing A LOT in the game, basically anywhere on the world map during the daytime, and yet it never gets old. It's just a slow repetitive haunting theme which was the perfect blend of making you feel off balance and not annoying you or being too obtrusive. There was a lot of other great music in the game oto, but I don't know any of their titles, so discussing htem any further would be pointless.
I also really liked the layout of the world map. You start out in a town, and you can go North, South, East, and West, and each of these areas is very distinct and opens up in a semi-linear manner. It's a difficult game to get lost in. And the warp points are all real convinient too. I wish other Zelda games coult take a hint from this.
Still for whatever genius was put into Majora's Mask it is a frustrating experience. While normally opposed to walkthroughs I feel that looking up hints is almost crucial to enjoying the game. In many ways Majora's Mask really is a work of art, and it made me sad I wasn't enjoying it as much as I was appreciating it.
And this was my original review for anyone who cares...
(Note: I never finished Majora's Mask. Find out why...)
The best thing I can say about Majora's Mask is that it makes me respect Ocarina of time a lot more.
Though I didn't particularly care for Ocarina, it was a work of genius compared to Majora's Mask. I'll start with what I hated about this game.
First and foremost, the time system is the work of the devil. The game takes place over the course of 3 days which last about 50 minutes total, but you can slow hem down to roughly 5 hours. After the 3 days are over the game resets. Luckily, you have the ocarina of time, which can take you back to dawn of the first day with most of your inventory (all of the important items anyway) and it saves your progress. Unfortuneately, the game DOES NOT save your progress if you just let the time run out. The game makes these rules pretty unclear, since both methods take you back to dawn of the first day, but one of these methods resets your progress from the last 5 hours. Perhaps this was my own stupid mistake, but it's still the responsibility of the writers and programmers to prevent shit like that form happening. The fact that it's even possible ot lose 5 hours of progress in a Zelda game is beyond me.
The other way to save your progress is using these owl statues. but they only save your progress if you save and quit. And then when you reload the game, your save gets erased. So if the game crashes (which I've heard of happening, though have yet to experience) you can easily lose several hours of progress. It's beyond me why they created save slots like this, and wouldn't just let you save and keep playing.
The time system is ripe with possibilities for sidequests, though most of these start the same way doing the same tedious quests over and over again. For example, there's a deku scrub near where you start the game and you can do some stuff to get the deed to his land. Later in the game you can sell his deed off for rewards. But everyime you startthe three days over you have to go through the same sequence to get his deed. t's not fun. It's not a puzzle. It's just plain tedious. And there are A LOT of subquests like that, where you have to complete the same tasks multiple times. In fact, a lot of stuff will open up after you beat a dungeon, but before the 3 days are up, so if you want to partake in any of these sidequests you best hurry. The game is anything but relaxing.
I did apprciate the options for so many sidequests, but these could have been done without the aid of the time system. I prefer the wind waker and how it has several islands with subquests that you can complete at your own leisure. I like open endedness, but only if it's relaxing. Feeling rushed bothered me to no end.
The game also has only 4 dungeons. I only played through the first two, and they were fine. Ocarina of time quality at least. That's a plus, I guess.
One good thing about MM is that you can get a lot of items right off the bat (like the bow and arrow, or bombs). The game is more like an add-on in that respect, and I dug that. I also liked it's strange story and how it diverges from the usual boring simple Zelda mythos.
Hardcore fans of OOT will love MM. I realize I am in the minority who doesn't. The game looks and plays like OOT (which I kinda liked. see my review), and that's fine, but its supposedly revolutionary time system is just and exercise in stress.
5/10
