The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

• 1. Introduction

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  A grimacing moon looms over the land of Termina in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Nintendo released the game for the Nintendo 64 in 2000. The moon is predicted to strike at dawn on the day of the Carnival of Time, an annual harvest festival. Yet the many peoples of Termina are busy with troubles of their own. The game follows Ocarina of Time from 1998 and is only the second in its series to use 3D graphics. How did a team assemble a sequel this quickly, and from what parts? What does a world feel like when its calendar refuses to move forward? And why do players still return to a game about a doomed town?

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• 2. A Land Under the Moon

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  Clock Town stands at the center of Termina, and its residents argue endlessly over whether to evacuate or keep preparing for the festival. A failed festival would devastate the town's economy, so the debate never settles.

  Termina is an alternate version of Hyrule, the setting of most Zelda games, and it is a darker one. Landmarks look familiar but twisted. Minor characters from Ocarina of Time return, each carrying a personal story of misfortune.

  The story begins several months after Ocarina of Time, as the first game in the Child Era of the "Victorious Hero" timeline. In that timeline, the Hero of Time defeats Ganondorf and returns to the present to warn young Zelda. Link is searching for Navi, the companion who left after the previous adventure. A Skull Kid in a mysterious mask ambushes him, traveling with two fairy siblings named Tatl and Tael. They steal Link's horse, Epona, along with the Ocarina of Time. Link chases them into a trap, where Skull Kid curses him into a Deku Scrub but accidentally leaves Tatl behind.

  Tatl leads the cursed Link to Clock Town, hoping to rejoin her brother. There the Happy Mask Salesman pressures Link to recover the stolen mask, promising to lift the curse if he succeeds. After three days, Link finds Skull Kid and retrieves the Ocarina of Time, but he fails to win back the mask. With the moon nearly upon them, Tael tells Link to awaken the Four Giants, the guardian deities of the regions in each cardinal direction. Link plays the Song of Time and returns to the day he first arrived.

  The Song of Healing comes next, played by the Happy Mask Salesman, who wrongly believes Link has the mask. When he learns the truth, he flies into a rage. Skull Kid's mask, he explains, is Majora's Mask, which holds a powerful evil capable of ending the world. Once he calms down, he sends Link out to retrieve it again.

  Four regions, named by Tael, show the mask's reach. Woodfall's swamp is poisoned, and its Deku princess has been kidnapped. Snowhead suffers an eternal winter that is starving the Gorons. In Great Bay, contaminated water has turned the creatures there into monsters. In Ikana Canyon, a plague brings the dead back to life.

  Skull Kid's loneliness lies behind all of it. He felt abandoned by his Giant friends when they became Termina's guardians, and he cursed the land in revenge. Tatl and Tael had befriended him and joined his mischief, which led to the theft of the mask. The mask has been corrupting him ever since, and under its influence he sent the moon toward Termina.

  Across many time loops, Link frees the Giants and summons them on the eve of the Carnival. They stop the moon's descent, but Majora's Mask comes alive, abandons Skull Kid and possesses the moon itself. Inside it, Link confronts the mask and defeats it. Link, the fairies and the Giants all make amends with Skull Kid, and the Happy Mask Salesman collects the now powerless mask. The Carnival of Time then begins with celebrations based on Link's accomplishments. In a nearby forest, Skull Kid draws himself with Link and his friends on a tree stump. Those loops, which the story passes over in a phrase, are the engine of the whole game.

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• 3. Seventy-Two Hours

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  A clock at the bottom of the screen counts a 72-hour cycle, and that span lasts about 54 minutes in the real world. Non-player characters and events follow predictable schedules. Playing the Song of Time lets players save and return to 6:00 am on the first day. Players must use what they learned in earlier cycles to solve puzzles, finish quests and open dungeons tied to the main story. Returning to the first day resets most quests and character interactions. Link keeps his weapons, equipment, masks, learned songs and proof of dungeon completion.

  The Inverted Song of Time slows the clock, while the Song of Double Time jumps to the next morning or evening. Owl statues are scattered across the major areas. Once activated, they allow a temporary save, and they double as warp points for the Song of Soaring.

  The Bombers' Notebook lists 20 characters who need help. Among them are a soldier in need of medicine and an engaged couple driven apart by Skull Kid's mischief. Blue bars on its timeline show when each person can be spoken to, and icons mark items, such as masks, that Link has received from them. Link's ocarina does more than manage time, since other melodies open hidden passages and reshape the environment.

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• 4. Masks and Transformations

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  Link's sword and shield are only the start of his kit. The shield blocks or reflects attacks, thrown Deku Nuts stun enemies, a bow and arrow strikes from a distance, and bombs destroy obstacles. The Hookshot lets him latch onto objects or paralyze enemies. Z-targeting, introduced in Ocarina of Time, lets the player lock the camera onto a character, object or enemy and keep it in view as Link moves. Dungeons hold puzzles to solve, plus optional puzzles that reward collectible fairies. Gathering all of them grants Link extra abilities.

  Twenty-four masks fill Majora's Mask, whereas Ocarina of Time confined masks to an optional sidequest.

  Three primary masks turn Link into a Deku Scrub, a Goron or a Zora. Deku Link spins to attack, shoots bubbles, skips across water and flies briefly after launching from Deku Flowers. Goron Link rolls at high speed and punches with deadly force. He also pounds the ground with his massive, rock-like body and walks in lava without taking damage. Zora Link swims faster and throws fins from his arms like boomerangs. He can also generate an electric force field and walk along the bottoms of bodies of water.

  Clock Town's guards show how forms change the story. Goron Link and Zora Link can leave town at will, but the guards refuse to let Deku Link out because of his childlike appearance. Some areas can be reached only with these abilities, and characters react differently to each form, which is key to certain puzzles.

  The Bunny Hood speeds up Link's movement, the Stone Mask makes him invisible to most enemies, and the Great Fairy's Mask helps find stray fairies in the four temples. The Postman's Hat grants access to items in mailboxes. Kafei's Mask begins a long sidequest to find a missing person.

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• 5. Borrowed Time

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  Five years separated Link's Awakening from Ocarina of Time, but Majora's Mask arrived on a far shorter schedule. Eiji Aonuma, Yoshiaki Koizumi and Shigeru Miyamoto led the team, with Miyamoto mostly in a supervisory role. The project began as a remixed edition of Ocarina of Time, called Ura Zelda, for the disc-based 64DD peripheral. Aonuma had handled dungeons on Ocarina of Time and felt no excitement about simply redesigning them. Miyamoto challenged his team to build a new game in one year, using the existing engine and graphics. The smaller team needed 15 months and reused existing assets to get there. The deadline brought crunch, meaning mandatory overtime, and the writers slipped complaints about overwork into the script.

  Ura Zelda itself was finished by another team but never came out on the 64DD. That device was a commercial failure and was not released outside Japan. In 2002 the game was retitled Ocarina of Time: Master Quest and packaged with pre-ordered copies of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the GameCube.

  Koizumi was designing a repeatable cops-and-robbers game when Aonuma recruited him. Aonuma was wrestling with what could follow the success of Ocarina of Time. Together they adapted Koizumi's game into the three-day system, which they said would "make the game data more compact while still providing deep gameplay." Early versions rewound a full week, but seven days seemed too hard for players to remember and too complex to build in a year. Aonuma cited the 1998 film Run Lola Run as inspiration for the loop.

  Miyamoto and Koizumi devised the story, and Mitsuhiro Takano wrote the script from it. Koizumi said the falling moon came from one of his dreams. Art director Takaya Imamura said the name Majora blends his own surname with "jura" from Jurassic Park, one of his favorite films.

  Aonuma sensed that the players of Ocarina of Time had grown up somewhat and could respond to emotions like sadness and regret. The Anju and Kafei wedding quest, the game's signature sidequest, was meant to set a joyous occasion against the approaching cataclysm. Reusing Ocarina character models saved time and let the team recast them in a gloomier setting. A planned feature for the Voice Recognition Unit accessory was dropped before release. Koizumi said Ocarina's Hyrule drew on medieval Europe, while Termina took its inspiration from Southeast Asia.

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• 6. Engine and Score

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  Only two Nintendo 64 games require the 4MB Expansion Pak, and Majora's Mask is one of them, alongside Donkey Kong 64. The game runs on an upgraded version of the Ocarina of Time engine. The add-on primarily supports complex mechanics such as the repeating cycle and the large mask system. IGN theorized that the requirement traces back to the game's 64DD origins, which would have called for an extra 4MB of RAM.

  Longer draw distances, more accurate dynamic lighting, richer textures and animation, motion blur and more on-screen characters all follow from the Expansion Pak. With distant areas now visible, the game dropped the fog and the "cardboard panorama" that Ocarina of Time used to hide them. IGN considered the textures among the best made for the system. Though some were low in resolution, IGN called them "colorful and diverse," giving each area "its own unique look."

  Koji Kondo, the longtime series composer, wrote the score with contributions from Toru Minegishi. Much of it reworks music from Ocarina of Time, joined by traditional Zelda pieces such as the Overworld Theme and by new material. Kondo described the result as having "an exotic Chinese opera sound." Clock Town's theme shifts among three variations, one for each day. IGN heard the quickened tempo on the second day as a sign of time rushing by. The two-disc soundtrack reached Japan on the 23rd of June 2000 and holds 112 tracks.

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• 7. Release and Reception

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  Famitsu reported in May 1999 that a long-planned Zelda expansion for the 64DD was in development. A playable demo appeared at the Nintendo Space World exhibition on the 27th of August 1999. It already showed the large clock at the center of Clock Town, the on-screen timer and the mask transformations. In November, Nintendo announced a "Holiday 2000" release window, and the final title followed in March 2000. An $8 million marketing campaign supported the game in America. It reached Japan on the 27th of April 2000 and North America on the 26th of October 2000, on a gold Nintendo 64 cartridge.

  In Japan, the game sold 601,542 copies by the end of 2000. In the United States it was the fourth best-selling game of 2000, at 1,206,489 copies. In Europe it ranked eighth in grossing for the year. Worldwide sales on the Nintendo 64 reached 3.36 million. Metacritic gives it 95 out of 100, based on 27 reviews, a rating of "universal acclaim."

  Chip and Jonathan Carter of the St. Petersburg Times had called Ocarina of Time "the Gone With the Wind of video gaming." They judged Majora's Mask equal or better in certain respects, as did most critics. Reviewers noted that Aonuma, rather than Miyamoto, primarily directed it, and they read this as proof of Nintendo's broader talent. Critics praised the repeating cycle as a bold mechanic and often compared it to the film Groundhog Day. They also liked the Bomber's Notebook for encouraging players to engage with Termina's inhabitants, and they highlighted the transformation masks as a fresh twist.

  Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot and Victor Lucas of The Electric Playground were frustrated by the time pressure and the heavy focus on side quests. Lucas found the repetition so aggravating that he nearly abandoned the game. He later appreciated its depth once he got past the learning curve.

  Edge called the intertwining of Clock Town residents' quests a "remarkable achievement." Jes Bickham of GamesRadar pointed out that the residents' reactions to their impending doom deepened the dark tone. Critics described Termina as smaller than Hyrule but denser, with its many side quests and interactive characters. On technical matters, Matt Casamassina of IGN argued that the sequel builds on its predecessor's controls without equally revolutionary additions, which explained a slightly lower score than Ocarina. Fran Mirabella of IGN, Casamassina and Greg Sewart of Electronic Gaming Monthly noted occasional framerate drops and blurry textures. Johnny Liu of GameRevolution called it one of the best-looking N64 titles, yet he compared it unfavorably with the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. "The Freshman" of GamePro was impressed by the menacing moon visible from a boat tour in a swamp. Mirabella noted the MIDI quality typical of N64 games, and Liu and The Freshman were critical of the absence of voice acting.

  GameSpot named the game runner-up for its "Best Nintendo 64 Game" award, behind Perfect Dark. At the 4th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, it won "Console Action/Adventure" and "Game Design." It was also nominated for "Console Game of the Year" and "Game of the Year."

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Danielle Riendeau of Polygon argued that Ocarina of Time laid the foundations for Majora's Mask to become the series' "most innovative" game on a structural level. She praised how it shifted attention from the usual chosen hero to the many people Link meets. Tomas Franzese of Digital Trends saw it as the template for how Tears of the Kingdom later added new mechanics to the world of Breath of the Wild. Yahtzee Croshaw of The Escapist observed that its progress-resetting design defied trends that favored player empowerment. He doubted that a game of its type would be repeated, given the conservatism of big-budget development. Jonathan Holmes of Destructoid called it a game about "being a young adult," with Link as an adult in a child's body who must step up when other adults fail to. Outer Wilds and Elsinore are among the games it has inspired. Gabe Durham of Boss Fight Books has observed its influence on the films Source Code and Edge of Tomorrow.

  In 2003, Nintendo re-released the game on the GameCube in The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition. That disc held three other Zelda games and a 20-minute demo of The Wind Waker. It came bundled with a console, through a Nintendo Power subscription offer, through Nintendo's website and through the Club Nintendo reward program. These versions are emulations, with button icons adjusted for the GameCube controller and a disclaimer that some original sounds may cause problems. Ricardo Torres of GameSpot found the frame rate "appears choppier" and the audio inconsistent. The GameCube version does offer a slightly higher native resolution and progressive scan.

  The Wii Virtual Console received the game in Europe and Australia on the 3rd of April 2009, and in Japan on the 7th of April. North America followed on the 18th of May, and the game was commemorated there as the 300th Virtual Console title available for purchase. The Wii U Virtual Console release came on the 23rd of June 2016 in Europe and the 24th of November in North America. The game arrived on the Nintendo Classics service on the 25th of February 2022.

  A fan campaign called "Operation Moonfall" began after Eiji Aonuma said a remake of Majora's Mask would depend on interest and demand. Its name echoed Operation Rainfall, an earlier fan effort aimed at getting Nintendo of America to localize three role-playing games for the Wii. The petition reached 16,000 signatures in a week. Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé acknowledged it but said financial projections, not a petition, would decide the matter. Grezzo's The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D arrived worldwide in February 2015. It brought improved character models, stereoscopic 3D graphics, altered boss battles and an additional fishing minigame. It also supported the second analog stick of the New Nintendo 3DS for camera control. To modernize the game, Aonuma and Grezzo compiled a list of moments that struck them as unreasonable, which they colloquially called the "what in the world" list.

  Ben Drowned, a web serial by Alexander D. Hall from the 2010s, took its primary inspiration from the game and helped define the creepypasta genre. It is framed as an urban legend about a "haunted" Majora's Mask cartridge. Eric Van Allen of Kotaku compared it to a campfire story adapted for the digital age. Victor Luckerson of The Ringer credited the game's ambiguous themes, open to reinterpretation, for part of its cult following. Super Smash Bros. also borrowed from the game, with a Great Bay stage in Melee and Ultimate, Skull Kid and the Moon as Assist Trophies, and a Skull Kid mask for Mii characters. In 2016, the American company Ember Lab made an animated short film, Terrible Fate, based on the game's premise. Its animation quality propelled the studio to stardom and led to Kena: Bridge of Spirits, another game that cites Majora's Mask as an inspiration.

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