Majora's Mask on 3ds!

[nintendo64isking]

the return of my all time favourite game- feel free to discuss your memories of it here

[IAmNotShazam]

Everyone's gonna be mad when the sacred cow of Zelda fans gets changed.

Calling it now.

[UndyingNephalim]

the return of my all time favourite game- feel free to discuss your memories of it here

Even though Majora's Mask is probably my favorite Zelda game at the current moment, I sort of hated the game when I first played it. As such, I really don't have warm super fuzzy nostalgia feelings for it like I do OoT, which might be why the new remake hasn't exactly phased me that much. I actually have a lot of negative and frustrating memories: Being stuck in the Deku Palace's stealth segment for well over a year, Having to constantly redo the Great Bay Temple because it took me longer than an hour to finish (when I was a kid I was limited to only an hour of time on a game... then forced to take a break), and repeatedly failing against Igos.... only to finally knock him down and have his corpse be too far from the light to reflect at him. The game is brutally hard for a 3D Zelda game, and whether the tone and mood was intentionally not for kids or not, the gameplay certainly is good grounds for defending the "it's not a kid's game!" standpoint. Despite it being the second Zelda game I owned waaaaaay back in 2000, I never finished it until after I completed pretty much every other game released until Phantom Hourglass.
I didn't like Majora's Mask at all until I replayed it a few years ago without the terrible gaming skills I had as a kid.

Everyone's gonna be mad when the sacred cow of Zelda fans gets changed.
Calling it now.

The Sacred Cow of Zelda fans? Tingle?

[Lortano]

I didn't like Majora's Mask at all until I replayed it a few years ago without the terrible gaming skills I had as a kid.

Oh crap well with my current gaming skills I will never finish this.

[starwars90001]

Even though Majora's Mask is probably my favorite Zelda game at the current moment, I sort of hated the game when I first played it. As such, I really don't have warm super fuzzy nostalgia feelings for it like I do OoT, which might be why the new remake hasn't exactly phased me that much. I actually have a lot of negative and frustrating memories: Being stuck in the Deku Palace's stealth segment for well over a year, Having to constantly redo the Great Bay Temple because it took me longer than an hour to finish (when I was a kid I was limited to only an hour of time on a game... then forced to take a break), and repeatedly failing against Igos.... only to finally knock him down and have his corpse be too far from the light to reflect at him. The game is brutally hard for a 3D Zelda game, and whether the tone and mood was intentionally not for kids or not, the gameplay certainly is good grounds for defending the "it's not a kid's game!" standpoint. Despite it being the second Zelda game I owned waaaaaay back in 2000, I never finished it until after I completed pretty much every other game released until Phantom Hourglass.

Alot of people talk abou how new zelda games have this problem with tutorial and hand holding, mask majora has a barley has hand holding and people complain they don't know what to do.

[nintendo64isking]

for me the world of termina was so much richer than most other zelda games, I loved the variety of characters and the fact that they operated on a three day cycle- something which kept me playing, to try to find as much as I could about each area on each day. The quirkiness combined with the doomed nature of the land also made it fascinating, so much denial over something which was bound to happen. The side-quests were what made the game fantastic, but the dungeons were amazing as well, i loved the level of complexity and how you could gather Stray Fairies for that extra challenge. Snowhead was so vast I remember thnking for a second dungeon, if only there were more than 4! I too had trouble with Great Bay hated it at first, but this year I played it again and realised it isn't as big and scary as I remembered and is not too much more difficult than Oot's Water Temple. All in all, a stunning game in which the continual cycle and interaction with the same events and characters actually makes you care about the situation, its much more than just rescue a princess from a castle, its saving the world and its troubled people from certain disaster.

[tf_]

@neph
How on earth did it take you a year to do the Deku Palace? I assume you weren't actually playing the game for the whole year.

And as for the Great Bay temple, did you know you can save at the owl statues? You can only load it once, from the same point in time as when you saved, but it's much better than re-doing whole sections. I didn't realise this was even possible until I replayed the game this year.

In that same play-through, I also tried to do the Great Bay temple and the Kafei/Anju sidequest at the same time, for some reason. I must have started the sidequest, then realised I had quite a bit of time to kill between appearances, so continued with the main quest. It was horribly inconvenient, I had to keep leaving the temple to go and talk to someone or do something in Clock Town, then go back. I eventually gave up.


Also, IIRC, the Beneath the Well section with the Gibdos would probably be very hard if you hadn't played OoT before. I think they ask for bottle items, by describing their features (e.g. asks for something that cures curses - blue potion, but you could easily not know that). I could just be making that up though.

mask majora has a barley has hand holding and people complain they don't know what to do.

My brother complained about not knowing what to do when I tried to get him to play OoT. Maybe it's because I'd already played the game, so knew how it worked, but it never really made sense to me that you could not know where to go, given that there was a fairy who would regularly remind you.

[UndyingNephalim]

@neph
How on earth did it take you a year to do the Deku Palace? I assume you weren't actually playing the game for the whole year.

Not every single day, I was really terrible at video games as a kid. I was stuck in Jabu's belly for almost three years though, and that I did play much more often. For some reason I never realized there was a second hanging tentacle in Jabu's butt to get rid of the green tentacles everywhere. You can imaging how embarrassed I was to accidentally notice that super simple solution after years of wandering that stupid fish. It's funny looking back at it... I can blaze through OoT in little more than 5 hours now and yet it took almost 7 years to finish it the first time.


I never figured out the Owl statues in Majora's Mask until I played through again years later. I used to think they were only warp points, I didn't realize you could also save at them.

mask majora has a barley has hand holding and people complain they don't know what to do.

And that's why we ended up with Fi telling every single pointless tiny detail in slow excruciating detail...

[Drazule]

I'm pretty sure I didn't actually beat Majora's Mask until some time after Twilight Princess. What would happen is I would beat half of Snow Head, run out of time, and then get confused as hell because I couldn't remember what rooms I had beaten, what rooms I hadn't, what rooms I needed to go to and what rooms I could skip because of whatever progress I had made up to that point. Finally I sat down one day, restarted the save and when I got to that dungeon I beat it in one sitting so I could continue.

[Duke Serkol]

The oddest thing with Majora's Mask for me was... in my first playthrough I never realized it was possible to slow down time and thus get twice as much.

As you can imagine, clearing Great Bay Temple and Stone Tower proved a tad bit difficult.

[Drazule]

Well its not odd. You never learn the Song of Double Time or Slowed time. You have to simply infer from the words of a wayward scarecrow. I definitely wouldn't have known if it wasn't something I had always known from watching my brother play it as a kid.

[Duke Serkol]

In a way, I'm kind of glad I didn't catch what the Scarecrow was telling me. I enjoyed the challenge... up to Stone Tower Temple. Much cursing was had there.

[Jakeford]

Wow! This is my first post here in ages!

Personally, I think Majora's Mask already looks great. The art style are atmosphere are very well done, and the everything just looks nice, likely because of the increased graphics engine expansion thing for the N64.

I always think it is good when an old game because available on new systems, however I don't really have any interest in getting a remake just for better graphics. I am still trying to beat the N64 version on the virtual console.

I am not sure if I feel surprised that they made this or not.

[Brihentin13]

I'm happy to see the game released in a way that will make it accessible to a new generation of gamers, but I gave up on Nintendo after the Gamecube. I will keep those treasured memories with me forever though. Oh, to relive he golden days where Nintendo was king, and Rare was relevant!

Story-wise, I loved Majora's Mask, but I think OoT is still my go-to N64 Zelda. The three-day cycle, while interesting, took a little bit of the fun out of it for me. It's the same complaint I would later have over Dead Rising. I liked being able to just "waste time" on OoT. As a kid, it was incredibly entertaining to just go jump off of the Gerudo Valley ledge and swim down to Lake Hylia over and over again. Years later, I talked to a younger friend of mine about Zelda, and he told me that he'd done the same thing at a different ledge in Twilight Princess when he was little!

It's funny little things like that which make certain games so good. Besides, I love exploring, so having a timer always there kind of takes the joy out of the random adventuring. Sure, you can always just play the Song of Time and start over, but that resets all the quests and there were certain things that had to be done at certain times on certain days. I preferred the relative freedom of OoT, but hey, to each their own.