Deep Down in Clock Town
Well over a decade since it originally came out on the Nintendo 64, “Majora’s Mask” has followed in the footsteps of its 3D Zelda predecessor and made a new home for itself on the Nintendo 3DS. Bringing not only a visual and auditory overhaul with it, “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D” has brought about a noticeable amount of changes to its gameplay, making it fall somewhere in between the area of port and remake.
Visually, this game looks great. Textures and models are fleshed out and richly detailed. The colors are more vibrant and varied, giving the game a lot of pop but not detracting from its dark atmosphere. One of my favorite overhauls is the Woodfall Temple. In the original game the walls of Woodfall were covered with poorly fleshed out carvings and paintings, but many of these have been updated in MM3D to become detailed sculptures of the area’s king that protrude from the wall. This attention to detail stays consistent throughout the game and makes each area a treat for the eyes.
The main premise of MM3D stays true to the original. Link, while out looking for his fairy partner from Ocarina of Time, is robbed by an imp called Skull Kid in a strange mask. Perusing the thief, he is brought to the strange world of Termina and cursed by the Skull Kid, turning him into a lowly deku scrub. As Link chases after the boy he is met by a mask salesman who claims to be the owner of the particular mask the Skull Kid is wearing, which is also the source of the power that cursed Link. With a time limit of only 3 days until the salesman has to leave, and by coincidence when the moon will come crashing down into Termina, Link must recover his stolen ocarina from the Skull Kid as well as the stolen mask.
The primary gameplay and goals also remains unchanged for the most part. By exploring the areas surrounding the central hub of Clock Town, Link discovers four giants that can help stop the moon from crashing, but in order to clear the temples they are sleeping in he needs to make use of a large array of items and masks. He then has to reset time and begin the 3-day cycle over again to venture to the next temple. MM3D makes use of the same 4-item equipment slots that OoT3D used, and it works wonderfully. The extra slot over the original game's gives a new place to stick masks that can be used in specific situations without blocking space for equipment. I don’t think there was a single dungeon where I didn’t have the Great Fairy's Mask, an item that helps you hunt down hidden fairies in dungeon rooms, equiped without having to constantly pause and unpause to move it back and forth from my inventory. The inventory system feels great, and how well it works shows better in MM3D than OoT3D if only because the amount of masks practically doubles Link’s inventory from the game’s prequel.
One of my favorite updates is the changes made to the Bomber’s Notebook. In the original game the Bombers were a gang of kids that identified themselves as a pseudo-boy scout troop that helps others and marks those deeds down in a book. For Link, this served as a way to keep up with side quests given to him by the various NPCs of Clock Town, typically ending in him getting a mask or piece of heart. In MM3D the book is expanded to encompass not only the people associated with Clock Town, but also various people outside of the central hub too. This makes it much easier to keep up with all the side-quests in Termina. On top of this you can also set alarms for Link to remind him of quests, as it’s sometimes easy to forget where you need to be when trying to micromanage things on the time limit MM uses.
Other good changes include:
-Overhauling the save system so that it’s not limited to just hard saving when you reset the cycle, but also at various points scattered about the map (which is nice for a portable title).
-Rebalancing the Goron and Zora transformations to make their attack animations feel more smooth and responsive than they were in the original game
-Allowing the player to look up ocarina songs they have learned while having the ocarina out
-The Song of Double Time no longer skipping to the next half of the day, but instead allowing you to pick any hour on the clock that you haven’t met yet in that cycle
However, as much as I wish all the changes in the game were good, that’s far from the truth, and one of the heaviest negative impacts being on the core elements of gameplay. Despite Link’s Zora form receiving a positive change it’s completely overshadowed by everything else. The Zora form was meant to be highly mobile in water, and in the original game this meant giving him a large speed boost while swimming by holding down the A button. To balance out this speed many of the water based sections in Majora’s Mask were large, but because of how fun it was to use the Zora form it wasn’t an issue. Nintendo has changed how the quick swimming works by assigning it to the same button as Zora Link’s electrical shield, a move that constantly drains the magic bar while the button is held down. This creates two problems:
1) Zora Link can only move at his maximum speed by expending precious magic.
2) The shield is an important tool for Zora Link, so wasting the magic it needs is not a smart idea
Nintendo tried to give the Zora form another swimming animation over the old one, where holding the A button down now causes him to move slightly faster than normal, but it isn’t fast enough to make the great distances of the Great Bay area not become boring to travel. Even worse is the Great Bay Temple, a level many people had issues with the first time around, becoming even more of a chore thanks to the goofy way Nintendo chose to redesign the Zora swimming mechanic. I find it funny how the back of the box advertises the “ease of swimming as a Zora,” when the reality is the opposite.
Another change that doesn’t work as intended is the updated bosses. The original boss battles were far from perfect, but their pacing fit well in a game that was about managing time. All of the bosses in MM3D have a new cycle that involves hitting giant glowing eyeballs they expose after taking enough damage. So, in reality the boss’ actual HP is represented by the eyeball which is on a fixed cycle. This leads to the first issue: there’s a lot of waiting. The best example of this is the rework for the boss of the Great Bay temple, Gyorg. Gyrog has two phases, the second taking place underwater where the player has to get him to swallow explosives chained down to the pool floor in order to expose his eye. Get too close to Gyorg and he begins to inhale and will catch you. In order to get him to swallow a bomb he needs to be near it so you can cut it and then make him inhale it. Gyorg doesn’t move in a set pattern and will randomly swim around the pool. He can set of the bombs by touching them, but he doesn’t take damage. In the first fight I had with him, Gyorg ran face first into every bomb, leaving me with no way to hurt him for a good minute or two, which is a lot of in-game time. This resulted in me waiting and doing nothing while I watched the timer slowly count down.
Twinmold was another boss that received a hefty overhaul. Probably one of the most boring fights in the original, the remake has made it one of the most frustrating. You’re forced into using a reworked Giant’s Mask, which turns link into a slow clunky giant with awkward attack animations. The second phase of the fight forces Link to run around and chase a boss moving much faster than he can ever hope to, and punch it in the face till it drops and then spin it around like he’s Bowser in “Super Mario 64.” The fight is more cinematic, sure, but the rate at which you have to punch the boss feels inconsistent. I’ve had fights where I ended up punching Twinmold through several agonizing cycles to get him to drop and then have him fall in a few punches in the following one. It takes 4 spin-cycles to finish the boss, and having fought him several times, I never had the fight last less than the better half of an in-game day. Each boss feels like a slog, and the giant glowing eyeballs stick out horribly as “please shoot me here” spots, which brings me to my final criticism of the game…
This game thinks you’re an idiot. The first chunk of the game is muddled with tutorial text where your fairy companion Tatl will chime in to tell you how to use items each time you find a new type. There’s even a horrendously placed sign at the very start of the game that tells you to move forward by pressing up on the circle-pad even though to get to the sign in the first place you have to be pressing up on the circle-pad. Ice arrows have had their water freezing function made useless in MM3D as you can only freeze water with sparkling effects, limited almost exclusively to the Great Bay Temple. There is an area later that makes use of the ice arrows for about 5 seconds, but as a tool the ice arrows serve almost as little of a function as they did in OoT (where they were actually useless and were never needed as a puzzle solving tool). This is a really minor nitpick, since the tutorial stuff is restricted to the first cycle, but the lack of freedom with items feels unwarranted. The giant sparkling “freeze” points bring back bad memories of some of the worst parts of “Skyward Sword” having to constantly tell the player what to do, assuming they are too stupid to figure it out themselves.
Overall, “Majora’s Mask 3D” is a really nice remake. Visually it’s fantastic, and is exactly what someone should expect from a graphical overhaul. The gameplay is held back though by clunky boss redesigns that feel counter-intuitive to the time management based pacing of the game, along with poorly implemented mechanics that I can only assume were added in to “appeal to a more casual audience.” If you really want your “Majora’s Mask” on the go then pick it up, it’s a fine game, but it’s a sometimes frustrating one.
