Quick Look: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D

@draxyle said:

It's running at 30 FPS. It just feels super smooth because the N64 OoT and MM ran at 20 FPS.

This

@fonzinator said:

The 13-year-olds of today will look back on Call of Duty with the reverence we look back on Zelda, which is kinda sad. Or if they're into PCs instead of consoles, then Minecraft is probably the game they'll look back on with reverence. For people 5 or 10 years older than that (Drew semi-included), instead that game would be Halo. The window where Zelda is a big deal to someone's chlidhood is a pretty narrow like 1986-2000 sort of thing. I would've liked to include Wind Waker in that range, but I think the sales of the Gamecube were so low that the people who played it were probably mostly Nintendo diehards who stuck with the company despite the popularity of the PS2 and Xbox, so it wasn't necessarily their first Zelda or anything.

Like comic books, video games have now become this thing where everything has to be faux-mature macho bullshit, so even the 8-year-olds see all the cool kids playing Call of Duty that they get through an older brother or cousin or whatever. Back in the 80s and 90s most console games were kids games until you got more into the PS1 and N64 era. But now the market for kids games is smaller because I think there is social pressure on male gamers at an earlier age to play shooters.

No gamers of any age are going to remember Clash of Clans in ten years (I'm being facetious, but they'll barely remember or care about it). I think most phone games are really ephemeral in their relevance, and only a small handful that reached merchandise status (Angry Birds, etc.) will have any lasting memory to people.

btw, who's majora? :D

Dammit Rudds I just started playing DS3 on the 20th. Thanks a lot.

2 very different games. Get both. However I suggest getting Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time(3D is fine) first for attempting either style of game.

I've watched this Quick Look twice. Not even sure why. I just enjoy seeing this game played. Now, playing it is something different. If I ever get a new 3DS I'll probably buy it.

Here is the thing to remember about Majora's Mask. When you are doing a dungeon, every item is like a checkpoint. Getting the dungeon item allows you to jump ahead in the dungeon progression if you fail. So say Brad had gotten to the last room as he said. All he would have to do is warp to the dungeon, use the boss key he had already acquired and fight the boss. Hardly the severe punishment he was expecting.

Eh, that's a blanket statement I really can't agree with. Sure, a game shouldn't be absolutely abysmal unless you play a specific way, but Majora's Mask isn't like that; it simply demands that the player slowly work out its pattern for maximum efficiency. At that point, it's just a game asking you to perfect its mechanical systems, which is what most of them do.

XCOM and Chess are shitty experiences too if you don't play them right, but that doesn't put them at fault.

You just made me curious if there are any good Gurren Lagann games.

Re: Nightmares - When I was around seven years old I had a nightmare that my younger sister had been kidnapped. Still to this day one of the worst, most terrifying thing I've ever experienced.

"I don't have the time for a "subpar" Zelda game"
-Brad

That may be true but you still sound like a snob when you say it out loud.
I guess Dota changes people.

The reason Brad managed to miss the scarecrow when he originally played the game is because, like I've said before, game reviewers predominately don't play games the same way regular people do, and he almost certainly was ignoring anything that would take him off of the critical path. Zelda games are action RPGs, and trying to make a beeline through the game, ignoring anything that didn't look utterly essential, sounds like both a really shallow experience and the worst thing for someone who is paid to tell people what is good and bad about games to come away from a game with.

As for the "lack of direction" complaint that gets thrown around, the only way a person could think that is ignorance, whether willful or being misled by someone else who ignored the signs the game gave you. Tatl tells you to go to the Great Fairy, that your primary objective to stop Skull Kid is to find beings who reside in the four cardinal directions, and just about everything you need to do you can find out by reading signs and talking to people in new areas you go to if Tatl doesn't already tell you. It's exactly the same amount of direction that Ocarina of Time gives you.

The only reason people think that newer Zelda games are so much more aggressively linear and terrible is because they stopped letting you go anywhere you wanted from the outset; and they stopped letting you go anywhere you wanted from the outset because people made it clear that not being put on a strictly linear path and being asked to pay attention and remember anything is too Herculean a task. If you want to talk about how the newer Zelda games are too heavy on tutorials, that actually makes sense to criticise. The kind of complaints that kept on getting thrown at Majora's Mask, though, don't.

Hell, looking at it and knowing what has been changed where, some of the changes in the environment feel detrimental to the design of areas. With the bank moved to Clock Town South so that players will find it more easily (yet still behind a structure in such a way that they could still easily miss it, so why even bother?), Clock Town West feels like there's pretty much no main reason to go there. South has the actual clock, where the story comes to a climax every 72 hours. East has the stray fairy at night and the entrance to the Bombers' hideout. North has the Great Fairy, Bomber leader, and Tingle. Laundry Pool has the stray fairy during the day. West now has almost no reason to visit there at the start of the game outside of catching one of the Bombers. After that, the only reason you'd need to go there (unless you lose your sword) is when you need to get the powder keg to get to the ranch to get Epona, which you don't need to do until halfway through the game. Moving the bank for the sake of convenience removed a reason for people to actually go there regularly and think about the buildings there; and it makes the wall that the bank used to be set into feel empty. In fact, aside from the Bomber and, at night, the dancing troupe, it is empty.

The owl and feather statues stand out far more, which is a good thing when they're something that a player needs to know about (I never thought they were that hard to miss, but I guess they must have been), but taking away the requirement for the player to hit the statues takes away their participation in the activation of them, so while they might notice the statues if they're looking at them, they will be far less likely to remember them. Also, a feather statue at the start of every dungeon is a terrible decision when there are owl statues right outside all four for the exact purpose of getting back to the dungeon at the start of a cycle. It highlights the problems of updating an older game with more modern design sensibilities to be more accessible, but it's made even more glaring because even as far as design went at the time, Majora's Mask was a serious deviation and was specifically designed with the specific save system in mind, to say nothing of how game design and the way people play games have changed since then.

In that way, Majora 3D comes across a lot like Ocarina 3D: a relic of an earlier generation of games. An enjoyable relic with great design, pacing and character arcs of just about every character in the game that compliments the resigned atmosphere of the game, but a relic all the same. Wind Waker HD has a slightly similar problem with the Triforce Hunt being streamlined, yet still containing triforce treasure charts, because they spent an entire map square on Tingle Island and he'd otherwise serve no purpose after freeing him. It might be personal preference, but I think the ways WW addressed the flaws it originally had are done in a more elegant way.

Still, it's the challenge that a developer faces when remastering their game. Console games before the era of patches were what they were and couldn't really be altered in meaningful ways, and that made them what they were, warts and all. Unless the game just happened to be basically perfect and is in no need of any changes whatsoever (Shadow of the Colossus), there's always something that a developer will want to change if they come back to it several years later, but by that point, fixing the things that were issues would require breaking apart what the game is. I just personally see more value in a developer taking what they learned from each previous game and applying it to new ones, especially in the case of games as revered as the Zelda series.

Majora's Mask is absolutely my favourite Zelda game, but I'm not sure if I can call it the best considering I've only played three (Ocarina (that I got with my N64), Majora, and Phantom Hourglass). I played Majora when I was, like, 12 or 13 and never quite 100% it, so that might be affecting my nostalgia. I'm absolutely looking forward to playing this but since I still haven't finished Ocarina3D I'm going to have to hold off.

(And you could totally save at the owl statues. And just hold left in the Zora dungeon's water pipe maze? That's something I sort of remember.)

"Man, I'm glad I'm a human; that's a pretty good deal."

People seem to hate the time limit, but if you play The Song of Time backwards to slow time, it takes nearly 4 REAL hours for the moon to fall. To me that's quite a long time to explore. The average dungeon takes about an hour and a half (if even that) to finish. And outside of dungeons, running out of time isn't really that big of a deal, seeing as you can fast forward 12 hours to get back to a specific time.

To me that's well worth the trade for more a challenging game, more sidequests, better storytelling, characters with depth, more upgrades, masks that change play-style and a slight shift away from the good vs evil trope.
Words can't describe how much I love this game

@kurinkita: It's never outright stated, but Majora is apparently the spirit that inhabits the mask.

@mintyice: Agreed. I want to punch brad and Jeff in the face every time they call it garbage.