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« on: October 11, 2024, 03:32:49 pm »
Game 17: The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D (3DS) - 37 Hours
I’m really torn on this game. It has a lot about it that I really enjoyed but overall I found this game a bit more frustrating than anything. Which is surprising to me because I know this game is beloved by many.
I think my favorite aspects of the game is the premise and atmosphere. Creating a Zelda game without the typical series tropes like rescuing the princess from Ganon is interesting. The 3-day time loop creates some interesting puzzle-solving scenarios similar to Ocarina of Time was quite enjoyable. I really enjoyed the ambiance of Clock Town which creates a feeling of loneliness and foreboding with the impending destruction of the world. It’s a fun hub world to explore with some really interesting characters and storylines to uncover that often revolves around death or other mature themes. And because everything you do in 3 days is reset each time you wind the clock back, it makes you feel hopelessness and despair because nothing you do for anybody in the game ultimately lasts. At its best, it also adds some nice tension to the game.
It’s unfortunate that none of your main gear is any different than Ocarina of Time, which makes exploring dungeons lose a lot of the excitement. But this is made up for with the masks that you can collect, which provide a lot of unique effects and it’s fun to collect them all. The game has a lot of interesting sidequests which are fun to explore, and it has a great notebook that keeps track of everything for you, though I did use the notes function extensively on my 3DS to denote quests that your notebook wasn’t adding.
Where I found this game to falter was the gameplay, music, and overall story. First, the gameplay. This game was very frustrating to control because of wonky jumping physics and collision detection and a very difficult to manage camera. The little c-stick nub helps, but really pales in comparison to a second control stick. I constantly had trouble locking on to enemies because I couldn’t move the camera correctly or your fairy just wouldn’t cooperate with you.
I found that the 3-day time limit caused a lot of frustration for me. Setting aside all of the weird inconsistencies in how time is managed in the game, this mechanic hampers your gameplay experience in two ways – the first is that you can’t take your time exploring or jump around to different quests or activities because all your progress resets. The second is that because this game is cryptic and requires trial and error, you often have to replay storylines or progress through a dungeon two, sometimes three times just to get back to where you were previously. It creates a lot of tedium, and I would say that a good 15 hours of this game was just repeating things I already knew how to do. The game gives you a way to slow the clock down but I feel like it should have just been that long from the start.
What particularly annoyed me was losing all your consumable items when you reset the clock. There is no functional reason why this needs to happen other than annoy the player. You get to keep all the important gear like your hookshot and bottles, why not make everything just carry over? Every time I reset the cycle, I had to make a field trip to cut some grass outside Clock Town just to restock my bombs and arrows and you need to do that like 30+ times. I also never used any of my bottles because anything you add to them is drained away when the clock resets.
Lastly, I just didn’t find the story to be that interesting even with the great initial setup. Skull Kid is just a stereotypical villain who wants to destroy the world because he found the mask and was lonely. No real deep storytelling, and the three main stories to me weren’t that impactful either. The music, other than a few standout tracks, I actually found it to be kind of boring, which was surprising to me. When you consider how many NPCs, enemies, and environments are lifted from Ocarina of Time, I felt like a lot of the game was a little more phoned in than I expected. I came away from this experience ultimately feeling a little let down by Majora's Mask, which was the same feeling I had when I first played Ocarina of Time 3D. I don't know, these games just don't resonate with me like they do for a lot of people.
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