Quite a large amount of the gaming community agree that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is one of the greatest games ever made ever. I remember my first moments with the game. Slotting that unique gold cartridge into my Nintendo 64 and becomming entrenched in a world of legend, adventure and an amazing amount of character depth. I spent much of my youth familiarising myself with this world. I played the game the whole way through many, many times. More times than any other game. I have never experienced anything like it since then.
Several years later there was to be a second Zelda game released on the Nintendo 64. I have just refamiliarised myself with it recently infact. So I thought that tonight I'd review The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
Majora's Mask is set immediately after the events of Ocarina of Time and see's Link stumble into a parallel world. It is a strange, twisted version of Hyrule (the world from OoT). Characters from OoT are reimagined and it's actually quite alot of fun to see how they've changed and how they've stayed the same to their OoT counterparts. It's quite a strange semi-nostalgic feeling actually. The tone of the game is much darker than any other in the Zelda series. I'm actually inclined to think that the world is dark, twisted, nostalgic and emotive because it reflects the way Link feels about leaving Hyrule; the world in which he was a hero. Majora's Mask is a story of regret, love, loneliness and annihilation.
Blah blah blah. Lets get on to gameplay. Many aspects of OoT's gameplay have returned but there are some interesting new additions. The main new feature is alot like Back to the Future. But instead of going back in time and making out with your mum Majora's Mask has you relive the same 3 days over and over in order to stop the moon from crushing the world. I guess it's a little more like groundhog day but then I wouldn't have been able to make wise cracks about Marty making out with his mum, so I stand by my choice of comparison. Anyway, because of this the game's main quest is substantionally shortened to make room for many more side-quests. Fear not because this is good for 2 reasons. One, the main quest is actually a bit harder than OoT anyway and two the side quests are based around interactions with all the characters in the world and getting to know their habits on a 3 day basis. Having said that though the time travel can be a bit frustrating. There's nothing like completing 45mins worth of a quest only to fuck upsomething major and have to travel back in time to start the whole damn thing over again. The game does accomodate for this in some respects by giving you options to speed up, slow down and skip ahead in time but it doesn't always cover all the damage. On the whole I think Majora's Mask is quite an excellent game but not quite on the same level as Ocarina of Time, but seeing as how Ocarina of Time is damn near perfect anyway I wouldn't let that trouble you too much. I'd give it 9/10.
(Yeah yeah I know it was a boring serious review but I'm struggling to come up with posts these days).
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