Things I played: Majora's Mask - A fun but sometimes frustrating time-travelling adventure

Me and Majora’s Mask have a bit of a tumultuous history. I first played it as a teenager through a ROM emulator and promptly broke the whole thing by using cheats to reach areas I wasn’t meant to. I tried again in 2017 back on the Wii U during my master’s degree and gave up somewhere around the second temple Snowhead. Playing - and finally finishing - it on Switch last week, I finally understand why it took me so long. Because it’s a game built on many dazzling highs and equally frustrating lows. 

If you’ve somehow missed the last 15 years, Majora’s Mask is the direct sequel to what many consider the best Zelda ever made, Ocarina of Time. It was developed in just over a year by Nintendo’s EAD studio and saw Eiji Aonuma returning as director, Shigeru Miyamoto producing, and Koji Kondo composing the music. The story takes Link to the mysterious land of Termina where he’s caught in a repeating three-day cycle as a mysterious mask named Majora threatens to pull the moon down onto the world. 

That cycle defines everything and mostly in a good way. The entire game revolves around rewinding time to prevent disaster, which means dungeons and puzzle routes can’t be completed in one linear run. You have to do it over many repeated days. Core quest items persist but peripheral items like money vanish when you reset the clock. It adds tension and planning that no other Zelda attempts. The masks you collect feed into this nicely, giving purpose to exploration and making side quests feel meaningfully tied to progression. 

The real joy of the game for me lies in its unique one. Put simply, there's no other Zelda like Majora’s Mask. It feels like the Forest Temple stretched into a whole adventure: dark, melancholic and sometimes genuinely unsettling. The moon looming over Clock Town creates a constant sense of foreboding. The time mechanic adds a surreal edge, and the people you meet feel caught in their own quiet tragedies. There’s a persistent weirdness - visually, musically, narratively - that sets it apart from anything else in the series. 

Where the game stumbles for me is also the reason it took me multiple attempts to finish. First, it’s cryptic. It remains the only Zelda game where I genuinely needed a guide because certain steps feel like they come out of nowhere. The powder keg -> Romani Ranch -> Epona -> Ikana Canyon chain is a good example. Second, the time mechanic, clever as it is, can drift easily from tense to stressful. The inverted Song of Time helps but doesn’t fix the waiting around to for something that can only be completed on a certain day. 

Third and probably biggest is that the main plot is surprisingly slight. To use another comparison, it’s a bit like if Ocarina of Time’s quest for the spiritual stones was a whole game, not the part after. It only has four dungeons and most of them are either forgettable or annoying (shout out to Great Bay’s swimming sections). The Stone Tower Temple is the standout and one of the series’ strongest but sadly doesn’t come until 20 hours in. It seems from looking around that most people agree the weight lies in its side quests and character moments. For me that's fine but also not quite the grand adventure I go looking for in Zelda titles.

This post is already longer than most of my others so I’ll end by saying Majora’s Mask for me sits somewhere in my middle tier of Zelda games: above Wind Waker and Skyward Sword but clearly below Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild (possibly Twilight Princess). That it was made in a single year is a marvel but it's easy to see the shortcuts it took to get there. I did mostly enjoy it but there were many moments where I had to push myself not to stop. Perhaps fittingly so given Link’s own quest here to resist repeating history. 

Still at least now I can say I finally beat it. Onto Mario Galaxy next! 

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