REASSESSING THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: Lockdown Replay Tournament

A series of incomplete thoughts and random ramblings about my favourite game series of all time

 

What better way is there to kill time when recovering from leukaemia under lockdown at home with a six-year-old child in a pandemic than to replay the Legend Of Zelda game series? Thankfully, my daughter has come to enjoy watching them as much as I enjoy playing them. She’s even had a bash at a couple. Strange to think that at her age, I was playing with Atari or the C64, and now she’s on Breath Of The Wild (she likes to cook, mostly). At any rate, I have thoughts on the series.

 

Criticism of any Zelda game has to be put into its proper context. This series is beloved for a reason: these are some of the best games ever made. A lesser Zelda game is still probably better than most other games around. When you criticise Zelda, it’s usually just because it’s not quite as good as your personal favourite Zelda.

First up: Majora’s Mask

 

Having just completed my umpteenth replay of Majora’s Mask, I stumbled across the creepypasta phenomenon of the story of the haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge. Go google it, enjoy. Aside from being stunned by all the people who believed it might be real – I mean I’m so easily creeped out you wouldn’t believe it, and I consider myself pretty damn gullible too, but come on, people! – I was most impressed by the creativity involved in modding the game to produce the videos of the “haunted” playthroughs.

 

It seems especially apt because, really, Majora’s Mask is a creepy game and it doesn’t take much tweaking to make it chilling, which is no doubt why it was chosen. Sure, it’s not Eternal Darkness, not Silent Hill or Resident Evil, but the Zelda series is family-friendly. It’s not supposed to be horror. It’s cute. And then you switch on Majora’s Mask, and that face comes swooping at you through the darkness, and it’s creepy from the get-go.

 

(As an aside, now that I think of it, a sequel to Majora’s Mask that leans into the weirdness, with Eternal Darkness-style insanity effects, in the Breath Of The Wild environment – can I start a petition to make this happen?)

 

From the face of the moon itself, to Skull Kid’s screams, the weirdly twitchy Happy Mask Man, the animations as Link transforms into his alternate selves, the Zora singer mourning the loss of her eggs, the Deku butler missing his son, the Goron baby wailing for his daddy and not knowing he’s frozen in the wilderness, the girl in Ikana guarding her half-zombified father, the doomed citizens of Clock Town itself – it’s all soaked in despair and futility and grief. Even the good guys – the four giants you must rescue and summon to help defend Clock Town from its descending satellite – are unsettlingly odd.

 

I’ve always said it was my favourite Zelda game, but strangely, this latest play-through has made me rethink that stance. It’s a brilliant game, no question, but the frustration level is just uncomfortably high. Not the difficulty, but the frequency with which one has to redo the same tasks, rewinding time to go over the same ground to get something you missed or couldn’t even have reached before. It never felt this way before, but now it smacks of artificial padding on a very short game (there are only four main dungeons).

 

For instance, in an experience I’m sure most gamers who played this can relate to (deep breath): I finished the Snowhead temple, brought spring to the mountains, dropped my sword off with the blacksmiths overnight, carted the powder keg to the race track, won the race (after half a dozen frustrating attempts), got the gold dust, picked my sword up, found out I could get a gold-plated sword – only to realise that, because this was the last day, I couldn’t actually get the gold-plated sword because I wouldn’t be around to pick it up in the morning because there wouldn't be one. So I had to go back in time – except in going back to the first day, I lost the gold dust I needed to plate the sword, lost the upgraded sword I’d already got, the mountains froze over and the race track closed.

 

Now, granted, certain things remained – I didn’t have to carry the powder keg this time, I could just buy one; I didn’t have to do the whole temple to bring spring to the mountains, just the end boss. But that’s still a lot of duplicated gameplay, and I could really really have done without doing that race again, or spending another day wandering around sans sword waiting for mine to be finished. The number of tasks in the game that I’ve completed, then realised there was some other element that I should have done afterward but didn’t – for instance, forgetting to accompany Cremia on the wagon after saving Romani Ranch – means that so many game events have to be done twice over.

 

It’s tricky, because I’m not really sure how this could be avoided while retaining the innovation of the three-day cycle – and I’d hate to lose that although, again, I find myself now wondering whether that aspect was added to pad out the game time. Remove it, and one still has a game in which tasks must be completed to acquire items to advance throughout the game, the same as any other Legend Of Zelda. What the three-day cycle really adds to the game is (as mentioned above) a sense of doom and futility, which is an odd selling point for a family-friendly adventure game, but complete genius nonetheless.

Save Pamela’s father, only for time to reverse and undo your good work – next time you see him, he’s a zombie again. Help Romani defend the ranch, but next time you go back, she’s a mute abductee. Go through hell to retrieve Lulu’s eggs, but she’ll lose them on your next cycle.

 

I’ve often grumbled that the NPCs in Zelda are all venal, selfish idiots – sure they’ll help you in your quest to save their world, but only after you do them a favour and collect their fucking chickens – but Majora’s Mask flips that around. You’re helping them, but only so you can get the mask or the bottle or the song that opens the temple. Next time you see them, they’ll be in trouble again, crying for help, and you’ll ignore them because their usefulness to you has ended. This is harsh.

 

It also means that the end credits sequence has real weight – it’s more than the usual parade of familiar faces, it’s a chance to see how things actually turn out for these characters. They survive, they flourish, the evil done to their world has been undone. It’s a delight. (Except for the fact that you never see Kafei as an adult. I still feel cheated by that.)

 

Also a delight is the final stage, Inside The Moon. Actually, “delight” is the wrong word: this is easily the strangest thing I can remember from any Zelda game. For a game series that usually hinges on the conventional old princess/evil dude/heroic boy with sword setup, it’s quite a departure to embrace something as weird as this, and I love it.

 

Link ascends to the moon to fight Majora’s Mask itself, and finds himself in a surreal, silent field, green grass and a sunny day and a single spreading tree to which you have no choice but to run. Masked children run around it and ask you to play, and it's no wonder someone decided to spin a ghostly mythology of dead children based on this. It’s eerie and dreamlike and haunting. 

Majora’s Mask is not as perfect as I used to feel, but it is hugely inventive, challenging, and if nothing else, it demonstrates that a good Zelda game doesn’t have to involve the Triforce, Ganon, Hyrule, or even Zelda herself. I wish the powers-that-be would try to depart from the formula a little more often.