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Some heartless jackass makes a fake Majora's Mask HD trailer because he hates me, specifically

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Having now caught up with all the Zeldas (except the Oracle games and the new Majora's Mask), I wouldn't mind returning to TP at some point. I played it at release on Wii and thought it was fine, if frustrating, but playing the GC version would be interesting. I remember being disappointed at Midna's reveal. She instantly went from intriguing to bland.

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I think that's also the writing - her reveal is also where her goals change (or get changed), and so she stops being so antagonistic. Her relationship with you is the only one that really matters; I think the game would have benefited immensely from Midna having someone to talk to.

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So, out of curiosity, I fired up my N64 and took a look at my save. Apparently, I got to the point I had the Goron mask but had not yet completed the second dungeon. I also knew the song to slow time, as it was active when I loaded my save. So I don't know what it was that eventually frustrated me into stopping. On the Giant Bombcast, they mentioned having to reset time to save, but I don't think that's true either as my save loaded at 8pm on the last day. *shrug*

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Been playing a bunch of this lately and I've remembered something that doesn't often get mentioned about Majora's Mask: it has the most fun traversal mechanics of any Zelda. Between the Deku flower flying, Goron rolling, Zora swimming, Bunny Hood and Epona, getting around in Majora's Mask is really entertaining in a way that it isn't usually in Zelda.

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Even after playing the Ocarina remake, I'm still quite impressed with this. Majora feels like a very fresh game and the first few hours I joyfully spent traipsing around Clockwork Town to rediscover all the villagers and their problems. It felt like a fullblown game already, and I hadn't even stepped outside or visited a single dungeon! That speaks tons for the diversity and attention to detail in this game.

 

And good point, tberton, the traversal mechanics are superb. Especially once you get the Goron mask, it's a ton of fun.

 

Extremely useful is also the improved aiming controls by manually tilting and panning your 3DS. Firing arrows is so much fun and so hassle-free now. It shows in the target range minigames, which are all highly doable now. It used to be so stressful and annoying! I haven't encountered the boss yet that I was always stuck at, but I'm hopeful, with all the refinements, that I'll be able to finish the game now.

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Reached the first strenuously uncomfortable moment: racing the beaver brothers as Zora Link. They couldn't have made it more frustrating if they tried. Having to hit 25 small underwater circles with sensitive controls, a blur effect and a camera that haphazardly dips above and below the surface almost made me crack in twain my 3DS. Maybe I should skip this hellish minigame and forget about a single extra bottle and a peace of heart.

 

This doesn't bode well for the water temple, my biggest fear, but we'll see how that goes. This race, in any case, was woefully designed.

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Fair warning: many people cite Great Bay Temple as the worst Zelda dungeon. I actually quite enjoyed it, especially since having the map constantly open makes navigating the temple a whole lot easier. However, I'm going to have to beat it again, because the Gyorg fight is complete bullshit and took me took long and I want to do the Don Gero's Mask quest, so I need more time for that. Oh well.

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I had no trouble with Great Bay. It was actually where I got stuck and gave up on the N64, so it was nice to conquer it in a sitting this time around.

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I did it! I totally did it, I defeated Gyorg, the fish monster that has always frustrated me in my progress up until now! And cripes did they make him a lot easier. He was a pushover this time, requiring almost no difficult swimming. There's hearts and space galore. It's such a relief, I thought I might get stuck here again!

 

The Great Bay temple itself was fun, but then I never shy away from water-based temples. There are some fun obstacles and challenges, especially to get to all the chests and fairies. Now, onwards to the rest of the game for the first time!

 

(Still, fuck the beaver bros though.)

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My photographic memory of every square foot of the N64 game is allowing me to delight in every minuscule difference.  It was probably a smart choice for them to move the Song of Soaring stone right to the entrance of the swamp.  I also think it's funny that the witch is actually acknowledging that you're going to ram into the giant Octoroks during the swamp door as it's about to happen.

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I picked up MH4u and Majora's Mask both on the day of their simultaneous launch alongside the n3DS, and after some three hundred or so hours of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, i decided i should probably crack open Majora too.

 

I'm probably too early in Majora to make any big statements about the game, and it's been over a decade since i played the game last, but i'm still impressed with the density and complexity of the side quests in Clocktown. I think i like that the new quest journal sort of forces you to appreciate it more, because it seems like something that a lot of people would completely miss or otherwise lose sight of.

 

The game's presentation also still strikes me as really sharp and stylish, whereas the narrative presentation in Ocarina came across to me as kind of listless and staid when i was revisiting it with Ocarina 3D.

 

Edit: I assume it was probably the case, but perhaps somebody can confirm for me if you had to first slot a mask to equip it in Majora? It probably made a lot of sense there with how slow the UI used to be in those N64 games, but why is that still a part of how the UI works with the remake? It doesn't make sense with the remake's quick and easily accessed touchscreen inventory, the extra step of slotting the mask is now actually slowing you down. They're passive equipment, they don't really need to be on a hot key.

 

That's my minor gripe, as of this point in time.

 

Apparently the original game did still have the journal, it's just been expanded upon for this release, so yeah, there's that. (Some puzzle solutions and quest rewards have also been shuffled around a bit, apparently.)

I'm still really, really impressed with the game. I'm a little further in, and i feel no reluctance in saying that it's easily still one of my favorite Zelda games. I'm so impressed with the way it strings you along in elaborate quest chains that are filled out with all these implicit checkpoints whenever you discover a new travel point or learn a song or get a major item unlock, all of which are set up to give you natural opportunities to go back in time and reset the clock so you can tackle the remainder of the quest more safely. What's so impressing me about that is the way those quests are designed so these break points can function logically and mechanically within the narrative and scripting of a given quest when you move to interject yourself back into the middle of a reset quest from all kinds of weird angles. Kind of makes my mind reel thinking about it, it feels like there's an insane number of variables for a designer to have kept track of.

 

Also noticing a lot more in the way of subtle thematic and narrative detail, especially in the clocktown quests, but kind of all over the game. (This is a superficial one, but everybody always seems to interpret the moon as being a malevolent force in this game's story, but it seemed immediately apparent to me this time that it's grimacing in pain as it's pulled along in an unwilling descent by Majora's Mask. I mean, the game makes the point several times that the moon is casting down teardrop-shaped meteorites from its eyes. I don't really know how i, and apparently a bunch of people, missed that the first time around.)

 

It's also relatively thin on hand-holding compared to Ocarina and the games that followed. That's kind of wonderful.

 

It looks terrific too, it goes a little further than Ocarina did with the visual upgrades, but a lot of it also owes to the presentation in Majora having already been more thoughtful and stylized. (Cutscenes, even simple dialogue scenes, are filled with nuanced little flourishes. I actually looked up videos of the original game to make sure i wasn't ascribing something new to the original, but Majora 3D is reproducing those details faithfully.)

 

Majora's Mask is fuckin` great, you guys.

I figured i should probably stick these in the actual Majora thread.

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I've been playing the remake slowly, and enjoying every bit of it.  I'm about halfway through, and relying purely on memory to get 100%.  Sadly, I'll probably be able to pull it off.  

 

I'm noticing a lot of new dialog and other hints that were not present in the original game, but even considering all of that the game is, like you said, very much free of handholding.  If you're not an actively curious player, you're missing out on a ton of the game's content, and some of its best.  The sidequests must make up fifty percent of the game.

 

Majora's Mask has as much kinship with The Last Express and Psychonauts as it does with the franchise it belongs to because of all the avoidable character content, though at least in this game you can always start time over and track down those moments, whereas in the other games, if you missed your lick, it's over with.

 

It gets brought up a lot, but this game is really sad and tragic when you shadow the NPCs through their various stories.  Captain Viscen fails to win his argument in favor of evacuation, dooming the city guard to remain at their posts when the moon falls.  The end credits sequence quietly reveals that the Deku corpse encountered during the game's prologue is the Deku Butler's son.  Romani gets a brain wipe, etc.

 

While I don't think any of the games following Majora's Mask quite match the pathos it was able to wring out, I do believe the series upped the ante a bit in that regard and I think Majora directly influenced that strength.

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Been playing a bunch of this lately and I've remembered something that doesn't often get mentioned about Majora's Mask: it has the most fun traversal mechanics of any Zelda. Between the Deku flower flying, Goron rolling, Zora swimming, Bunny Hood and Epona, getting around in Majora's Mask is really entertaining in a way that it isn't usually in Zelda.

 

This is really, really true. Majora really does go kind of nuts with its traversal mechanisms in a way that very few of the other Zelda games have approached. It gives you exciting and interesting abilities and doesn't rein them in with rigid contextual activation, but instead gives you big open spaces to let you properly play around. Zelda, at its worst, seems afraid of that, afraid to give you anything too significant or unusual, and tends to end up restricting such tools to the point of being glorified door keys.

 

The end credits sequence quietly reveals that the Deku corpse encountered during the game's prologue is the Deku Butler's son.

 

More than that, it seems quite strongly implied that the spirit of the Deku Butler's son is what Link found himself initially possessed by, and is the restless spirit that is healed to become the Deku Mask.

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