Majora's Mask 3D Daybook, Final Day

Here we go. I've completed the game, all Hearts, Masks and whatever. The only thing left to do is the new fishing, but I'll write a separate journal about that.

On the moon they changed the Zora labyrinth. Or you could say they completely replaced it. There's now more skill involved, because you have to get all these dolphin jumps right. I always jump out, where the vortex is. This seemed to get the job done. And the right path is marked by fish, but of course you have to find the Piece of Heart first.

It's left, right, center.

It's kind of annoying, how it keeps showing you the sequence, where it opens the doors. Because this interrupts your swimming every time. But it looks like they didn't only want to ruin the swimming, but also taunt you with it. The old labyrinth might have been too simple, but it didn't need to change like that.

It's almost worse than the Goron labyrinth, where you now have the problem of the slide pad with 360° "precision", which gives you a hard time going straight forward. That wasn't a problem with N64, GCN or Wii analog sticks for sure, which were optimized for eight directions.

Well, trading all masks finally gives you the Fierce Deity's Mask again, which now looks a little bit edgier. He certainly looks a lot better in Hyrule Warriors or the artworks. But the new whirling sword beams are cool and even a lot stronger than they used to be, it only took a couple of hits to bring each form of Majora down. Wow.

But they're entirely useless pretty much everywhere else. The only boss that still goes down nicely against Fierce Deity Link is Goht. Odolwa blocks the sword beams more aggressively now. You can land some hits, but he takes a lot more damage and overall the fight is not as satisfying as it used to be.

Blasting Gyorg with sword beams from on top of the platform still is very satisfying, but he now ends the fun and Fierce Deity Link sadly is only prey in the water. And the 2nd phase of the fight involves a lot of luck, so that the fight can take its time... no fun to have here.

Twinmold doesn't work at all as Fierce Deity Link. You might score some lucky hits against some of the eyes on the blue form, but the red worm seems impossible to hit. You can fight the "small" enemies though, but overall Fierce Deity Link is of no use here. Well, the original Twinmold also wasn't easy to fight as FDL, but at least it was possible.

And this is my biggest complaint with the remake! I can live with the magic swimming, I can live the castrated Ice Arrows, but that they made Fierce Deity Link look like an useless joke, that's unacceptable. Instead of actually giving this transformation some more action, as I had hoped, they took away from him! Thank the goddesses for Hyrule Warriors, because at least there I got to have some fun with Fierce Deity Link. But Majora's Mask 3D is simply broken and easily my least favorite remake, despite all the good improvements like the Song of Double Time. But turning Fierce Deity Link from a boss killing machine into a fisherman was the worst thing they could have done to the game.

Bad job, GREZZO.
Bad job, Nintendo.

Also, if you do pretty credits and have two screens, put the names on the other screen and let us watch the beautiful scenes without your names obstructing the view... you have two screens, use them!

Ah yeah, no Hero Mode or Master Quest unlocked, but we knew this already. A cheap Hero Mode like in Skyward Sword or A Link Between Worlds, where the damage simply gets multiplied, wouldn't have been a good idea anyway. This game is mostly about the sidequests and either you still have some left to do or you don't really feel like doing it all over again. Majora's Mask doesn't really have immediate replay value, plus you can replay every dungeon any time anyway thanks to the 3 day cycle. However, they still could have given a Hero Mode option like they did in The Wind Waker HD. And in three years they could have developed a full blown Master Quest with all new dungeons. This would have been a lot better than ruining the bosses. They could have even made it so that you fight the original bosses in the Master Quest Mode...! That would have been a solution.


One last thing, this is how I organized my items:

I love it, when you can chose your own order. This is supposed to be symmetrical. Bottles on the right and items with counters on the left, mirroring each other. Solid items in the center. I kept the bottles right, because I like to put them on the touch buttons and this keeps the distance at minimum.


Well, thanks for reading! And stay tuned for my fishing journal.