Back in June I was replaying Ocarina of Time on my Nintendo Switch 2 and already made a mental note that I wanted to do the same with Majora's Mask later this year. However, it was originally my plan to do so after the Ocarina of Time remake came out, so that I can replay the second Nintendo 64 classic with a full understanding of what a potential follow-up remake could offer.
But then Nintendo highlighted Majora's Mask this month with all their 40th Anniversary activities, which made me reconsider. Maybe it's best to play this one last time now, before the Ocarina of Time remake spoils you so hard that this just won't be enjoyable any longer. I was worried that I wouldn't want to play Majora's Mask again without a remake of the same caliber.
Well, and by now we have a pretty good understanding of how the Ocarina of Time remake is going to look in detail, even without having played it myself. And there were some things that I was already longing for.
It starts with the item management. Since you need to put your Ocarina, Hero's Bow, Bombs, Hookshot, Lens of Truth, and all the masks on the C-buttons, you have to constantly go back into the menu to re-assign things. It's almost as bad as with the Game Boy Zelda games. Majora's Mask 3D made things a bit better with its touch screen buttons, but it wasn't ideal either.
Now, in the Ocarina of Time remake both the L- and R-buttons bring up the item quick select, where I suppose that a similar remake for Majora's Mask would use the L-button for switching your masks instead. So, it would bring up a quick select menu with all masks in it, where the first entry let's you remove your current mask, but you should also be able to switch from one mask to any other. In the original it wasn't possible to swap from a transformation mask to a normal mask, without taking it off first, but this would need to be possible to make such a menu comfortable to use.
The Lens of Truth and Ocarina go to the D-pad, just like in the Ocarina of Time remake. And since there are no different boots, there would even be one D-pad slot left (downwards), which they should reserve for the Great Fairy's Sword. So, instead of making the two-handed sword a ZR item, you would switch between the two different swords via a button press. With only one item slot this is for the best, because you wouldn't want that button be blocked by a second sword.
Such a remake would also be a great chance to flesh out the three day cycle in areas outside of Clocktown, e.g. the Romani Ranch. If you successfully aid both Romani and Cremia during the first two days, then Cremia will be completely absent during daytime on the final day. And this may even be intentional, because she's probably on her way to bring Anju's family to the ranch with her carriage.
But that's something a remake could show us: let her travel from Clocktown back to the ranch with a bunch of people on board. You should be able to watch these people take shelter there, instead of magically appearing at 6PM. This was completely fine for a 26 year old Nintendo 64 game, which was developed within a single year, but a remake in today's time could do so much more...
Otherwise I'm curious how they would handle the auto-jumping–or the lack thereof, because Majora's Mask has this odd inconsistency about invisible grounds. There is a hidden pathway at Ikana Graveyard where you just walk off into the abyss, where I wish I could jump manually... The invisible platforms around Snowhead on the other hand let you jump off them automatically, even when you don't see them, oddly enough. But it's how you are able to get to the Lens of Truth in the first place, where I suppose they would change this in a remake into one continuous path with curves.
But enough talk about a remake... I will get back to that topic once I've played and completed the new Ocarina of Time.
One of the reasons why I started replaying Majora's Mask now were the collectible cards this month in Nintendo Today. And here it's funny how this often coincided. Well, I wasn't rushing, usually just playing a single cycle per evening with some breaks here and there. These cycles were also far from optimized, so this wasn't about challenging myself to cram as much into one cycle as possible.
And by doing so I matched the cards with what I was playing that same day a couple of times. I've obtained the remains of Odolwa, Goht and Gyorg when their cards came out on October 7th, 10th and 16ht respectively. Kafei's card showed up when I played parts of his quest early in the game, on October 8th. And I got both Zora Link and Fierce Deity Link on the day of their cards. Zora Link came out on October 15th and the Fierce Deity card is live today, on the day where I have finished the game.
But yeah, I was playing a lot more casually and even going for things I haven't seen for quite some time, because they usually don't matter. For example, I've stalked Pamela with the Stone Mask, where you can watch her go to the well... slowly.
Or, I've witnessed the hustle between Sakon and the Curiosity Shop owner when he's trying to sell the stolen Bomb Bag. There is a lot to explore in Termina, which is quite amazing for a Nintendo 64 game.
One thing I never realized until today is that the Deku Stick trick also works in Majora's Mask. You can turn a butterfly into a fairy when it touches the stick's end. It's something that you learn in Ocarina of Time from a Gossip Stone, which came up the other day with the news about the Fairy Thoughts. So, I just randomly gave this a try on the moon, which worked like a charm. And it makes sense that this still works, since the two games share the same basis, but it's just something that never occurred to me in all those years.
The Nintendo Switch Online release also came with a number of caveats, like the slightly smoother 20FPS of the NTSC version. And I'm not sure I have ever experienced the game with active rumble before. It was an option on the Wii U, but I normally turned this off back then and I also haven't mentioned it in my blog post from almost ten years ago... (Which was the last time I had replayed Majora's Mask.)
But Link has essentially the Stone of Agony on him all the time, where it's not only rumbling for the two secret grottoes, but also on spots where treasure chests may appear. That was more irritating than helpful, however.
The true novelty was the rewind feature and this certainly shines in Majora's Mask with its many mini-games. The two Shooting Galleries always have been a pain without gyro aiming, but with rewind this was still easy enough to score a "PERFECT" on "first try". This is an absolute blessing even a remake wouldn't provide.
It's still painful how you have to do the Beaver Race four times in total, where the ten seconds less on the clock for the Piece of Heart certainly don't make any difference for when you can easily undo mistakes. But I generally hate it when mini-games just make you repeat the exact same thing with less time, where Rollgoal in Twilight Princess was the worst offender.
And that's it... This may have been the last time I have played through the original Majora's Mask, because I'm expecting a remake to appear within the next four to five years and I won't go back from that. Though, I also thought the same about the Nintendo 3DS remakes and here we are. Still, if I want to refresh my memories until then, I will probably go for Majora's Mask 3D instead, where a part of me missed those fishing holes.
Finally, here is some of my latest RNG:
- Bomber's Code: 21435
- Lottery Numbers: 021, 656 and 848
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