One of the most popular books of the Boss Fight series, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is finally back in print. It’s easy enough to see why. Despite its odd place in the canon, with the game being a rushed project designed to make use of the Zelda assets already developed for the Ocarina of Time before the Nintendo 64 hardware became obsolete, history has smiled broadly on the carnivalesque vibe of this game. Author Gabe Durham has an interesting thesis as to why. As he tells it, Majora’s Mask is interesting because it’s a race against time. Both textually, and literally, with the designers stuck on their first ideas mostly because they didn’t have time to come up with any others.
This more than anything else, Durham argues, is why The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is so genuinely, intriguingly weird. It’s a mundane theory that paradoxically sticks out precisely because Majora’s Mask is notorious for the theorycrafting it inspires. Like for the game being a symbolic representation of the stages of grief. Or how the whole game is just the aftermath of Link being dead, in some sort of purgatorial afterlife. Majora’s Mask also somewhat indirectly sparked the ever-notorious Zelda timeline discourse, simply because, as the first game after Ocarina of Time, questions are immediately begged as to what happened to the world of the adult link who defeated Ganon, if the young link of Ocarina of Time’s ending got lost in the woods afterward and landed in Termina.
Durham’s down-to-earth analysis is convincing in part because he relies on a lot of actual interviews with the designers of Majora’s Mask, and it’s always striking how much more they care about playability and efficient use of existing assets than necessarily giving the project clear authorial intent. It’s interesting, for example, that the only reason Ocarina of Time bothered with the time travel at all was because Shigero Miyamato kept insisting on a child Link model when they’d developed the adult Link model first. These parts of the book are a fun depiction of Miyamato’s eccentric management style, with his arbitrary requirements and cryptic communications would inspire developers to go in any number of weird directions.
It’s quite appropriate then, that weird begets weird. Durham covers the infamous Ben Drowned creepypasta early on, and it’s fun to see the contrast with the very practically minded Nintendo workplace that actually made the game and the bewildered fans in the years to come who posted many a YouTube video on the subject trying to figure out what Majora’s Mask is even about. It’s easy enough to see the depth of Majora’s Mask secondhand through Durham’s descriptions of other descriptions because so much of what’s going on doesn’t sound like a video game. This is, quite literally, a game where Link meets dying people and/or their ghosts, tries to pacify them, and then wears their masks to try and solve puzzles.
Majora’s Mask is a strange text to engage with. The text is filled with weird little jokes that no one who made the game could have reasonably expected that many people would ever see, just because every NPC has their own reaction to any of the two dozen odd masks you might be wearing when talking to them. And Majora’s Mask also defies easy categorization because it can’t really be completed on a single cycle. One task or another must inevitably be left undone, and Link finishes the game again a wandering hero, oddly detached from the world of Termina that he saved. Despite lacking the epic overtones more common in Zelda games, this tale of a doomed world coping with its inevitable end as the moon crashes into it leaves a lasting ambivalent impression that touched even people like Durham, who didn’t play the game when it was new, but only learned of Majora’s Mask as more people do every day by its ominous reputation.
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