I remember with peculiar clarity Majora’s oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere, the creeping anxiety that lay beneath even its lighter moments.

Every time he puts one on it triggers genuinely frightening scenes in which he screams out and convulses as his body shifts and alters. While his Song of Healing can bring these figures to rest, enveloping their spirits in the masks, wearing them seems to cause Link terrible pain. These transformative masks are acquired from three dying or dead characters. While these new identities give Link new attacks and magical abilities, they come at a cost to their bearer. The game is full of masks that Link can wear to give himself useful powers, some of which let him physically transform into different creatures: Deku, Goron and Zora. The Song of Healing is central to some of Majora’s most moving and troubling scenes. Every time you play it, it’s an aural reminder that Link has found himself somewhere very different to Hyrule, somewhere that things aren’t quite right. The first song that Link learns to play on his ocarina, the Song of Healing, is a literal inversion of the jaunty Saria’s Song from Ocarina. Majora’s Mask is about revisiting familiar environments, peopled with characters players recognise from Ocarina, but everything has the slight wrongness and strangeness of a dream. More than anything, it was the game’s unshakeable melancholy, its pervasive strangeness, that appealed to me. Only by keeping careful note of their movements, learning and relearning the game, can you unearth their stories. It is a place in which you exist, rather than a place you create.Ĭharacters come and go, each with their own timelines, thoughts and desires. It was the first game I had ever encountered in which the world felt separate to you. But Majora’s Mask was different and bewitching. Having played through Ocarina of Time with my brother and sister, my memories of the game are bright-edged and clear: that first breathless emergence into Hyrule Field as the music started up the devastation of the ruins of Castle Town fighting the spider boss Queen Gohma, which we found so terrifying that we had to call my mum in. The mask’s evil magic has set the moon on a collision course with the earth, and Link has three days to avert certain disaster – three days that he must relive over and over, using his ocarina to slow, speed, reverse and invert time. Having lost his way in a forest, he is transported to an alternate version of Hyrule called Termina by the impish, sinister Skull Kid, a lost child-spirit who has stolen the powerful Majora’s Mask. Photograph: NintendoĪfter saving Hyrule from Ganon’s destruction, Link, the hero of time, has crept away in search of the fairy Navi.

Legend of zelda majoras mask moon