Note: The following screed contains spoilers for several twenty-year-old video games and reeks of twee optimism. You have been warned.
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is my favorite story. I would say that it’s also my favorite video game, but in the almost twenty-four years since its release, I’ve played games that were far more enjoyable, held my attention much more strongly, and were altogether better experiences than those I had with Majora’s Mask as a six-year-old when it first came out, but I haven’t gone back to most of those games nearly as often as I have Majora’s Mask. In fact, for most of the last fourteen years of having a smart phone, a piece of Majora’s Mask concept art has been my phone’s background. As a story, Majora’s Mask is the single most impactful piece of media I’ve ever interacted with.
In off-chance this specific twenty-year-old video game hasn’t been the central piece of media of your entire life, here’s a two-fold primer for what makes Majora’s Mask an interesting addition to its own mythos:
First, Majora’s Mask is one of very few direct sequels in the long-running Legend of Zelda series. It was released less than two years after its predecessor, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is widely regarded as both a cornerstone of modern 3D action games and one of the best video games ever made. Majora’s Mask is not considered either one of those things. With its crushing development timeline and odd place in its own overarching story, it’s sometimes been dismissed as little more than an asset flip of Ocarina of Time, and at best, it’s an strange experiment that tried to capitalize on one of the most successful video games of its era.
Second, as a sequel, Majora’s Mask canonically takes place after the hero has successfully run away from the conflict. The Legend of Zelda series is comprised of twenty mainline games that all take place in an endless cycle of rising action and reincarnation. Almost every game takes place as a freshly minted Link dons a green tunic, picks up a sword, and rushes headlong into whatever Apocalypse du Jour has been prepared for his home of Hyrule. The Zelda timeline is, quite frankly, a disaster of post-hoc storytelling and fan theories run amok, but in the time-traveling shenanigans of Ocarina of Time, there are three coinciding and contradicting timelines that diverge from its climax against Ganondorf, the prince of darkness. The first of these timelines is strangely not the darkest but takes place after Link (our silent, eternally returning protagonist) loses. He gets merked by the big bad, and the world crumbles away into various states of disrepair and chaos ad infinitum. Most of the games in this sub-timeline are the disjointed adventures of our disparate Links as they try to save maidens and break whole populations out of waking nightmares on vibrant, colorful backdrops. The second major timeline follows the happy ending of Ocarina of Time where Link wins, and his reward for that victory is the ability to continue living out his adult life in a world forever changed by the seven years it spent under the thumb of Ganondorf, who has since been turned into a kebab. Links’ adventures in this second timeline are presented with much more whimsy than their counterparts, but their backdrops are no less bleak. Lost civilizations are spoken of in whispers on the winds of an endless ocean, and the villain still ends up skewered by our sylvan savior. The third timeline, which Majora’s Mask kicks off, takes place in a reality where Link never fights Ganondorf. Upon witnessing the horrors of a broken future, he returns to the past, warns the eponymous Princess Zelda, and flees Hyrule. It’s less of a retreat and more of an insurance policy against the possibilities that Ganondorf, if confronted, could always still win. The important note here is that Link, a time-traveling swashbuckler in Ocarina of Time, is a literal traumatized child in Majora’s Mask. Escaping the weight of destiny, Link finds himself in a time loop that lies somewhere between Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day and a lengthy screed on the importance of eternal recurrence. Most importantly, Majora’s Mask sets the tone for this, the darkest of all three timelines, where our heroes must wrestle against the tides of time and decay themselves.
Majora’s Mask takes place in the unsubtly named land of Termina in a three-day cycle that’s defined by the impending doom of a moon pulled out of its orbit, a world full of people who know they’re about to die, and a child who had to run away to save everyone he loved the last time his world was ending.
It’s a stressful game, and the stress of that backdrop colors absolutely everything.
The 72-hour time limit that Link finds himself beholden to lasts just under a real-world hour, and a clock ticks away at the bottom of your screen, with large placards announcing each coming dawn. From the early parts of the game, you’re given some tools to slow down the passage of time, to fast forward through it in chunks, or to even make it go faster. You cannot, however, rewind. To reset the clock, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the first day, which resets both your resources and your progress on quests. At every step of the way, you are fighting against your own insurmountable end and are forced to relive it every time you fail to keep disaster from striking.
Strangely enough, though, that’s not what Majora’s Mask is about. Yes, your ultimate goal is to keep the moon from falling, but from moment to moment, you’re not focused on ending the cycle. You’re learning to work with it. You’re learning how to schedule your days to help as many people as possible—reliving the same events dozens of times because you didn’t quite get the timing right the last time.
Without your interference, Termina is a sad, broken place full of even sadder, more broken people. No one has the ability to help themselves out of their current problems, be they minor or quite literally earth-shattering. No one but you even knows that these events are repeating themselves time after time after time.
In the end, as defined by its gameplay loop, Majora’s Mask is about helping people even if they won’t—or can’t—remember that you did.
It’s a story about love and grief and time, and it doesn’t provide any answers for how those things fit together, but it does make the argument that if you’re facing certain, collective annihilation, the least you can do is to help other people through it.
It’s a story about making friends at the end of the world, and it argues that those friendships are enough to save us.
It’s a story about taking others’ griefs seriously and taking what little time you have left to assuage them.
At the very beginning of the game, when Link first enters Termina after being horrifically transmogrified into the likeness of a dead, eternally weeping tree, the first person he meets greets him with the words “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” This mysterious mask salesman, who is at least partly to blame for the current fate of Termina, helps you regain your lost human form and gives you the means to help others put their own lives back together.
Throughout the course those fateful three days, you (as the player) turn the sorrows of the people of Termina into masks that are, within the context of the world, filled with their newfound joy. Each of these Happy Masks are awarded to you for helping someone (or something) overcome their own personal tragedies and give Link the tools to finally put an end to the glowering moon’s encroachment.
It’s a story about how helping people will ultimately save the world.
Another infamously strange sequel that’s near and dear to my heart is 2004’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
First off, that’s too many colons for a single title, but it’s par for the course for Star Wars.
From the jump, KOTOR 2 promises more than its predecessor, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, could offer, and it doesn’t have the greatest success rate at following through on those promises. It does, however, have a much more dire tone than the original KOTOR, and the story it tries to tell is ultimately one worth celebrating.
Developed under similarly fraught circumstances to Majora’s Mask, KOTOR 2 is not nearly as polished of a game as either Majora’s Mask or the original KOTOR itself. In fact, KOTOR 2 has famously never been finished. Rushed out to market at the expense of its own completion, KOTOR 2’s story falls apart in its substitute third act and never quite manages to live up to the expectations of its benefactors or its fans. In fact, for the PC release of KOTOR 2, a fan mod restoring cut content to the game is widely considered to be the definitive way to play it. Despite all of its glaring shortcomings, though, KOTOR 2 is the other video game that I go back to more than literally anything else.
Like Majora’s Mask, it’s a story that starts after our hero has walked away from the conflict, whether by choice or (in this case) by decree.
In the sweeping space opera of Star Wars, the eternal struggle between the Jedi and Sith has repeated itself across canon and non-canon stories for the last 47 years. Perhaps the most lauded of these stories is 2003’s KOTOR, which places you in the boots of a nameless soldier who’s been conscripted by the Republic into a fight against the machinations of the Sith Lord Darth Malak. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the story, you learn that your blank slate of a protagonist was once Malak’s master, the mythical Darth Revan. From that point forward, the conflict builds until a final confrontation with your former apprentice, where you are given the choice to either abjure or usurp him once and for all.
As character, Revan ends up being more of a power fantasy than anything of real substance, which is probably why they’re one of Star Wars’ most popular characters. That being said, the central question posed by KOTOR’s story comes into view only after you learn the player character’s past: Will you return to your baser instincts for conquest and power, or will you choose to become an altogether better version of who you once were?
In contrast, KOTOR 2’s protagonist is much less important and far more interesting. You are a former Jedi, fallen from grace and stripped of any power you once wielded, and you have spent the last several years wandering the outer reaches of the galaxy in the wake of the Mandalorian Wars, which drove you to follow Revan and Malak to war in order to save the faltering Republic.
Because of your travels, however, your character knows nothing of the events of the previous game, now broadly known as the Jedi Civil War. Wracked by back-to-back galaxy-spanning conflicts, the Republic stands at the brink of collapse (as it so often does in Star Wars), and you start your journey immediately backpedaling away from danger. From the outset of the story, you are being hunted as “the last of the Jedi.”
Bounty hunters, Sith, Jedi in hiding, and even entire planetary governments all vie for your life and attention as the galaxy hurtles blindly toward yet another catastrophe, and even though the writers of KOTOR 2 swung for the fences, all of those beats fall flat against the real bread and butter of what makes KOTOR 2 so compelling.
Like the first game, the gameplay loop KOTOR 2 is built on the relationships that you cultivate with your crew. More importantly, though, the inclusion of a party influence system makes your choices just as important for your companions as they are for you. In the original KOTOR, your party members were mostly set in their ways until well after the revelation that you used to be Darth Revan. The in-game morality system (called “alignment” in accordance with Star Wars’ terminology) has each of your party members set at fixed points on the sliding scale between light and dark. Some characters are fundamentally evil while others are fundamentally good, and there is markedly little you can do to change any of that. As you progress through KOTOR’s story, your companions will express their approval and disapproval for your choices, but for the most part, they don’t substantively change based on who you decide to be throughout your journey.
In KOTOR 2, your effects on the broad majority of your party are immediate and noticeable. Based on the influence you have gained with them, you alone have the power to determine who they decide to be. Will you drag them down the path of self-aggrandizing power, or will you inspire them to become the saviors of the Republic? Will you craft them in your own dark image, or will you guide them toward the light to which you aspire?
Much like Majora’s Mask, these relationships morph what KOTOR 2 is about in a meaningful way. Yes, the text of KOTOR 2 is focused on the reestablishment and/or ultimate destruction of the Jedi, but the story of KOTOR 2 is, in the end, about the relationships you build on your way to those final moments. While you’re gallivanting across the galaxy to either save or murder everyone in your path, your party will join you, and in the end, they’ll come to reflect your own choices back to you.
Throughout the game, its text asks you to reaffirm your choices both as a character but also as a person whose choices will ripple through the lives of those around them—whether you intended for those ripples to form or not.
In the end, KOTOR 2 (like Majora’s Mask) is a game about saving the world by helping the people next to you, and it carries the added warning that abandoning those people could damn us all.
I love both of these games because they remind me that we are who we choose to be only in the context of who we find ourselves near. Since I first played both of them twenty years ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about either one. And while it feels a bit overdrawn to say that they’ve shaped my worldview, they have. Permanently. Good stories are meaningful because they make a difference. Even though the world may not be ending this very moment, that doesn’t detract from how powerful our decisions to help each other ultimately are.
Choosing to help each other through disasters of every size is what will ultimately save us, and I think that’s worth holding on to.