A Terrible Fate: Majora's Mask at 25

One of the first creepypastas (creepypasta? Not a word I ever expected to pluralise) I can remember sticking with me is a lurid story about a person buying a strange-looking copy of the 2000 game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and slowly coming to realise, through a series of strange glitches, that the game is haunted by the ghost of a child named Ben[1]. It’s a good story, imaginative, with a slow build of real creepiness – it certainly spooked me the first time I read it. And yet, the more I thought about it, both at the time and subsequently, the more I realised that Majora’s Mask was not quite the right choice for the story. The problem is, you see, that Majora’s Mask is already so uncanny, so spine-tinglingly creepy in ways that are difficult to define, that finding out it’s haunted is actually something of a relief. A haunting, with a defined ghost, is less scary than the whatever’s going on in this game. At least there’s an answer.

Though it’s well thought of, particularly by people of my generation who played it when it first came out, Majora’s Mask is relatively overshadowed by its overachieving big brother Ocarina of Time (OoT), which broke new ground for the series, and its cute younger cousin Wind Waker, controversial at the time for its cel-shaded graphical style, but now widely seen as a classic. A 3DS remake in 2015 came and went with little fanfare, and the game is now seen as something of an oddity in the series. It seems to elide categorisation, not fitting easily into anyone’s idea of what Zelda is  - Zelda herself is not even mentioned, nor are Ganon, the Triforce, or the Master Sword. There are Zelda games without some or all of these core elements, but none feel quite this disconnected from the rest of the series.

Majora’s Mask is, moreover, one of the few Zelda games not to take place in the Kingdom of Hyrule, or even a post-apocalyptic version of it, as in Breath of the Wild and Wind Waker. At the beginning of the game, Link enters a land called Termina (of which more later), which, as quickly becomes apparent, is doomed in a particularly vivid manner. The moon is falling, summoned by the malevolent Skull Kid (under possession by the eponymous mask), and will impact, destroying Termina, after three days. The player must play through these three days over and over again, rewinding time before the calamity, and watching the residents of Termina’s central hub, Clock Town, go from oblivious ignorance to dawning realisation to abject terror over and over again. It’s a constant race against time – can you finish this dungeon or questline in the time you have left, before having to restart the loop? The six-minute timer that comes up when you enter the final six hours is one of the most nerve-wracking experiences I’ve ever had in a game, especially given that certain events can only be completed within those final minutes, deliberately pushing you right up against the deadline. The sombre music, entirely different from anything else in the game, plays a slow dirge, as if the residents of Termina are already dead. Which in a sense, of course, they are.

As all of this might suggest, Majora’s Mask is a game steeped in death. Even the name Termina suggests the end – terminal, terminus etc. Then there is the fact, so obvious that the game rarely deigns to point it out (making it all the more chilling when you think about it) that every person Link meets has at most 72 hours to live. As you rewind time again and again, you get to know the routines of these people, where they’ll be at certain times, and this intimate knowledge of their daily lives makes the looming spectre of death feel all the more disturbing. The loop itself is strangely uncanny, allowing (indeed encouraging) the player to know exactly what’s going to happen at particular moments – it’ll always rain on the second day, the bomb shop owner’s mother will always get mugged just after midnight on the first day, and so forth. There’s an absurdist bent to all of this, placing the minutiae of everyday life alongside the certainty of disaster, with the constant loop of the former reinforcing the inevitability of the latter.

The game’s method of tracking side quests is a notebook supplied by the Bombers, a group of children devoted to helping people out (Link being himself a child in this game), and there’s a curious mixture of hope and futility to all of these missions. Why bother helping the innkeeper Anju find her disappeared fiancé, through a precisely timed series of letters and meetings, when they’ll both be dead in a matter of hours anyway? The answer depends on your viewpoint: perhaps there is no point, other than getting that elusive mask or piece of heart; perhaps it’s a statement of hope that disaster can be averted; or perhaps the presence of death overhead, growing increasingly visible as the days go on, makes these small victories all the more important. The stuff of life stands out against the shadow of death, as Anju and her lover join hands to face the final hours of their lives.

A similar ambivalence lurks over one of the game’s central features, in which Link can transform into the form of a Deku Sprout, Goron or Zora by the adoption of a mask, which causes his face to contort in screaming pain in an animation that you’re forced to watch the first time it happens (it’s skippable subsequently). The first of these is a shapechanged version of Link himself (who in this form gets to experience a strange mixture of bigotry and condescension from the inhabitants of Clock Town, not least the apparently benevolent Bombers), but the other two are something murkier.

Twice in the game Link meets the ghost of a dead hero, whose spirit is transmogrified into a mask along with their wish for Link to resolve their unfinished business. These masks are the means by which Link changes into a form which the dead heroes’ acquaintances recognise as them – a delusion which Link, silent as ever, does nothing to break. The Gorons of Snowhead end up believing that Goron Link, whom they believe to be the hero Darmani, will lead them into a bright new future as their new chief, while Zora Link’s alter ego, Mikau, has a lover and newborn children and, in an endearingly bizarre bit of worldbuilding, plays guitar in a famous band. Then there’s enormous skeletal general Skull Keeta, one of the game’s oddest tonal shifts. His undead soldiers are hanging around in various parts of the game’s world, mostly resting on the job in quirky and entertaining manners, but Skull Keeta, upon being defeated, tasks Link with setting their souls to rest. “Tell them the war is over,” he says, the vagueness (this “war” is never mentioned at any other point) making the request all the more poignant.

Even the ending, after disaster has been averted, maintains this sense of melancholy. Link leaves Termina, returning to his quest to find the fairy Navi from Ocarina of Time (much to the bafflement of anyone who played that game), which means that he leaves all those promises unfulfilled, presumably. Mikau’s band play their scheduled carnival appearance, with Link on guitar, but whether he reveals his true identity afterwards is never revealed. Certainly the Gorons must be left without the leadership they were looking for. Ikana Valley, at least, seems to return to peace, the undead having been laid to rest – seemingly the only people left are the music box owner and his daughter, his grotesque transformation having been forgotten entirely.

Going along with this overriding sense of doom and melancholy is a pervading eeriness. As may already be apparent, this is a profoundly weird game – sometimes in amusing ways, sometimes in unsettling ways. Again, its relationship to its predecessor is significant here, in this instance providing a sense of uncanniness to many of the characters. Many of the character models are carried over from OoT, but applied to new characters, with two major exceptions. So the ranch owner Cremia and her younger sister Romani have the character models of the younger and older versions of Malon, the ranch girl from OoT, leading to a strange sense of defamiliarisation – this both is and isn’t a character that you already know. The game wisely avoids reusing the models of especially significant characters from OoT (Zelda, the Seven Sages et al), so this uncanniness is always just on the edge of perception, never taking over.

As for the two exceptions, if anything they just make things even stranger. The first is the Skull Kid, the game’s main antagonist, who can be encountered as a benign if mischievous figure by young Link in OoT (and, bizarrely, can be fought and killed by the older version of Link, having presumably become evil in a post-Ganondorf’s-takeover world) and turns out to have retained much this personality in Majora’s Mask prior to and after his possession by the titular evil mask. The other exception, and the source of this mask, is the mask salesman, who is only implied to be the same individual as in OoT, and had a creepy edge to him even in that game. In this one, he’s a profoundly ambiguous figure; his opening line, to the Deku-transformed Link, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” has become a sort of unofficial slogan for the game. It’s never clear why he had Majora’s Mask in the first place - he refers darkly to the struggles he went through to find it – nor why he wants it back, other than getting it away from Skull Kid. Strangest of all, he, almost uniquely among the game’s characters, seems to know what is going to happen to Termina in advance, claiming initially that he needs to leave within three days, before the moon’s imminent fall is obvious to anyone, including the player. Whether he, like Link, is a time traveller, or he has some power of foresight is one of many questions that the game refuses to answer, making him all the more unsettling for the ambiguity.

Even Termina itself feels like a sort of liminal space. The doppelgangers of people from Hyrule suggest as much, as indeed does the fact that Link is led through a portal at the beginning of the game, falling for an unknown period of time. Some fans have speculated that the mountain (volcano?) visible on the horizon throughout the game is recurring Hyrule location Death Mountain, but it looks markedly different to how Death Mountain appears in OoT – for starters, it’s a different colour. This in itself suggests that we may be in a sort of parallel Hyrule where everything is recognisable but different, but it’s impossible to be sure.

Despite this, the game’s central (in a very literal sense) location, Clock Town, is a wonderfully realised place, full of memorable characters. The town is preparing for its annual carnival, the beginning of which coincides with the moon’s fall, and so over the three days the attractions go up. On the third day, though, carnival preparations largely grind to a halt, as residents either prepare to flee or stand staring up into the sky. It’s a grim portrayal of the age-old association of the carnivalesque with death – the carnival’s main attraction is the town’s clock tower, the very point on which the moon is going to fall. Furthermore, as the title suggests, masks are at the very centre of this game, providing all kinds of different effects, and masks are traditionally associated with the carnival – a way of taking on a different identity, at least temporarily, as Link does throughout.

On the third day, the music in Clock Town speeds up, going into double time and giving the carnival mood a frantic atmosphere, as if whirling towards the inevitable end. Indeed, as with its predecessor, music plays a central role in Majora’s Mask, and the game’s actual music, composed by series veteran Koji Kondo, contributes enormously to its atmosphere. A couple of songs – namely the rain-summoning Song of Storms and the time-altering Song of Time – are reused from OoT (though the latter comes with variants that slow down and speed up time), but the game’s affecting central theme is the Song of Healing, which “calms troubled spirits” and turns their woes into masks. Sometimes, as with the ghosts of Darmani and Mikau, these spirits are literal; other times, as with the aforementioned music box owner, the song lifts a curse. Either way, this is a very different version of Link as adventurer. Yes, he’s travelling the land fighting monsters, but he’s also laying ghosts to rest and bringing peace on a psychological level. Both Darmani and Mikau fade away after hearing the song and experiencing a vision of the adulation and love they knew in life – whether to an afterlife or simply into oblivion, you’ve guessed it, the game doesn’t let on.

Which makes sense, because fundamentally, this is a game about death. The dead hang around in various parts of Termina; not just Darmani and Mikau, but also the ghost of a dancer who wants to pass on his techniques, as well as the zombies and skeletons of Ikana Valley (who are, uniquely for a Zelda game, somewhat humanised, with voices and personalities in some cases). But more than that, this is a game about cheating death. Link constantly rewinds time, trying again and again to avert catastrophe. To do so, he takes on the aspects of dead people, summoning help from beyond the grave. In one way, this is all to restore the natural order: the moon is not meant to fall, and all those restless spirits need to be laid to rest. But doing so in itself requires going outside the natural order of time and even life. No wonder Link is a perpetual outsider.

Outside of all this uncanny morbidity, the game is just suffused with general weirdness. One standout sequence is the alien invasion of Romani ranch[2], which Link must fight off in collaboration with Romani (and the horse Epona). It’s a sequence not quite like anything else in any Zelda game, where the player has to roam the area picking off attackers over the course of the night (a few minutes of real time), but more pointedly, it has a visual style not quite like anything else. The aliens vaguely resemble the Poes (ghosts) elsewhere in the game, but are actually based on the Flatwoods monster, a cryptid/alien sighting from the early 50s. It’s a very unusual reference point for a Zelda game, which are normally entirely fantastical, and helps give the game a very different feel to its predecessors and successors.

All of this talk of death and uncanniness might make it seems like the game is a depressing slog, but in fact it’s pervaded by a peculiar whimsy, and an off-kilter sense of humour. Koume and Kotake, the evil witches from OoT, here run a boat tour of a poison swamp. One of the people who needs help in Clock Town is a disembodied arm reaching out of a toilet looking for paper. The aforementioned zombies in Ikana Castle, known as Redead, dance wildly in one of two styles if Link enters the room wearing a particular mask. Then there’s Tingle, later a mainstay of the series, a man in his mid-30s who is convinced he is a fairy and who floats from a balloon (which must be popped in order to speak to him) in various locations drawing his maps.

Oddly, perhaps the area of the game where this sense of humour is most on show is Ikana Valley. As well as Skull Keeta’s idle soldiers and the dancing zombies, there’s the King of Ikana and his bickering minions, who could have walked straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon[3]. And yet all this goofiness is set against the curse overriding the land, Skull Keeta’s lingering sense of duty, and the two warring composer brothers who can’t find rest in death. The undead, it turns out, are still just human.

Ikana Valley is also home to what, for my money, might be the game’s strangest and most lingering scene, which I’ve already alluded to briefly: the healing of the music box owner. When Link first enters the area, the music box house is shut tight, the man’s daughter Pamela refusing to allow entry. Pamela must be distracted by restoring the river’s flow (by laying to rest one of the composer brothers) in order to sneak into the house, where upon descending to the basement, Link discovers a man half-transformed into a mummified Gibdo, his mouth hanging open, making otherworldly noises. It’s a genuinely disturbing sight, made all the stranger to contemporary eyes by the blocky N64 character model. If Link attacks the man, Pamela shields him and pleads with him to remember her before throwing Link out. If Link instead plays the Song of Healing, the Gibdo transformation is removed, turning into a mask, and Pamela and her father embrace, she taking on the parental role in consoling him and assuring him that he’s had a bad dream. The whole scene is strangely affecting, not least for its understatedness – neither participant acknowledges Link’s presence, and if he returns to the house Pamela thanks him but asks him to leave lest his presence prompt her father to remember what happened.

All of this weirdness is all the more startling to me when I consider that I was only 9 when I first played the game. I’d been looking forward to it for months, after playing OoT to death, and got it for Christmas of 2000, after poring over magazine coverage of it slavishly. Along with Pokémon Gold/Silver, it’s among the first games I can remember being excited for pre-release. And while OoT certainly isn’t without its darkness – it is, after all, a game in which the villain succeeds at his evil plan a third of the way in, and the rest of the game is devoted to ensuring this dark future never comes to pass – it’s fair to say that Majora’s Mask, in its tone and the ideas that it’s playing with, was utterly unlike any piece of media I’d experienced before.

And yet I enjoyed it very much. Fundamentally, it is a well-designed game, and one which picks up many mechanics from its prequel, which made it easy to pick up. But I’m inclined to say that something of that strange tone got its hooks into me too. I’ve heard people of my generation say something similar of something like Final Fantasy VII, that it was a game they didn’t fully get to grips with until they were older. But where FFVII is a narratively ambitious game with a great deal going on in its worldbuilding and characterisation, Majora’s Mask is actually relatively straightforward in terms of what’s going on. What marks it out is its tone and imagery, the way that it’s pervaded with morbidity and sheer strangeness. I think it was likely my first real encounter with a piece of media that revels in the uncanny. And while I wouldn’t say that horror is my genre particularly, I think that often where I find a piece of horror media that really sticks with me, it's because it takes me back to something of that formative first experience with Majora’s Mask.

Zelda has gone to a lot of varied and interesting place over the last 25 years, but I think it’s fair to say that Majora’s Mask represents an extreme that it’s never approached again. Certainly I don’t expect another game in which Link runs around wearing people’s faces like Hannibal Lecter, or a giant memento mori hangs over the game world drawing ever closer as time wears on. It speaks to the breadth of the series that it can incorporate an entry like this, something profoundly weird that people like me are still getting their heads around two and a half decades later. I feel about it very similarly to how some people similar ages to me feel about Silent Hill 2, a game I didn’t experience until I was an adult, but with a similar refusal to explain itself or quite make sense. It’s not only my favourite Zelda game, it’s one of my favourite games of all time. It’s engraved in some deep, dark corner of my being. Which may not be entirely healthy, but it’s just how it is.

[1] You can read it here if you’re interested.

[2] The creatures involved are never referred to as “aliens” – Romani just refers to them as “them,” while Cremia recalls her referring to them as “ghosts.” They do, however, appear from a ball of light in the sky, so it’s not exactly a far reach, and their intent to kidnap the cows (and Romani, who is returned with no memory a day later if the kidnapping goes ahead) seems a tongue-in-cheek allusion to cattle mutilation and alien abduction stories, another example of the game's weird humour.

[3] In one of many obvious indications of the game’s influence, the goofy skeletons Sans and Papyrus in Undertale (a game whose uneasy tone owes a little to Majora’s Mask at times) are very clearly modelled after these two.