The Majora's Mask Article, Part 1.
A personal introduction.
…this is gonna be the big one.
The following journey is an edit and completed version of something that’s rotted in various Google documents for literal years at this point- nearly three since its inception. I have so many things I want to say about Majora’s Mask. That I need to say about Majora’s Mask. If the 48 some-odd pages of an essay devolving into scattered notes and assorted gun-jumping paragraphs weren’t indication enough, I wouldn’t be anything like the person I am today without this game. So… it’s time to finally straighten all that out, light up the signs, and show you all- over the course of a long long time, because again, 48 pages- where I came from and who I am.
Majora’s Mask is… it… is…
Oh for the love of God, am I really doing this? How on God’s sweet green Earth could I ever POSSIBLY hope to do this game justice?! I ju- *sigh* okay, okay, okay… let’s try, objectivity first. Ahem!
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is an action-adventure game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 home console. It was released worldwide in 2000 as the sixth main installment in The Legend of Zelda series and was the second to use 3D graphics, following 1998's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, to which it is a direct sequel and… I can’t do this. Wikipedia, you’re too objective. Love ya, but you won’t do me any favors here. It’s up to me. This is a fight I have to take on alone. Because I feel, truly, I have a couple somethings to add to this conversation.
And that’s crazy, right? Everyone who’s anyone has already sung their praises about this game. Somecallmejohnny’s review, frankly, set a benchmark. His whole channel set a benchmark for a lot of down-to-earth game reviewers to this day, really, but his video on Majora’s Mask covered the bases wonderfully. KingK did his whole KingK thing too, covering the whole thing even deeper. AVGN… okay I respect his cred, you don’t fuck with the classics, but the man just didn’t get what he was talking about for the most part, we’ll get to that. And hell, do we even TALK about Schaffrillas Productions and that ungodly personal video? “The greatest work of art ever made”, yeah, that’s… accurate. Yeah. Yeah no. Yeah it is. I’m with him on that one. How much this game’s done for me, where it’s gotten me, it’s hard to quantify. Yeah. It’s time for the scary things. Not just Majora’s Mask… but emotional personal backstories with video games.
The crashing of threatening lightning crashes all around, because that is quite spooky, indeed. The writer cracks his knuckles, preparing a transition…
It must’ve been… God, how many years ago now? It’s… it’s been ten years now… hoo boy. Okay, SO. Ten years ago, this was early 2014. Now, I remember most of the details here vividly, but the only missing piece is how I discovered YouTube. I only remember two things: one, I was shown the site because of something to do with school; and two, I had briefly found two enduring legends:
ZackScott and Chuggaconroy.
Ah, good times, good times. Anyway! It was because of them that I found out that the video games I knew had… some backing. Some SOMETHING behind them. Growing up on the autism spectrum left me with such a weird and roundabout thought process and lack of questions to understand how things worked that it actually still colors those memories in such a bizarre way that it’s difficult to even process them. In truth, it’s like reading an inscription in a foreign language through smudged glass from thirty feet away, while your reflection in said glass is still visible enough to get in the way! As such, I didn’t understand video games the same way people around my age did- it was more “ooooh pretty plastic guitar thing that hooks up to white rectangle and plays that music my dad plays that I really like”, not dissimilar to jingling keys distracting a baby while represented in a family memories scrapbook. The Beatles Rock Band and Wii Sports were exactly that, things that brought the family together every so often to make fun memories. It wasn’t until I got Mario Galaxy for a birthday that I saw other kinds of games and concepts- and even then, again, I didn’t understand it. Nothing ever… clicked. Nothing… until that one day in early 2014. I was scrolling YouTube on a Friday afternoon, as one does, and then… I see something odd.
Yeah, I found THAT Game Theory. I found Is Link Dead. And I knew a bit of Zelda at the time, for sure- this was right after Christmas 2013, where I got Wind Waker HD AND Link Between Worlds! I knew me some Zelda. And to this day I prefer Link Between Worlds between the two because it is the PEAK of 2D Zelda and I WILL not hear otherwise but I knew Zelda, so I clicked!
And I… was scarred. Permanently and absolutely scarred. That video was freaky to an unsuspecting baby! Thinking about death and mortality, about grief and sorrow, about that MOON, it was too much! I was terrified. I have never remembered a single dream I’ve ever had in my life, but the one exception to that was the recurring nightmares of 2014, and the only part of that I remember… is that one key art piece of Skull Kid. Cast in shadows, dancing his mad mad nihilistic jig, awaiting the apocalypse his id desires. And he wasn’t even moving in my nightmares, he was just… standing there! Menacingly! Stuck in that pose from the artwork, yeah th-this!
This pose! This is all my subconscious showed and it scared the shit out of me! I love the game now, but I still refuse to buy any more than this sweet-ass poster right here…
…as merch and GOD FORBID I GET A REPLICA OF THE MASK BECAUSE I AM STILL SCARED OF THOSE EYES. THOSE EYES THAT BORE THEIR WAY INTO THE SOUL AND YET STILL SPEAK TO THE DARKNESS WITHIN BECAUSE NO SOUL LAY WITHOUT TROUBLING DEPTHS THE BRAVEST CANNOT OVERCOME WITH OPEN EYES AND-
Y-yeah. It scared me. But, for as debilitated as that damn video left me, its ending sat with me as a little bit more than the rest- one quote in particular.
“Ultimately, though, dead or not, the reason this game is so incredible is that it’s bigger than itself. It’s symbolic of much larger and [more] mature topics allowing for any number of interpretations, really. It’s deeper, more somber, and incredibly more artistic than other entries in the series[…] And in a lot of ways, the gamer sees what the gamer most wants to see in this sort of game.”
It almost made the torturous never-ending nightmare… pleasant? Like it had a point, a purpose, a nice reason to scare you. That sat with me. So, despite the spooks, I have to give credit to the YouTube algorithm because it allowed me to dive deeper and deeper down the Termina rabbit hole. Getting greeted with urban legends and Ben Drowned… wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the universe… but you know what they led me to? The thing that was unique among the storm of more creep factor?
Heh, it was Johnny’s review.
Man, Johnny’s review was all I needed to open the floodgates. I found other reviewers, other ones of Johnny’s videos, which led me to Sonic, and that’s a ten year old discovering Sanic Hedgehog. You can imagine how well THAT went for me. But discovering Sonic led to Fawful’s Minion and his old Top Ten Sonic Games video, and that- well, that’s what TRULY set things off. That video, more than any before it, imprinted on me that I wasn’t alone. There were communities of people that viewed these things I viewed as fun as the very same thing. They gathered and talked about these things, and celebrated them for the work that went into them and the aspects that make them work. Those were things that I could do too. Maybe… just maybe… I had friends out there somewhere.
Yeah, I’d say that bore fruit in time. But all of that traces back to Majora’s Mask. I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to say that… this game fixed my brain with the journey it took me on. Those bizarre framings and thought processes that would have likely destroyed my entire potential future, let alone rendered me WITHOUT a future because of how Majora showed me my passions as a writer of fiction, that was all something I helped myself over because of that journey. Part of the reason I’m so intimidated by talking about this game is that, funnily enough, it changed my life unequivocally for the better. Some accident of a nightmare fuel N64 cartridge with a cool-ass holographic front image changed my life unequivocally for the better. That’s… I mean… wow. But, that’s kind of the lesson I took away from it, too: that’s not just the power of Majora’s Mask, that’s the power of fiction. It can offer an escape, a place where we can feel safe and make new friends in fantastical worlds while learning about our own world and the people within it, or see the world through someone else’s eyes for even just an hour or two. It can shape views, destroy views, create worlds, depict the end of our own, it can do anything. It’s my view of the world as well that the measure of impact or relevance in life is always best measured by others- namely, if you’ve made an impact on someone else, whatever kind of impact, you’ve staked your claim in reality as a whole. A master of fiction, therefore… is a master of the fabric of reality itself. And given that I felt the masters imprint upon me, well… who’s to blame me for wanting to do it like them?
Next time, we explore the ludicrous development history. Yes, even a road this worn and trodden must be trod again, trust the process.
Cheers,
from The CrystalPunk
(He, who rises for the almighty grind)