When I was a kid, I didn’t know that forums and walkthroughs existed, and nor did my friends. Instead, we traded solutions to the puzzles that the Nintendo 64 games provided us. We would sometimes keep little notes in the instruction booklets, but more often than not, the real challenge was remembering how we solved the earlier puzzles.
Mostly, we did this with Majora’s Mask. My friend two doors down would come round to mine with new info, direct me to a mask location, and then I’d return the favor the next time we went to her house. We’d see how many masks we could find in an afternoon and try to remember when a mask could be found. The “where” was usually easy to remember, but the “when” was always more difficult.
Replaying the game last year, I found myself reminiscing about this bizarre way of playing the game. We never tried to complete the game, and I definitely never completed a dungeon back then, but running around Termina and talking to the residents of Clock Town seemed to fill many hours of our weekends.
For me, the immersion of the world was all I wanted from Majora’s Mask. I wanted to collect things, to move side plots along, and of course collect masks. When I played Ocarina of Time, I did try and complete it, though at that age I never did. But exploring the time loop and starting afresh in Majora’s Mask was always so much more engrossing. It was about remembering where all the masks could be found, who they would affect, and then doing it all again, collecting more and more each time.
When I replayed it last year — the whole thing, dungeons and all — I tried really hard to find all the masks from memory alone, but I just couldn’t. But next time I will. Maybe that’s not the way the game was intended to be played, but I think that there’s a lot to be said for what we, as players, put into the games ourselves. Besides, it’s Majora’s Mask, you can transform into anything you want to be — if you can remember where to find the right mask.
