Impending Moon: Crisis and Anxiety in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
It’s a good time for stories about the end of the world, if for little else.
Everyone you know (who reads) is talking about reading either Station Eleven or one of The Stand, The Plague, or The Road. Every Internet outlet has produced its own lists of bingeable end-of-days-or-at-least-civilization TV shows to help keep the dwindling content fires going. Essays about the appeal of a certain kind of movie in these certain kinds of times have an R0 to rival that of the virus itself.
It’s an auspicious moment to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (released in Japan on April 27, 2000), the entry in the series best-known for its giant, grimacing moon. Said celestial body has been set on a collision course with a major population center just three in-game days from pressing Start. It’s the most concrete and manifest doom the series — typically the province of ancient curses and dark bursts of energy and surprisingly porcine ultimate evils — has ever featured. The cataclysm is forever looming overhead; every time you step outside in the game you’re aware of it. It feels very pertinent to April 2020. And it is, though not in the same way as I Am Legend or Snowpiercer. That’s because Majora’s Mask is actually pre-apocalyptic, which is far more pertinent to our lived experience. If you do it right, the moon never impacts. The game is not about the end of the world, but about successfully managing the stress of saving the world.
Majora’s Mask is Nintendo’s White Album, the ambitious, experimental and downright weird follow-up to the then- (and now-?) greatest work in the history of the medium. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had debuted for the Nintendo 64 just a year and a half earlier and was, much like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, immediately hailed as an apotheosis for the form. Both follow-ups would take the experience gained from the creation of the first and run with it in the opposite direction.
Ocarina of Time is organized around the concept of awe. Link, and the player controlling him, is first a child stepping into the larger world, then that child thrown unexpectedly forward into his adult body and a ruined version of that world, then that child-adult given a mechanical grappling hook with which to play Batman across that world. Form and function come together perfectly: the then-revolutionary 3D landscape felt boundless — every reflection on the game is required to mention the moment Link steps into Hyrule Field for the first time and the player realized how much more there was going to be — and the tools the designers gave the player for maneuvering through it made doing so frictionless.
Majora’s Mask inverts those themes to make a game about anxiety. The designs of Ocarina of Time, many of which were reused to save time due to the short turnaround between the two projects, are twisted into new, higher-strung characters in the mirror world of Termina. Everywhere things are going wrong. Everywhere people are stressed. A groom has gone missing days before the wedding. A monkey is set to be wrongfully tortured. Aliens are invading the dairy farm. Not to mention the imminent lunar collision and the obliteration of all life forms. The spine doesn’t tingle; it crawls.
Much as Ocarina’s technological leap forward over its predecessors synced the player’s experience with the sense of wonder Link feels when exploring his Hyrule, this three-day time limit transfers the stress that permeates the game’s world out to the person holding the controller. The 72 in-game hours available to save the world translate to about 54 real-world minutes, which is not nearly enough time to do everything the game requires in order to save the world. Apprehension is the vibe, not admiration.
And so Link learns to reset the clock back to the beginning of the three days. As he returns to the past he takes vital items and knowledge back with him but loses everything else. The supplies he has gathered scatter as he falls backwards through time. Allies forget what he’s done for them. Many of his accomplishments are reset back to square one. It’s Groundhog Day with a sword and a pointy green hat.
The clock hangs over the player’s head constantly, more foreboding in some ways than the moon. Some events have to be completed by a certain time. Some require Link to be in a certain place on a certain day at a certain time, and if this appointment is missed, there’s no recourse but to restart the cycle. If you make it most of the way through one of the game’s big dungeons but run out of time before beating the boss, you have to repeat the whole level. It’s an inordinately stressful gameplay mechanism, one that runs counter to Ocarina’s ethos of free exploration.
Which is what makes it the perfect game for the current era. Much of playing Majora’s Mask is learning how to make playing it easier. The player masters methods by which to restock Link’s gear that bleed less time away and learns shortcuts that staunch its flow. Link even finds the means to control time, to slow it down so more can be accomplished or to jump ahead to access a particular event quicker.
These routines are necessary aids to Link’s quest, but they’re not the point of it. Making progress toward the ultimate goal of stopping the falling moon requires easing the tensions of Termina’s residents. You can reunite the missing groom with his bride, clear the monkey’s name, save the farm and discover who’s really behind the cow’s abductions. The masks Link collects and wears — the game’s other, almost-too-on-the-nose-at-this-point conceit — reveal new secrets or give him special powers. Chief among these are masks that transform Link into Termina’s different sentient species: the plant-like Deku; the giant, rocky Gorons; or the aquatic Zora. These transformations alter the way Link fights and moves, but also change how characters react to him, what they’re willing to tell him, whether they’re willing to help him or allow him to help them. Beating the game, in other words, requires radical acts of empathy, adopting the personae and the pain of those unlike him in order to do what he can to alleviate it.
These are the same skills required to weather the current adversity. Link resets the clock in order to give himself more time to undo the moon’s descent; we remain home, keep our distance and wear our masks to buy ourselves and our health care systems time while a vaccine can be developed. We learn our limits and how to gauge when we need to block out the news, just as the player puts out of mind the fact that, as Link progresses in the game, there’s no one to save the monkey in each subsequent three-day cycle. We train ourselves not to think about the passage of time. In this case we have the opposite problem as Link, in that the volume of days stretching before us feels too prolonged rather than too brief. Same unrelenting sameness though. Same Groundhog Day vibes.
The vast majority of us can’t do the big things required to remit this particular threat. Instead we find little ways to alleviate the strain of the new lifestyles required of us: new routines to adopt, new skills to learn. We do what we can to help those who need it, to identify and to share and to ease their pain. We look forward to a time when the world might be explored again. One day, when this has passed, the world will open up again, and you can bet by then it will feel boundless.