![]() ![]() Altruism and stoicism are simple, virtuous philosophies that mean giving up something you want to help others, and accepting the unfairness of life - a sort of "might as well get on with it" policy. ![]() Ocarina of Time, philosophically, presents the players with an altruistic choice: can Link sacrifice his innocence and childhood for the good of Hyrule? Link himself is a bit of a stoic: silent, uncomplaining, accepting of his fate. Please stop making me fight eight-foot bug monsters" And all of this has to be done by a child? Zelda games are normally about killing big bad monsters, and defeating evil - but people don't usually die! Except Dampé, but if anything, dying made him better at his job. By chasing the Skull Kid, and unlocking the core time loop of the game, Link is drawn further into Termina's predicament: the moon is falling, and they have just three days left before it crashes to the ground, killing everyone. There was no Call to Adventure - he's just stuck as a little tree boy, and needs to figure out how to return to his regular boy form. At the start of Majora's Mask, Link is pulled, unwillingly, into the story by virtue of being cursed. Link is merely in the right place at the right time to save Clock Town and Termina from its fate.īut I'm getting ahead of myself. If Ocarina of Time is Lord of the Rings, then Majora's Mask is The Hobbit: a story about a no one who becomes someone almost entirely by accident. He is not the Hero of Time, because he never grew up to be a hero he exists in a timeline where he is little more than a kid with a sword and a horse. The child Link of Majora's Mask is a stranger in a strange land, wandering the earth as an itinerant nobody. ![]() Today, it tops many critics' lists of best Zelda games, and even makes its way into lists of the greatest games of all time on a regular basis. Its success was much more slow-burning than the instant classic of Ocarina of Time, and that's because it plays with convention and formula in unexpected, inventive ways, largely owing to its constraints - it takes a long time to see it as more than just "Ocarina, but weirder". It sold relatively well, but only managed about half the sales of its predecessor. In the end, it took 18 months to finish what would become known as The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, using assets created during Ocarina of Time's development and twisting them to create a whole new story. Bonus points if they could make it good, of course - but with so little time invested, and a much smaller team to pay, at least it wouldn't take as long to break even if the game was a dud. It would be a race to the finish, using whatever they had on hand to save time, and then it would be done. The idea of working on another multi-year project was daunting, so they made a deal: they had just one year to make the next Zelda game. Today, Kate explores the philosophy and tragedy behind Majora's Mask.Īfter The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released on the Nintendo 64 in 1998, the development team was exhausted. ![]() To celebrate the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, we're running a series of features looking at a specific aspect - a theme, character, mechanic, location, memory or something else entirely - from each of the mainline Zelda games. ![]()
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