Game Discussion of the Week: LoZ Majora's Mask

My favourite Zelda game of all time and it's in my top 5 favourite games of all time. This was a great response from Nintendo to all the great RPG's that the Ps1 was pouring out.

Love the world and atmosphere in this game. Clock town and all its streets and crevasses are very iconic to me. love just getting lost and walking around in it for ages.

I love the stories of the individuals and how each of their missions turn out. The whole mask thing is great with Fierce deity at the end was great.

The only Zelda game where i really like the vast majority of the characters. Absolutely one of my favourite games of all time.

Convenient that the Majora's Mask discussion thread was revived, since I was planning on resurrecting it myself.

One thing that always personally divided me about the game was its art direction. I remember Cervantes saying years ago that he thought Majora's Mask was the closest we'll ever get to a survival-horror LOZ game from Nintendo. I personally think that, despite having the darkest themes and storyline of a Zelda game, the visual style of Majora's Mask is far too expressionistic to be scary to me. While the environmental designs were always great, several of the new NPCs look like they'd fit right in with Wind Waker's:



As for the new enemies/creatures/monsters/sub-bosses, some of their models are so flat and cartoony that they literally look like they're made out of paper mache. One example I remember off the top of my head is the King of Ikana:



Then there are a number of WTF characters/creatures who don't even look like they belong in a Zelda game, like the beavers:



I mean, WTF?!?


For these reasons I still consider Ocarina of Time scarier than Majora's Mask, since it ultimately had much more consistently realistic character models. I do admire the creator-driven feel of Majora's Mask's art direction, but it comes at the expense of the game's scare factor, which felt less intense than OoT's, despite MM's higher difficulty level and darker themes. (OoT also used blood in some of its environments and cutscenes, whereas MM never featured any blood whatsoever)

Cervantes Does this make sense?

 So you find the many cartoony creature models in MM scary? I would say you're easily spooked then.

Well I'm just talking about the new character models. The environments in MM were absolutely outstanding and indeed darker in a figurative sense, especially ikana canyon. Some of the environments that exclusively feature OoT models like the well in ikana canyon really did feel genuinely scary. But too often the game looked more along the lines of expressionistic animation like Nightmare Before Christmas, and those kind of visuals only scared me as a child.

As stratogustav said, it definitely has that uncanny vibe that comes with stop motion animation - things like Nightmare Before Christmas. It's not horror in the sense of being outright scary, but horror by an atmosphere of uneasiness (also look at David Lynch's movies in general). It's the impression that there's something very wrong with that place, with a very melancholic feel and darker themes than what one would expect from a game from that era: the entire section with the zombified father, or the implication that the masks come from dead people and that Link goes through great suffering while using them are some examples. The Mask Salesman, with his erratic movements and forced smile, is also strange enough to give the idea that he might not even be a person (maybe he is using a mask himself?). It's what we would generally call surrealistic horror: horror centered on the strangeness of a place and its characters.

It doesn't mean that the game doesn't have lighter moments and even funny ones - it's just that, at least in comparison to other Zelda games, this one veers too close to being more about the horror than the high fantasy side of the series. Link's Awakening had already showed that the series could deal with more serious, philosophical and darker themes, but I do think Majora's Mask realized more of those possibilities while dealing with the horrific side of the series (even though Link's Awakening is, to me, the better game).

Of course, horror is a very subjective thing, so I get that Ocarina, for Spirit Bomb, with its more outright scary moments (bottom of the well says hi), might be seen closer to straight up horror.