The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask Review

The time loop is not a gimmick, it is the theme. Everyone in Clock Town has a schedule, a problem and a place to be when the moon falls, and because the reset erases your help, the only way to matter is to learn their lives well enough to intervene at the right hour. The Anju and Kafei quest runs across all three days and is the best written side story in the series. The masks are the second system, twenty four of them, and the transformation masks rewrite your movement, combat and puzzle vocabulary entirely rather than adding a tool.

There are only four dungeons and they are demanding, particularly Stone Tower, which inverts the world. The costs are the ones a one year development produces: heavy asset reuse from the previous game, an inventory and time management burden that frustrates as often as it focuses, and an early stretch before the song of time that is genuinely punishing. Strange, sad and unlike anything Nintendo has made since.