The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

And we have had to really wait until the last Nintendo laptop, since Majora's Mask comes from the hand of New Nintendo 3DS, with a special edition and everything, including the Skull Kid figure, which suggests that Nintendo is very Aware that Majora's Mask 3D is a game that comes to satisfy a huge fan base, those who have been asking for it for years. And here we have it, finally, the darkest Zelda and that completely broke with the aesthetics of the saga, which followed many of the steps of the magisterial Ocarina of Time and that took advantage of the increased memory power of the Nintendo 64 to offer some amazing graphics.

It is precisely in the part of the graphics that veteran players are going to look at the beginning, since an excellent job has been done in redrawing and bringing life to the world of Termina . This place, a parallel reality to Hyrule, has much more colors and settings than Ocarina of Time. Where the many times called "Best Game in History" innovated and laid the foundations for a way of playing, Majora's Mask decided to offer something more of the same ... but without limiting itself to offering more of the same, we did not stop talk about nintendo. Majora's Mask 3D looks much better than Ocarina of Time, with more colors, much richer textures and much more care when redoing the models of the characters. This may be because in Ocarina of Time we only worked firmly with the models of the main characters and this game has very few. However, the nature of Majora's Mask, which forces you to speak to all of Termina's inhabitants and where almost everyone has side quests to offer, has taken much more care that they all look the way they should.

The interior of the dungeons, where we see architectures and worked metal surfaces, is a true delight. There are few, true, but all of them are superbly well differentiated and have unique elements. The Bahía Temple deserves special mention, in which its mechanical nature and its structure on several floors make it a challenge and a visual delight. The machinery, in bronze metal, is carved and we can see the bas-reliefs with clarity. The gates of the ruins that populate the Ikana Canyon are not far behind either. It is in these small details where we realize the magnificent work of adaptation of this new Majora's Mask. In addition, the 3D effect is brilliant and gives the game a unique depth.

The final bosses have benefited from the same facelift as the other characters in this conversion and look much more similar to the drawings that Nintendo distributed at the time, more than a decade ago. Back then, the limitations of the Nintendo 64 made the degree of detail that we enjoy today impossible and we can see, for example, Gyorg, the enemy of the Temple of the Bay, with his perfectly defined bone shell and makes him an enemy not fearsome to defeat only, but also to see. In other cases, like Twinmold (the final enemy of the Stone Tower, the mechanics have even been completely changed to defeat him.

The dungeons continue with the classic structure of the saga, each containing a map, a compass, the key of the final boss and a special object that will open the doors for many of the puzzles in the same dungeon (and the following ones). What Majora's Mask innovated was in the development of the exteriors, in the process that had to be followed until getting into these dungeons and in the success of creating a world much more alive and full of people than in the previous (and later) ones. Zelda titles. As we mentioned in the final impressions, one of the most important characteristics of this Zelda is that a large part of the game time falls on the secondary missions, something that is usually relegated to the background in the saga.

In Majora's Mask we have a quest book, which has also been improved in this review for Nintendo 3DS. The Bomber's Notebook is a very important object that allows us to keep track of the people we have helped and, moreover, it keeps a record of the steps we have to take to help them. This is so since the nature of Majora's Mask leads us to go back in time many times and part of that progress can be lost. It does not happen with all the secondary missions, which are often solved in the moment, such as when we have to help the Ikana Valley scientist, but others, such as the search for Kafei, are a story arc that will take us to the limit of the destruction of the World.

Because here we have one of the distinctive elements of Majora's Mask and all the Zelda since Eiji Aocuma took control of the franchise: the establishment of a control point that the player has to go to every time a milestone ends in the adventure. In other games the idea has led to a place to return to after each dungeon, but in Majora's Mask this is done in a more subtle way, since we only have three days to save the world, 72 hours of time limit. Every time we run out of time (which will happen quite often) we can use the Ocarina and the Song of Time to return to the beginning of everything. All the frames will be restarted and we will only keep certain objects and, of course, the masks that we have obtained.