Let me take you back to the simpler time of 2003. My older sister was a massive Zelda fan during her high school days, and I, at around the age of seven, would always watch her and her friend play Ocarina of Time together. Then one day, my sister’s friend brought her little brother over to hang out with me. With him was a game I had never heard of before: Majora’s Mask.
He popped it into my Nintendo 64 and started playing, sometimes letting me play as well. I was completely enamored: Everything looked so familiar yet so different, and with each second that went by, all that I could think of was that I really wanted this game.
So, about two months later, Christmas was coming up and my mind was fixed on getting that game. Only there was one problem: I couldn’t remember the name of it! I put so much brainpower into trying to remember, but nothing came up. Then, for some reason, even though I had never heard of it before, I thought: “Oh that’s right, it was Master Quest! That was it!”
So that’s what I asked for, and my dad managed to find the bonus disk it came on at our local GameStop. Used, mind you, but still playable. I popped it into my Nintendo GameCube, the game started to load, and I was excited. I came to find out it was just Ocarina of Time, except harder.
I was so confused, but I played it anyway. I enjoyed it to an extent, but given how next-to-impossible some of those puzzles were, I didn’t give it a lot of time.
Here’s where it starts getting interesting. One February weekend, I was playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, going through and grinding out trophies to fill up my collection. As I was looking through my gallery, a particular trophy popped up: the Four Giants trophy, and right below it came the name I was looking for: Majora’s Mask. I had finally cracked the code. You know that moment when the DVD logo hits the corner of the screen just right? Yeah, that.
My birthday came around a few months later and I asked for it, and sure enough, I managed to finally get my hands on it. I was insanely excited. The second the festivities were over, I went right down to my basement, popped the game in, and started to play.
Now things get even more interesting. See, back when I was younger, I had no concept of a “used game.” So imagine my surprise when I saw that there was already a file on the game cartridge before I had even started playing. And not just a file, a completed file. Twenty hearts, double magic meter, damage reduction, all the masks, every song, every item, a bank account filled to the brim with spending money — every single little thing was unlocked. I felt like a kid in a candy store (which makes sense given that I was an actual kid at the time). I could practically do whatever I wanted: go to Zora’s Cape, race the Gorman Brothers, explore the Great Bay Temple (and then give up because it was way too complicated), or rematch the four bosses to my heart’s content. It was incredible.
As a base game, I’m not the biggest fan of Majora’s Mask. A lot of the game was a little bit too cryptic for me, and alongside the wonky save mechanics and how the game doesn’t guide you as much as Ocarina of Time did, I never spent much time with my own save file. But I’ll always have fond memories of my adventures with the game, even if it was following on the coattails of someone else’s.
