I recently beat Majora's Mask 3D on 3DS. This game was the one glaring hole in my Zelda collection. I have beaten every other main series game since Ocarina of Time. (I do intend on going back for the previous ones, someday.) Majora's Mask always felt like a sidestroy - a weird Zelda game that didn't quite "count", so it never really grabbed me when I was younger. But, after hearing rave reviews for years, followed by a remastered release on a handheld, I figured it was time to see what the big deal was. I was disappointed.
There is a lot of great, tried-and-true Zelda gameplay in Majora's Mask, but I feel like it is mostly dampened by that infernal 3-day clock. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Majora's Mask has a novel gimmick - the entire game takes place over only three days in the game world, which equals only a few hours in the real world. At the end of the those three days, catastrophe strikes and you get a game over. That is, unless you use the Ocarina of Time to travel back to the beginning of the 72 hour period. You bring back with you plot devices, spells, tools, etc, so you can advance to new areas you could otherwise not have reached. But, and here's the sticking point for me, if you don't acquire that tool or spell or whatever before time is up, you have to start all over questing for that item.
I believe requiring a player to replay an exact game experience is just bad design. A huge part of why games such as the Zelda series are so fun is the sense of exploration. Seeing new things, solving new puzzles, killing new enemies. A puzzle you've already solved becomes a chore. Who wants to travel to a magical kingdom to do chores? New content is the key to engaging players, not simply "more of the same".
The clock does lend a sense of urgency to your tasks, but I don't believe it is a worthwhile trade-off for repetitious gameplay. There are a ton of exciting things to explore in Majora's Mask, but they are only novel the first time. No other Zelda game forces players to re-live challenges, at least not as a core gameplay mechanic. No other Zelda game felt a mechanic to add pressure to the player's actions was necessary, and they were right. The Zelda formula works without it - you rarely die, and when you do, it's a short run to be right back where you were. That little bit of time spent catching up is enough punishment to make a player play carefully; you don't need the threat of having to re-do an entire dungeon!
The time-travel system does lend itself to some brilliant questing mechanics, solving challenges with brain-twisting temporal puzzles. But, for the most part, they don't engage the clock system this way. Most of the quests that require time travel are about memorizing a complex series of events through trial-and-error, then going back and trying again, until you finally do all the correct actions in the correct order. Often (for the more complex quests) this can mean doing the beginning of the quest 4 or 5 times! Again, the repetition is not a worthwhile trade-off for a novel quest mechanic.
Don't get me wrong, Majora's Mask still has a lot of excellent points. The dungeons are a little harder than the other games (and that's great) but still filled with classic, fun Zelda puzzles and enemies. The fantastic dialogue, multiplied by the "mask system" means there is a lot of funny, touching and interesting "conversations" Link has. (Quotes because, like all Zeldas, he never speaks.) There's a lot of great challenges, exploration and narratives in Majora's Mask, but the ticking away of the clock chips away at the overall experience.
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