odolwa: masked jungle warrior

Inspired by my friend's recent Majora's Mask fanart and my girlfriend playing the game for the first time. Might do some more, the bosses in this game are pretty and I feel like doing more fanart.

I used to give Majora's Mask a lot of props over its elder, more mainstream sibling Ocarina of Time (that name sounds more stupid every time I read it), but I think after a while I started worrying that my rabid appreciation for the notably "edgier" MM was probably just a contrary sort of nostalgia. However! I'm watching Blanca play it now and it's been just long enough that a lot of the character design (and the design of the story in general) is actually really appealing to me.

Most of the character design in OoT is simple and recogniseable (princess looks like a princess, bad guy looks like a bad guy, Link looks like... Link), but the incidental characters you meet just around in towns and stuff could sometimes be pretty funny (or creepy) in a way that makes them stick out a little bit. Majora's is a famously sidequest-heavy game, and what's more it doesn't have the standard fairy tale Princess/Hero/Bad Guy triad (which the other games go so far as to fucking canonise), which essentially removes all of the boring characters (except Link, who is well-known to be a characterless player vehicle). They take some of these weird little side characters who would usually stand around forever in town X continuously repeating the same line (then they go and design a lot of new ones) and then give them this amazing groundhog day cycle to play around in.

I can't really stress how good an idea this is - by simply adding a restriction to the timespan of the game, by putting it in parentheses, this actually gives the characters such a vast amount of life, it allows them to move and change and fight and trade and get married and do a lot of the things people actually do. It doesn't matter that the whole story is only three days long - it rids the game of that weirdest of tropes that almost all videogames by necessity fall prey to - the paradox of infinite time, something that I feel is possibly one of the most well established and subtlest ways to kill peoples' immersion.

But yeah, the character design is also fucking amazing, the lack of pressure in this obviously being a B team title completely freed up whatever artists worked on it and they just went crazy and it's just beautiful to watch. And it's funny how much the gamecube incarnation rips it off, especially since Wind Waker pretty much holds the sole status of "artsy game" among the Zelda brethren.