Clock Town represents some of the very best of what Zelda games have to offer. It's where your first three-day cycle will take place, the music becoming manic by the final day as the Moon closes in before the sombre, haunting turn it takes in those final few hours. It's where most of your filling in of the Bombers' Notebook takes place, meeting a wonderful array of characters, finding out how they all interlink, and seeing how each responds to the notion of their world coming to an end so soon. It's where you grapple with the notion that no matter how much you help these people with their problems, the moment you turn back the clock to save yourself all that aid will be undone. There's a hopelessness to this that is very striking.
Managing your time here is also just immensely fun in the early game cycles. It's easy to find yourself juggling four or five different things over the course of a cycle, trying to be efficient with your time whilst not letting any of these plates you have spinning crash to the ground, and this multitasking was very exciting and rewarding to me. I think this quality largely disappears by the end of the game once your checklist of things to do has reduced to the two or three things you've left hanging which made the earlier stages of side-questing much more engaging than what followed, and there are some problems here beyond that with some frustrations over having to repeat content (I had to play through the Kafei/Anju storyline four times for various reasons) and a few questlines being very easy to miss if you're not in the right time at the right place by accident, but you'd be hard-pressed not to form an attachment with Clock Town and its residents.
Things outside of Clock Town fell a bit more flat for me. I was willing to forgive Woodfall Temple for being fairly simple because hey, it's the intro dungeon, but the problem is none of the remaining dungeons after that point are good either. Snowhead Temple is rife with backtracking and I found it hard to appreciate exactly the effect I was having when interacting with its central gimmick mechanic, Great Bay Temple has some frustratingly obtuse puzzles, and performing the Elegy of Emptiness for the Stone Tower Temple is the biggest pain which in turn leads to me being hesitant to interact with its central gimmick mechanic any more than is strictly necessary. The drop in quality between the better dungeons in Ocarina of Time and the dungeons in Majora's Mask is honestly startling. The bosses and minibosses are also just incredibly rough here at times, too. Gyorg was easily the nadir of the game for me and I can't imagine how miserable that fight is without access to save states, but I don't really enjoy any of the bosses and almost in an effort to spite me for that there's even content locked behind fighting these things multiple times.
Outside of the dungeons themselves, I found a lot of the content in the locations the dungeons are situated within to be very inconsistent. There's some solid moments here and each of the areas is very enjoyable to discover and initially explore, but on the other hand there's stuff like the Gibdo trading quest maze that just act as brutal, mediocre pace killers.
So, the highs are very high, and the lows are disappointingly so. I was so taken by Clock Town in the early part of Majora's Mask that I half wondered if this might end up being my favourite Zelda game, but alas it ultimately fell short for me and, whilst Majora's Mask is a remarkably ambitious and bold game, I think I might actually prefer Ocarina of Time to it even.
Managing your time here is also just immensely fun in the early game cycles. It's easy to find yourself juggling four or five different things over the course of a cycle, trying to be efficient with your time whilst not letting any of these plates you have spinning crash to the ground, and this multitasking was very exciting and rewarding to me. I think this quality largely disappears by the end of the game once your checklist of things to do has reduced to the two or three things you've left hanging which made the earlier stages of side-questing much more engaging than what followed, and there are some problems here beyond that with some frustrations over having to repeat content (I had to play through the Kafei/Anju storyline four times for various reasons) and a few questlines being very easy to miss if you're not in the right time at the right place by accident, but you'd be hard-pressed not to form an attachment with Clock Town and its residents.
Things outside of Clock Town fell a bit more flat for me. I was willing to forgive Woodfall Temple for being fairly simple because hey, it's the intro dungeon, but the problem is none of the remaining dungeons after that point are good either. Snowhead Temple is rife with backtracking and I found it hard to appreciate exactly the effect I was having when interacting with its central gimmick mechanic, Great Bay Temple has some frustratingly obtuse puzzles, and performing the Elegy of Emptiness for the Stone Tower Temple is the biggest pain which in turn leads to me being hesitant to interact with its central gimmick mechanic any more than is strictly necessary. The drop in quality between the better dungeons in Ocarina of Time and the dungeons in Majora's Mask is honestly startling. The bosses and minibosses are also just incredibly rough here at times, too. Gyorg was easily the nadir of the game for me and I can't imagine how miserable that fight is without access to save states, but I don't really enjoy any of the bosses and almost in an effort to spite me for that there's even content locked behind fighting these things multiple times.
Outside of the dungeons themselves, I found a lot of the content in the locations the dungeons are situated within to be very inconsistent. There's some solid moments here and each of the areas is very enjoyable to discover and initially explore, but on the other hand there's stuff like the Gibdo trading quest maze that just act as brutal, mediocre pace killers.
So, the highs are very high, and the lows are disappointingly so. I was so taken by Clock Town in the early part of Majora's Mask that I half wondered if this might end up being my favourite Zelda game, but alas it ultimately fell short for me and, whilst Majora's Mask is a remarkably ambitious and bold game, I think I might actually prefer Ocarina of Time to it even.