When people ask me about the things I've been through over the past year, they often assume that the toughest thing has been losing my job. In a way, I know loneliness better now than I did 15 years ago when Majora's Mask first came out on the N64, so the game only seems more relevant to me today. It's loneliness that drives the antagonistic Skull Kid to lash out against the world as he does, and I understand the bitterness and anger that loneliness can threaten to cultivate in someone. Link's path-the hero's path-is often a lonely one, but Majora's Mask is more directly concerned with loneliness than any other Zelda game. What I find so affecting about Link's time in Termina is that he never gets to really connect with any of those people. I imagine Link returning to Hyrule and feeling like Dorothy feels when she wakes at the end of The Wizard of Oz. And although the first time I played the game I was disappointed that so many of the residents of Clock Town were duplicates of Hyrule citizens from the preceding Ocarina of Time, I now think this is essential to Majora's Mask's dreamlike power. This lets Majora's Mask take root in my mind as a kind of symbolic quest, rife with dream logic, in ways that more grounded fantasy adventures just can't. If Hyrule is a fantasy world, Termina is a surreal world. It's precisely the vagueness surrounding Termina, the lack of lore and explanation, that prevents Majora's Mask from feeling burdened by reality. But what even is Termina? Where exactly is it in relation to Hyrule? What is its history? Thank goodness Majora's Mask never bothers to answer any of these questions. Hyrule feels established as a physical, geographical place with a kind of history. Majora's Mask feels like Link's dream to me, as if he rode his horse into the mysterious forest we glimpse at the start and end of the game and nodded off, and the whole game took place in his mind.īy this point, the lore of Hyrule, the usual setting for Zelda series adventures, is relatively concrete. I think of Link's Awakening, my other favorite Zelda game, which always felt to me like a product not of Link's subconscious but of the subconscious of Nintendo itself, with so many characters from other franchises showing up in one form or another. I love the way that Termina, the land where Majora's Mask takes place, feels like a dream. And with its setting and structure and premise and that moon sinking in the sky, Majora's Mask does so much. And when I first saw the moon fall on Clock Town and witnessed the shockwave radiate outwards, unstoppable and unendurable like the shockwaves in those old films of early nuclear-bomb tests, I knew that it's not the size of the moon that matters.

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