For years, something hasn't quite lined up for me, sitting like a splinter in my mind Matrix style. Majora's Mask was the game that cemented my love for the series and made me a fan for nearly 2 decades. Hell, it's the game that got me thinking about games as a narrative and artistic medium and is probably the reason I got into game development. But none of the 3D games since have captured the things about that game that spoke to me. This always perplexed me, because Eiji Aonuma, the guy who gets all the accolades for having directed Majora's Mask, has still been at the helm of the series ever since. And every one of those games, even when good, made odd decisions that almost seemed to express a different underlying philosophy of game design. Why was his freshman outing the one that hit me in the feels and engaged me in a way that few games had before or since?
Then I saw this:
Frankly, I was stunned, that pretty much every decision made on this remake, as far as I can tell, seemed to fail to respect or even understand the source material. Many of the things that made Majora's Mask stand out from the rest of the series have been removed or butchered. I have a friend who has agreed to loan me the game and her 3DS because I want to confirm these things for myself, but holy crap.
You no longer have to restart the time cycle to save your long-term progress? Doesn't that completely negate the narrative and gameplay tension of having the time mechanic, rendering it a meaningless gimmick without consequences?
They gave all the bosses the standard glowing eye weak point and 3 hit cycle pattern? Are you kidding me?! That literally sounds like a joke, like the series has begun to parody itself. The thing that made those fights interesting (especially Odolwa) was that they felt like actual fights rather than merely puzzles. In the original, Odolwa responds to you, he adapts, or at least he seems to, which is arguably more important. You can attack him whenever you find an opening and he will throw whatever's in his arsenal at you when he feels it's appropriate. As a kid I would return to Woodfall Temple just to fight Odolwa again with a better sword, because it felt so satisfying to come back and quickly wreck the boss that felt so brutal the first time around.
They broke the Zora swimming by requiring it deplete magic in the name of "symmetry" with the other forms? That sounds like the kind of naive mistake a first-year design student would make. As a kid, I would often boot up the game just to swim around aimlessly for what felt like hours, the 3d movement was so smooth and satisfying and responsive in a way that other games were still trying to figure out (it was 2000, 3D games were still in their infancy at the time).
To top it off, Aonuma openly admits to not really liking or understanding this game. He sees many of the very things that made it worthwhile to me as flaws that must be corrected.
And then finally, a statement was thrown out casually that made everything finally make sense, an obvious solution to a mystery I've only been subconsciously aware of for years. That Yoshiaki Koizumi, a man we rarely even hear mentioned in the context of the Zelda series, was the co-director of Majora's Mask and was behind most of the things I loved about it (the time mechanic, for example). He was also apparently a key creative force behind Link's Awakening, another classic in the series.
Which brings me to the title of this thread. While obviously a bit hyperbolic (Aonuma is clearly a competent developer) it seems that under his direction, the series stalled creatively for years. BotW is the first game to breath new life into the series in a long time, and it's a game which he didn't even direct. Does Aonuma get too much credit for the good parts of the series?
Then I saw this:
Frankly, I was stunned, that pretty much every decision made on this remake, as far as I can tell, seemed to fail to respect or even understand the source material. Many of the things that made Majora's Mask stand out from the rest of the series have been removed or butchered. I have a friend who has agreed to loan me the game and her 3DS because I want to confirm these things for myself, but holy crap.
You no longer have to restart the time cycle to save your long-term progress? Doesn't that completely negate the narrative and gameplay tension of having the time mechanic, rendering it a meaningless gimmick without consequences?
They gave all the bosses the standard glowing eye weak point and 3 hit cycle pattern? Are you kidding me?! That literally sounds like a joke, like the series has begun to parody itself. The thing that made those fights interesting (especially Odolwa) was that they felt like actual fights rather than merely puzzles. In the original, Odolwa responds to you, he adapts, or at least he seems to, which is arguably more important. You can attack him whenever you find an opening and he will throw whatever's in his arsenal at you when he feels it's appropriate. As a kid I would return to Woodfall Temple just to fight Odolwa again with a better sword, because it felt so satisfying to come back and quickly wreck the boss that felt so brutal the first time around.
They broke the Zora swimming by requiring it deplete magic in the name of "symmetry" with the other forms? That sounds like the kind of naive mistake a first-year design student would make. As a kid, I would often boot up the game just to swim around aimlessly for what felt like hours, the 3d movement was so smooth and satisfying and responsive in a way that other games were still trying to figure out (it was 2000, 3D games were still in their infancy at the time).
To top it off, Aonuma openly admits to not really liking or understanding this game. He sees many of the very things that made it worthwhile to me as flaws that must be corrected.
And then finally, a statement was thrown out casually that made everything finally make sense, an obvious solution to a mystery I've only been subconsciously aware of for years. That Yoshiaki Koizumi, a man we rarely even hear mentioned in the context of the Zelda series, was the co-director of Majora's Mask and was behind most of the things I loved about it (the time mechanic, for example). He was also apparently a key creative force behind Link's Awakening, another classic in the series.
Which brings me to the title of this thread. While obviously a bit hyperbolic (Aonuma is clearly a competent developer) it seems that under his direction, the series stalled creatively for years. BotW is the first game to breath new life into the series in a long time, and it's a game which he didn't even direct. Does Aonuma get too much credit for the good parts of the series?
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