For someone suffering from the kind of undiagnosed, temporal-based depression that I was, in retrospect my brother getting me N64 game Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000) for my thirteenth birthday was a little like chucking me into a moshpit full of goths. Goths who are keen to discuss the cost-of-living crisis.
I was already obsessed with the passing of time and how terrifyingly soon I was going to be a ‘woman’ -– because that’s what you start being called as soon as your vagina unsolicitedly starts leaking blood like a crying religious painting. A game about the fragility of youth and the all- devouring march of time wasn’t the best choice for a gift. In my then eleven-year-old brother’s defence, he only got it because the cartridge was golden, and that was pretty sweet, to be fair.
That summer holiday promised the same as the others when it came to our time at Mum’s – little to no interaction with either Mum or Him, save the Monday nights when we had dinner together. Hours left to our own devices playing video games. By this time though, my brother had mates to go out with and I increasingly found myself alone slouched in bed playing PlayStation, eating crisps or crackers I’d found in the storage room.
My birthday is around the hottest time of the year and I didn’t have a fan to cool down with while playing my new Majora’s Mask game. Despite being alone, I was so ashamed of my body that I didn’t want to look at it. So there I was, lying on a beanbag in my brother’s room, wearing baggy cargo pants and a big fleece hoodie with an embroidery of Eeyore on the breast, my chest tight with multiple training bras, absolutely pouring with sweat while the Majora’s Mask opening gently pressed against a little CRT screen.
The plotline and lore of Majora’s Mask is like a poem – its meaning is fiercely debated among fans because it’s deeply confusing at times and is best looked at as a piece of art rather than solely as a video game.
The game starts with the series hero: Link, a child again, wandering through a gloomy forest in search of his missing friend Navi – that's the annoying fairy from the previous game. He is ambushed by a rickety-legged straw doll creature called The Skull Kid, who is wearing Majora’s Mask.
The little bastard steals Link’s horse and turns Link into a leafy Deku scrub with sad eyes. This is how Link enters the kingdom of Termina, a parallel land outside of Hyrule but sporting a fair few similarities. Not least because nearly all the inhabitants are lifted right from Ocarina of Time, although that was a decision made due to deadline constraints rather than an intended narrative aspect.
Link, shortly after being turned into what is essentially a very sick-looking bonsai tree, meets the Happy Mask Salesman. He is a terrifying grinning man wearing a great bag of faces on his back.
You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
It was an odd feeling, slouching in that beanbag and seeing that foreboding text on the dark screen. Because yes, I had. I was about to be forced to grow up and become what society calls a woman. And all the shitty things that go with it. My fate was to be in a body not meant for me, no matter what mask I’d wear.
The world of Termina is under threat. A huge, red-eyed moon hangs in the sky, slowly falling closer to the guffawing men in Clock Town centre. A dial at the base of the game screen shows time slipping away; you have three days to stop the moon from falling.
After finding the Ocarina of Time, Link can start manipulating chronophobia in video game form. He can reset the clock back to dawn of the first day, slow down and speed up time. Termina is stuck in that perpetual three-day loop. On the third day, the horrifying face of the moon looms so close to Clock Town tower that it looks like Link could reach up and touch it.
There are three masks Link must acquire to proceed, all of which turn him into a race of people living in Termina. The Deku scrub, a Goron, and a Zora. All three masks come from death.
The body of the first mask is found at the start of the game; a twisted, agonised little tree with empty, sad eyes. This is the remains of the Deku King’s Butler’s son.
The second body doesn’t get found; only his ghost – Goron warrior Darmani III who died in the cold at Snowhead Temple while searching for the cause of the long winter which is killing his people. Link finds the warrior’s ghost lurking by his grave, taking the mask so the tortured spirit can move on.
The third body Link finds in the process of dying. Mikau, a Zora guitarist, is mortally wounded while trying to save Zora eggs from pirates. Link drags his body to the shore, where the mermaid-like creature breathes his last breath and his soul becomes a mask.
The game is carefully threaded with dark themes and heady scripts of coming of age. A young woman fears her missing fiancé won’t return; meanwhile, he’s hiding away, cursed into the body of a prepubescent boy. A little girl wielding a bow and arrow at a cow-filled ranch tells stories of ‘them’ coming in the night. A middle-aged map merchant dressed in green tunic and red pants insists he is an ageless fairy. An entire area, Ikana Canyon, is haunted by dead warriors and inside a music box house, a little girl lives with her undead father. The undead are alive in Termina.
Fan theories range from reasonable to wildly speculative about what exactly Termina is. Is it a kind of purgatory, into which Link has fallen unaware that he is dead? Is it a universe parallel to Hyrule? Is it a depiction of the grieving process after bereavement? Is it all a dream from the mind of The Skull Kid?
The Zelda Encyclopaedia quite crushingly says that Termina is a land made of the Skull Kid’s memories and is thus a dream that disappears after the game ends. This ‘canon’ explanation seems to be mostly rejected by fans of the series; not least because it’s utterly lame, but it makes no sense for a game that is sculpted specifically around helping other people to be set in a dream where that wouldn’t matter. There's not much of an explanation in-game, but the instruction manual states this is a parallel universe. In a 2015 interview, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma stated Termina was a land near Hyrule, almost like another dimension.
In prequel Ocarina of Time, the main drive of the game is to protect the land and, by extension, Princess Zelda from the evil Ganondorf. The needs of the residents of Hyrule are secondary aside from the few tasks needed to progress.
In Majora’s Mask, Link must help all the inhabitants of Termina – both with their own personal problems, and the somewhat more looming matter of the giant moon about to crash into their town. No princess, no Ganon – just innocent bystanders with their own relationships and stories to tell.
Sunk into that beanbag chair, I became so immersed in the world of Termina that hours seemed like minutes. In between releasing each of the four giants trapped in their temples, I’d carefully help each member of the town, watch them move in their set paths again and again, ride Epona around Termina field, splash in and out of the sea as Mikau’s mask, exploring each and every pixel of the world before me and feeling that relief of being able to start all over again if anything went wrong.
But that rolling feeling of dread remained in my stomach. Link, a child forever, switching in and out of adult bodies and speaking to children, ghosts; a snapshot of time three days long repeating forever.
The feeling rolled down into my stomach, and then lower.
I was playing the Spirit Temple section. Using the masks of the dead, Link plays the ocarina tune Eulogy of Emptiness again and again, leaving empty statues of each character to lodge a door open, be a stepping stone. Copies of himself separate but all at once – he is a child while also an adult, dead but alive.
I looked at the empty cases and was brought back to reality with a sick feeling. A true fear of what was laid out before me in the Spirit Temple – a life lived, and a death died. A reflection of real life, the life outside that CRT screen that loomed above my teenage self like a red-eyed moon.
I pressed pause. A strange rolling pain in my abdomen, a deep depression in my chest. And an even stranger feeling further south. Had I wet myself?
I pulled myself to the grey bathroom on the landing, curled down my pants, and stared at the blood pooling there and running down my legs.
You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
That looming moon, slowly falling from the sky above me. Red eyes. Adulthood. Womanhood. Unstoppable.
