All four dungeon bosses in Majora’s Mask 3D have received changes. Each now has an eye, usually somewhere that eyes aren’t normally found, that serves as a weak spot. Goht’s is on its back, and the fight is basically the same aside from this addition. When Goht’s toppled, the eye pops out for Link to attack the eye to deal further damage. Sometimes the eye lands within reach for Goron Link to punch it, but sometimes it’s out of reach, so Link needs to shoot it with arrows.
Odolwa’s eye is right behind its head, so first Link needs to bring him down to be able to hit it. The easiest way is to use Deku Link, launch from the flowers around the arena, and hit the eye with a Deku Nut. This is a nice new addition – Goron and Zora Link had contributions to make to Goht and Gyorg, but Deku Link didn’t really have much to do in this fight in the N64 version. (There was one Deku Flower that could be used to damage Odolwa, but it was much harder than just wading in and hacking it to death.) Other ways of bringing Odolwa down are to shoot it with an arrow or to hack at it knees with the sword.
Gyorg’s eye is in its mouth, and when it’s stunned, it floats to the surface with the eye exposed, so Link doesn’t need to dive in after it, deal as much damage as he can, then try to escape before getting eaten. However, since this deemphasizes Zora Link, there’s a second phase to the fight where Gyorg destroys the platform in the center of the arena, forcing Link to battle it underwater. This also adds mines on chains underwater, so the trick becomes to break the chains of a mine near Gyorg, then get it to suck the mine in. This stuns Gyorg, causing the eye to pop out so Link can zap it with the electric barrier.
The most changed boss, however, is Twinmold. In the original, the two worms jumped around the area while Link put on the Giant’s Mask and hacked them to death. Now, Link doesn’t get the Giant’s Mask before the fight. The blue worm has eyes along its body for Link to shoot out, and when they’re gone, collapses to the ground with a giant eye falling out of its mouth. Meanwhile, the red worm flies overhead, strafing Link. When Link takes out the blue worm, a treasure chest appears in the center of the arena with the Giant’s Mask. Giant Link doesn’t have a sword, instead, he beats the red worm into submission, picks it up by the tail, spins it around, and slams the eye into the ground. This is a much-improved fight over the N64 version.
When I played the N64 version, I beat Majora’s Mask by using the Fierce Deity Mask, which was fun, but a bit too easy – lock on, spam attacks, watch it transform into a supposedly tougher form, repeat until it dies. I had always intended to go back and fight it fairly, but never did, so when I tackled this version, I figured it was as good a time as any. At the start of the fight, the four boss remains leave Link and are mounted on the wall. In the first phase of the fight, the mask spins around the room, and Link can stun it with a spin attack just as it passes overhead. After enough of this, it switches tactics: the four boss remains are animated, and Majora’s Mask starts using a laser attack. Link can reflect the laser attack to kill the boss remains and damage Majora’s Mask.
After enough damage, the mask sprouts arms, legs, and a tiny head and becomes Majora’s Incarnation. This form runs and dances around the room and Link can stun it with his sword or arrows. About the only challenge here is that the boss is fast and hard to hit. Once Link has hit it enough, it transforms into Majora’s Wrath: beefing up its limbs, replacing the tiny head with a full-sized one, and growing tentacles from the ends of its arms. This form tries to whip Link constantly with its tentacles, and the shield really isn’t that useful in blocking them. The strategy remains the same: stun it with arrows, get close, and stab until it runs off.
Ultimately, unlike Ocarina of Time where I generally like the remake better than the original, I’m decidedly more mixed on Majora’s Mask. Enough is clearly better – graphics, controls, saving – that I think, like Ocarina, this is the version I’ll come back to. Unless, of course, they decide to make an HD version for the Switch that combines the best parts of both versions.
Showing posts with label Majora's Mask. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Majora's Mask. Show all posts
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Majora's Mask: 3D Update
Unlike Ocarina of Time, which was mostly a port with a few new things, there are significant changes made for the 3DS version of Majora’s Mask. Some of these are straight improvements: saving at owl statues is now a full save rather than a suspend save, and there are extra quill statues added for save points without adding more quick travel points. (Sadly, they removed the automatic save when restarting with the Song of Time, and moved the respawn point away from the Clock Town owl statue.) The Song of Double Time lets Link skip forward to a certain hour, not just the next dawn/dusk. The Bombers’ Notebook is expanded, with notes on just about everything. Shiro, the wounded soldier who gives Link the Stone Mask, is moved to the Pirates’ Fortress, where the Stone Mask is most useful. There’s a Sheikah Stone in the Clock Tower for hints. Tatl doesn’t wonder why Link forgot how to fight enemies that were in Ocarina of Time.
Some rewards are rejiggered: Koumé’s archery game awards a bottle, with the heart piece moved to the third night in the graveyard, and two Great Fairies are reversed so Link gets the upgraded magic meter before the upgraded spin attack. Because the Circus Leader’s Mask was only really useful in the N64 version for a prerequisite to earning it (wearing it makes the Gorman Brothers not attack Cremia’s wagon, but it can only be given by Gorman in the Milk Bar), there’s a new quest: wearing it and talking to a drunk Gorman makes him ask Link to go to the Gorman Brothers for a special milk delivery, and Link gets to keep the bottle.
There are two big changes I have mixed feelings about. Zora Link’s default swim speed was slowed down; this means it has greater control (yay!) but going fast requires using the electric field, which drains magic. This basically means that for times where going fast is a requirement (racing the Beaver Brothers), I made sure to have Chateau Romani’s bonus active. The Gyorg trial on the moon was also redesigned to have Link strike a crystal switch and swim to get through the gate it opened in time, also requiring a perfectly-timed jump out of the water. I thought once I finished it maybe I’d hate it even more than the Goron rolling trial, but no, that one is even worse than I remember.
The Inverted Song of Time doesn’t slow things down quite as much; while the only time I felt a time crunch it was self-imposed by continuing to push forward after I met each previous goal for the cycle, there were times I had to start a new cycle that I got through in a single cycle in the N64 version. (I didn’t make it through Snowhead Temple in time to get the Gilded Sword the same cycle, and didn’t have time to round up frogs after completing Great Bay Temple.) I didn’t do a “help as many people as you can” cycle before going to the Moon this time; when I was planning to, I figured I could cut out the Spider Houses and maybe a few small things and still get it in.
One new feature of the 3DS version is there are two fishing holes added, one in the swamp and one in Great Bay. Each one has a dozen types of fish, some that only appear under certain circumstances or can only be caught while wearing a particular mask, and “boss” fish, and… I spent a couple hours trying and started to wonder what the point of it all was. As far as I can tell, there’s none. For a while I thought I would come back and give it a try. Then, two months later and still no more interested, but needing the DS to play A Link Between Worlds, I finally gave up on the idea, came back, and left the fishing behind and finished the game. (This is also when I scrapped any plans of a final cycle. It also has me seriously reconsidering if I’m going to bother with fishing when I do Twilight Princess HD.) The worst part is some of the minigames’ rewards changed from 50 rupees to Fishing Hole Passes – theoretically, an equivalent exchange, since admission costs 50 rupees otherwise, but even if I cared about fishing, it’s not like scrounging up the rupees is in any way difficult. (The Takkuri drops 200 rupees, is easy to kill with Fire Arrows, and spawns near a zone transition so it can easily be respawned.)
Minigames already feel a bit out of place in this game – if the moon’s going to crash into Termina, what does it matter if you have a perfect score in all the shooting galleries? (Incidentally, I didn’t hate the shooting galleries as much this time.) Adding fishing – an activity that is 90% waiting around for something to happen – feels really out of place.
Next: Three (and a half?) revamped boss fights, plus one that I never went back and did properly.
Some rewards are rejiggered: Koumé’s archery game awards a bottle, with the heart piece moved to the third night in the graveyard, and two Great Fairies are reversed so Link gets the upgraded magic meter before the upgraded spin attack. Because the Circus Leader’s Mask was only really useful in the N64 version for a prerequisite to earning it (wearing it makes the Gorman Brothers not attack Cremia’s wagon, but it can only be given by Gorman in the Milk Bar), there’s a new quest: wearing it and talking to a drunk Gorman makes him ask Link to go to the Gorman Brothers for a special milk delivery, and Link gets to keep the bottle.
There are two big changes I have mixed feelings about. Zora Link’s default swim speed was slowed down; this means it has greater control (yay!) but going fast requires using the electric field, which drains magic. This basically means that for times where going fast is a requirement (racing the Beaver Brothers), I made sure to have Chateau Romani’s bonus active. The Gyorg trial on the moon was also redesigned to have Link strike a crystal switch and swim to get through the gate it opened in time, also requiring a perfectly-timed jump out of the water. I thought once I finished it maybe I’d hate it even more than the Goron rolling trial, but no, that one is even worse than I remember.
The Inverted Song of Time doesn’t slow things down quite as much; while the only time I felt a time crunch it was self-imposed by continuing to push forward after I met each previous goal for the cycle, there were times I had to start a new cycle that I got through in a single cycle in the N64 version. (I didn’t make it through Snowhead Temple in time to get the Gilded Sword the same cycle, and didn’t have time to round up frogs after completing Great Bay Temple.) I didn’t do a “help as many people as you can” cycle before going to the Moon this time; when I was planning to, I figured I could cut out the Spider Houses and maybe a few small things and still get it in.
One new feature of the 3DS version is there are two fishing holes added, one in the swamp and one in Great Bay. Each one has a dozen types of fish, some that only appear under certain circumstances or can only be caught while wearing a particular mask, and “boss” fish, and… I spent a couple hours trying and started to wonder what the point of it all was. As far as I can tell, there’s none. For a while I thought I would come back and give it a try. Then, two months later and still no more interested, but needing the DS to play A Link Between Worlds, I finally gave up on the idea, came back, and left the fishing behind and finished the game. (This is also when I scrapped any plans of a final cycle. It also has me seriously reconsidering if I’m going to bother with fishing when I do Twilight Princess HD.) The worst part is some of the minigames’ rewards changed from 50 rupees to Fishing Hole Passes – theoretically, an equivalent exchange, since admission costs 50 rupees otherwise, but even if I cared about fishing, it’s not like scrounging up the rupees is in any way difficult. (The Takkuri drops 200 rupees, is easy to kill with Fire Arrows, and spawns near a zone transition so it can easily be respawned.)
Minigames already feel a bit out of place in this game – if the moon’s going to crash into Termina, what does it matter if you have a perfect score in all the shooting galleries? (Incidentally, I didn’t hate the shooting galleries as much this time.) Adding fishing – an activity that is 90% waiting around for something to happen – feels really out of place.
Next: Three (and a half?) revamped boss fights, plus one that I never went back and did properly.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Majora's Mask: The Moon
The final confrontation with the Skull Kid starts more or less the same way the previous one did, with Tael telling Link and Tatl what they need, and the Skull Kid bopping him. When the Skull Kid accelerates the moon’s descent, Link plays the Oath to Order on the ocarina, and the giants come and hold up the moon. In the moment of peace, Tael says it wasn’t really the Skull Kid’s fault, illustrated when Majora’s Mask comes to life, abandons the Skull Kid, possesses the moon, and starts pushing against the giants. Tatl wants Link to reset time again, but Link intends to go through the portal to confront the Mask. Tatl is reluctant to join him, but when Tael says he’ll go instead, she agrees to go with him.
On the moon, there are five kids gathered around a tree, four who wear masks based on the game’s four other bosses. These lead to micro-dungeons for Link to solve. Odolwa’s involves Dekucoptering, Goht’s goron rolling, Gyorg’s zora swimming through tunnels, and Twinmold’s a miniboss gauntlet followed by the only bombchu puzzles in the game. Three of these are easy enough at this point – even iron knuckles buckle when Link charges at them, hacking away with the Great Fairy’s Sword – but goron rolling, yeesh. Each micro-dungeon has a piece of heart, which when all four are earned makes the 20th and final heart container.
The kids all demanded masks from Link, one set to start the game, one afterward. I started out giving out things with low usefulness and sentimental value, like the Mask of Scents that I’m pretty sure I never used, but by the end, all but the three transformation masks had to go. The last kid, the one wearing Majora’s Mask, notices Link’s all out of normal masks, and so to prepare him for their final game, gives him the 24th mask: the Fierce Deity’s Mask. It’s aptly named, because this thing puts Link into god mode. There’s no strategy needed for the final fight: put on the mask, and then Z-target the boss, shoot sword beams at it until it triggers a cutscene, rinse, repeat. Eventually, the boss dies.
The moon turns into a rainbow as the people below watch and cheer, and a new day dawns. Link wakes up to see the giants saying goodbye to the Skull Kid before returning to their homes. The Skull Kid asks if Link will be his friend too, then comes over and smells him, and he recognizes Link – it’s the same Skull Kid Link sold the skull mask to in Ocarina. The mask salesman has Majora’s Mask, so he bids Link farewell. As he walks away, he stops to suggest that Link return to Hyrule. And he stops one more time to say, “But, my, you sure have managed to make quite a number of people happy. The masks you have are filled with happiness. This is truly a good happiness.” Then, after a few more steps, he vanishes. Finally, Tatl says goodbye to Link, and as Link gets on Epona and rides away, she calls after him to say thank you.
As the credits roll, we see scenes from around Termina as the festival starts, which highlight just how much Link has made things better. There are sad scenes, like the Deku who said Link reminded him of his son discovering his son’s remains – that was Link’s Deku form. But overall, things are good: the Gorman troupe and zora band get to entertain at the milk bar (with Zora Link standing in for Mikau one last time), Romani continues to practice her archery, Anju and Kafei are married (we don’t get to see Kafei restored to his adult form, though), and in general life goes on in Termina. As Link passes through a forest on his way out of Termina, he stops when he notices a carving of him with some of the friends he’d made: the giants, Tatl and Tael, and the Skull Kid. The first notes of Saria’s Song play as the game comes to an end.
That was… an odd one. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, because of what made it odd. The sidequests feel almost more important than the main quest; I think the best way I can put it is it’s like if BioWare made a Legend of Zelda game. I loved the people and enjoyed making their lives better. The Anju/Kafei story was excellent, and I enjoyed everything about Romani Ranch, too. Despite one of my few complaints about Ocarina being too many minigames and this game having even more (even with a time limit that should really make such frivolities even more jarring), I didn’t mind so much, aside from four separate archery games. All in all, it’s a solid contender for my favorite game in the series.
On the moon, there are five kids gathered around a tree, four who wear masks based on the game’s four other bosses. These lead to micro-dungeons for Link to solve. Odolwa’s involves Dekucoptering, Goht’s goron rolling, Gyorg’s zora swimming through tunnels, and Twinmold’s a miniboss gauntlet followed by the only bombchu puzzles in the game. Three of these are easy enough at this point – even iron knuckles buckle when Link charges at them, hacking away with the Great Fairy’s Sword – but goron rolling, yeesh. Each micro-dungeon has a piece of heart, which when all four are earned makes the 20th and final heart container.
The kids all demanded masks from Link, one set to start the game, one afterward. I started out giving out things with low usefulness and sentimental value, like the Mask of Scents that I’m pretty sure I never used, but by the end, all but the three transformation masks had to go. The last kid, the one wearing Majora’s Mask, notices Link’s all out of normal masks, and so to prepare him for their final game, gives him the 24th mask: the Fierce Deity’s Mask. It’s aptly named, because this thing puts Link into god mode. There’s no strategy needed for the final fight: put on the mask, and then Z-target the boss, shoot sword beams at it until it triggers a cutscene, rinse, repeat. Eventually, the boss dies.
The moon turns into a rainbow as the people below watch and cheer, and a new day dawns. Link wakes up to see the giants saying goodbye to the Skull Kid before returning to their homes. The Skull Kid asks if Link will be his friend too, then comes over and smells him, and he recognizes Link – it’s the same Skull Kid Link sold the skull mask to in Ocarina. The mask salesman has Majora’s Mask, so he bids Link farewell. As he walks away, he stops to suggest that Link return to Hyrule. And he stops one more time to say, “But, my, you sure have managed to make quite a number of people happy. The masks you have are filled with happiness. This is truly a good happiness.” Then, after a few more steps, he vanishes. Finally, Tatl says goodbye to Link, and as Link gets on Epona and rides away, she calls after him to say thank you.
As the credits roll, we see scenes from around Termina as the festival starts, which highlight just how much Link has made things better. There are sad scenes, like the Deku who said Link reminded him of his son discovering his son’s remains – that was Link’s Deku form. But overall, things are good: the Gorman troupe and zora band get to entertain at the milk bar (with Zora Link standing in for Mikau one last time), Romani continues to practice her archery, Anju and Kafei are married (we don’t get to see Kafei restored to his adult form, though), and in general life goes on in Termina. As Link passes through a forest on his way out of Termina, he stops when he notices a carving of him with some of the friends he’d made: the giants, Tatl and Tael, and the Skull Kid. The first notes of Saria’s Song play as the game comes to an end.
That was… an odd one. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, because of what made it odd. The sidequests feel almost more important than the main quest; I think the best way I can put it is it’s like if BioWare made a Legend of Zelda game. I loved the people and enjoyed making their lives better. The Anju/Kafei story was excellent, and I enjoyed everything about Romani Ranch, too. Despite one of my few complaints about Ocarina being too many minigames and this game having even more (even with a time limit that should really make such frivolities even more jarring), I didn’t mind so much, aside from four separate archery games. All in all, it’s a solid contender for my favorite game in the series.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Majora's Mask: The Last Cycle
Okay, so I’ve started one last cycle. Over the next three days – slowed down with the Inverted Song of Time – I’m going to do as much as I can for the people of Termina. Some basic information here: I’m not going to do anything that requires significant dungeon exploration; sorry, great fairies and frog choir, hopefully Link will make sure to get you on his way out of town, or when the Skull Kid is stopped, the goddess of time will get you guys back together because Link did it once. There’s not enough time to worry about things that don’t really help people, so no random minigames (riding around Romani Ranch popping alien balloons, yes, racing the Gorman Asshats, no). I probably should have chased down Keeta again and freed Flat (I’d tell the Dampé one to go pancake itself even if half the time I’d have for it wouldn’t be spent with Kafei), but that didn’t occur to me until just now, and breaking the curse on Ikana Valley by killing Twinmold probably took care of at least some of it. Oh, and some things are mutually exclusive, so: Sorry, bomb lady, but Sakon needs to steal your stuff so Anju and Kafei can have their happy ever after, and sorry, Mr. Handy, I’ll tell Anju to look after you. And finally, Link did a fair bit of shopping and gathering during downtime between quests, but I’m going to skip over that.
Link started with the zora eggs, sneaking around the pirate fortress to steal them again. The great fairy’s sword is a nice upgrade, even if I do have to use a C button slot which were already rather precious. Link finished that in plenty of time to get back to town to wear the couple’s mask to remind the mayor he has a backbone. Then, because it wasn’t going to be that long before Anju needed to be brought in on the Kafei search, he went out to Romani Ranch, popped balloons to convince Romani he was a worthy partner for “ghost”busting, and used the Bremen Mask to age up the chicks for Grog’s enjoyment. After returning to town to wear Kafei’s mask for Anju, Link finally went back to the coast, where the super picky guy in the fisherman’s hut didn’t like the pirate picture he took, so he had to go back out to the fortress, get another picture that was good enough. The whole thing’s ooky enough as it is; I’d have skipped the whole thing except it’s needed to help the seahorses. Speaking of, the sea snakes got dead, the last zora eggs got recovered, and the seahorse couple got reunited. After dropping the eggs off at the lab to be hatched, Link went to Ikana, saved Sharp’s soul, lifted the curse on Pamela’s father, and brought a potion to Shiro.
It’s a busy night in town. Link starts the trading sequence by getting the Moon’s Tear and trading it to the town scrub, hears Guru-Guru’s confession about stealing the Bremen Mask, teaches Kamaro’s dance to the Rosa Sisters, does the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” sound check for the zora band manager and Gorman, gets a bottle of Chateau Romani, and dropped Anju’s letter in a mailbox. He went out to meet Kamaro, but I forgot he needs to play the Song of Healing for him. There was still time left before he was needed at Romani Ranch, so he went out to the swamp, traded deeds with the scrub there, and brought a potion to Koume. Then it was time to save the ranch from the aliens, and that took up the rest of the first night. He made arrangements to protect Cremia’s milk shipment before leaving the ranch.
Now it’s dungeon time. Link defeated Odolwa, who was even easier with the fairy sword. He brought the Princess back home and secured the monkey’s release. Before taking on Goht, he stopped in the goron village, traded deeds, put the elder’s son to sleep, and got the rock steak and brought it down to the stranded goron. Then he took down Goht, Gyorg, and even Twinmold before coming back to Clock Town just in time to witness the mail delivery to Kafei, get his pendant, and take it to Anju. With a little time to kill before Cremia needed him, Link went back to Ikana to try to help the Poe Sisters, but apparently defeating Twinmold blocks off that quest. Oops.
Cremia was grateful for the help delivering the milk, and without anything else to offer Link, gave him a hug… that had his face pressed right into her chest. Heh. (“You feel all warm and fuzzy! inside [sic]! Sigh… You could get used to this!” Double heh.) After that, there wasn’t much left to do: wrap up the Deku trading sequence; clear out the Fearful Spider House, the Secret Shrine (dawn of the last day broke after two of the minibosses), and the Ocean Spider House; visit Kafei’s hideout to get the letter to Madame Aroma; kill the takkuri one last time, for old times’ sake (and to get to blow it up with light arrows); help Kafei get his mask back; give the letter to the postman; and wait with Anju for Kafei to return. I wasn’t too big on seeing things I’d seen before that would inevitably happen, but Anju and Kafei’s reunion is too good, and I worked too hard to make it happen, to miss.
There are a few things I forgot, and some I skipped, but overall, I think I did pretty well. Now it’s time to save the world.
Next: The weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn.
Link started with the zora eggs, sneaking around the pirate fortress to steal them again. The great fairy’s sword is a nice upgrade, even if I do have to use a C button slot which were already rather precious. Link finished that in plenty of time to get back to town to wear the couple’s mask to remind the mayor he has a backbone. Then, because it wasn’t going to be that long before Anju needed to be brought in on the Kafei search, he went out to Romani Ranch, popped balloons to convince Romani he was a worthy partner for “ghost”busting, and used the Bremen Mask to age up the chicks for Grog’s enjoyment. After returning to town to wear Kafei’s mask for Anju, Link finally went back to the coast, where the super picky guy in the fisherman’s hut didn’t like the pirate picture he took, so he had to go back out to the fortress, get another picture that was good enough. The whole thing’s ooky enough as it is; I’d have skipped the whole thing except it’s needed to help the seahorses. Speaking of, the sea snakes got dead, the last zora eggs got recovered, and the seahorse couple got reunited. After dropping the eggs off at the lab to be hatched, Link went to Ikana, saved Sharp’s soul, lifted the curse on Pamela’s father, and brought a potion to Shiro.
It’s a busy night in town. Link starts the trading sequence by getting the Moon’s Tear and trading it to the town scrub, hears Guru-Guru’s confession about stealing the Bremen Mask, teaches Kamaro’s dance to the Rosa Sisters, does the “Ballad of the Wind Fish” sound check for the zora band manager and Gorman, gets a bottle of Chateau Romani, and dropped Anju’s letter in a mailbox. He went out to meet Kamaro, but I forgot he needs to play the Song of Healing for him. There was still time left before he was needed at Romani Ranch, so he went out to the swamp, traded deeds with the scrub there, and brought a potion to Koume. Then it was time to save the ranch from the aliens, and that took up the rest of the first night. He made arrangements to protect Cremia’s milk shipment before leaving the ranch.
Now it’s dungeon time. Link defeated Odolwa, who was even easier with the fairy sword. He brought the Princess back home and secured the monkey’s release. Before taking on Goht, he stopped in the goron village, traded deeds, put the elder’s son to sleep, and got the rock steak and brought it down to the stranded goron. Then he took down Goht, Gyorg, and even Twinmold before coming back to Clock Town just in time to witness the mail delivery to Kafei, get his pendant, and take it to Anju. With a little time to kill before Cremia needed him, Link went back to Ikana to try to help the Poe Sisters, but apparently defeating Twinmold blocks off that quest. Oops.
Cremia was grateful for the help delivering the milk, and without anything else to offer Link, gave him a hug… that had his face pressed right into her chest. Heh. (“You feel all warm and fuzzy! inside [sic]! Sigh… You could get used to this!” Double heh.) After that, there wasn’t much left to do: wrap up the Deku trading sequence; clear out the Fearful Spider House, the Secret Shrine (dawn of the last day broke after two of the minibosses), and the Ocean Spider House; visit Kafei’s hideout to get the letter to Madame Aroma; kill the takkuri one last time, for old times’ sake (and to get to blow it up with light arrows); help Kafei get his mask back; give the letter to the postman; and wait with Anju for Kafei to return. I wasn’t too big on seeing things I’d seen before that would inevitably happen, but Anju and Kafei’s reunion is too good, and I worked too hard to make it happen, to miss.
There are a few things I forgot, and some I skipped, but overall, I think I did pretty well. Now it’s time to save the world.
Next: The weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn.
Friday, September 7, 2018
Majora's Mask: Stone Tower Temple
My first accomplishment happened at the very start of the cycle: I took the last rupees out of Link’s bank account to stock up on arrows, bombs, and other consumables before Soaring to the top of Stone Tower. There’s no new form for Link this time around, unless you count the Giant’s Mask, found in the dungeon, which makes Link huge so he can fight the boss but can only be used in that one room. Each of the three forms is needed to work the way through the dungeon; Zora Link is needed the least, but that’s okay, after Great Bay Temple I’m happy to let it have a break.
There are a lot of those puzzles using the mirror shield to reflect sunlight onto faces or blocks, and I don’t know what’s changed since Ocarina, but they’ve gotten a lot harder for me. Maybe it’s more need to be precise, maybe the shield’s smaller, maybe I’m just out of practice or don’t remember how hard they really were. They did add a new wrinkle that makes it harder: needing to charge up a mirror with sunlight then reflect the mirror’s emitted light, and that’s not how mirrors work but whatever. Needless to say, I was quite thrilled when I got the light arrows and discovered they were a shortcut to solving those problems.
The light arrows also come up in the dungeon’s signature mechanic: after Link goes through once and gets the light arrows, he has to go outside and hit a mark on the temple to flip it upside-down, then explore it again like that. There are a few rooms inside that have to be flipped multiple times to get through, memorably one with a sliding block that can only go so far on each surface so getting it to its puzzle solved spot is basically “push block, flip room, push block, flip room…,” ending with two more flips to make it onto the platform to leave.
There are a lot of minibosses here. First is a leader of the Garo ninjas, who fights with flaming swords and doesn’t leave himself open to counterattacks when blocked. I found it easiest not to Z-target him, just roll out of the way and thwack him when I had an opening. Eyegores return to the series, now with laser beams, so the strategy is to block those, then shoot the eye when it’s vulnerable – kind of like Hyrule Warriors’ interpretation of gohmas. There’s yet another wizzrobe fight here. And finally, Gomess, whose weak spot is protected by bats. They flee if he’s hit with a light arrow, leaving the weak spot vulnerable.
If Link wants to get all the stray fairies, he’s got to flip the dungeon two more times. Once to collect all the ones from chests he spawned while upside-down that can only be gotten rightside-up, and then one more time to be able to get into the boss room. These forced exits gave me a chance to Soar back to Clock Town and buy Chateau Romani so I didn’t have to worry about magic when using light arrows (or later, the giant’s mask), and between finishing fairy collection and fighting the boss, down to Ikana Canyon to get the final fairy reward, the Great Fairy’s Sword. All this was nearly rendered moot for me by one of the fairies, which requires some very precise goron rolling to get from one button to another before fires surround the second button again.
The boss of the temple is Twinmold, giant masked insect. It’s a pair of giant… well, the name makes me think moldorms, but everything about the design echoes A Link to the Past’s lanmolas. I noted back during The Legend of Zelda that it seemed the moldorms and lanmolas in that game were backward, given A Link to the Past’s boss monsters; now it seems like they have two wormy monsters and just randomly assign names. I even like the name “Twinmola” a little better. As for the actual fight, Link puts on the giant’s mask and hacks away until they die, and this seems to be the intended way for the fight to flow. They didn’t even seem to acknowledge the big guy killing them. It’s a weird, easy fight.
The four giants, now freed, agree to come to Link and Tatl’s aid to stop the Skull Kid. They express some reluctance to do so, and send Link and Tatl back to the world with a parting message, “Forgive your friend.” Defeating Twinmold also lifts the curse on Ikana Canyon, so there are no more gibdos around the music box house.
There’s one last thing to do before resetting time. Back down in the river with the octoroks that make convenient ice cubes, there’s a Secret Shrine behind a waterfall where Link can fight minibosses from each of the four dungeons. Dinolfos are easy, dying in one hit to the Great Fairy’s Sword. The challenge with the wizzrobe is there’s no minimap to track him on. Wart, I’ve decided that the easiest way to fight is to just wade in swinging the sword until it dies. It’s amazing how effective that strategy is against a lot of things. Finally, I continue to refine tactics against the Garo Master. With all four dead, Link is awarded a heart piece.
I’m now ready to go to the final confrontation, but time travel and quests resetting means all those people I’ve helped need helping again. I would bet there’s some kind of magical merging of all the best outcomes, even mutually exclusive ones (although it shouldn’t be that hard to stop Sakon from robbing the bomb lady and then tell Kafei where his hideout is thanks to the magic of time travel; on the other hand, it requires saying something so, yeah, it's beyond Link's ability), but I want to do as much of it myself as I can.
Next: A very busy three days.
There are a lot of those puzzles using the mirror shield to reflect sunlight onto faces or blocks, and I don’t know what’s changed since Ocarina, but they’ve gotten a lot harder for me. Maybe it’s more need to be precise, maybe the shield’s smaller, maybe I’m just out of practice or don’t remember how hard they really were. They did add a new wrinkle that makes it harder: needing to charge up a mirror with sunlight then reflect the mirror’s emitted light, and that’s not how mirrors work but whatever. Needless to say, I was quite thrilled when I got the light arrows and discovered they were a shortcut to solving those problems.
The light arrows also come up in the dungeon’s signature mechanic: after Link goes through once and gets the light arrows, he has to go outside and hit a mark on the temple to flip it upside-down, then explore it again like that. There are a few rooms inside that have to be flipped multiple times to get through, memorably one with a sliding block that can only go so far on each surface so getting it to its puzzle solved spot is basically “push block, flip room, push block, flip room…,” ending with two more flips to make it onto the platform to leave.
There are a lot of minibosses here. First is a leader of the Garo ninjas, who fights with flaming swords and doesn’t leave himself open to counterattacks when blocked. I found it easiest not to Z-target him, just roll out of the way and thwack him when I had an opening. Eyegores return to the series, now with laser beams, so the strategy is to block those, then shoot the eye when it’s vulnerable – kind of like Hyrule Warriors’ interpretation of gohmas. There’s yet another wizzrobe fight here. And finally, Gomess, whose weak spot is protected by bats. They flee if he’s hit with a light arrow, leaving the weak spot vulnerable.
If Link wants to get all the stray fairies, he’s got to flip the dungeon two more times. Once to collect all the ones from chests he spawned while upside-down that can only be gotten rightside-up, and then one more time to be able to get into the boss room. These forced exits gave me a chance to Soar back to Clock Town and buy Chateau Romani so I didn’t have to worry about magic when using light arrows (or later, the giant’s mask), and between finishing fairy collection and fighting the boss, down to Ikana Canyon to get the final fairy reward, the Great Fairy’s Sword. All this was nearly rendered moot for me by one of the fairies, which requires some very precise goron rolling to get from one button to another before fires surround the second button again.
The boss of the temple is Twinmold, giant masked insect. It’s a pair of giant… well, the name makes me think moldorms, but everything about the design echoes A Link to the Past’s lanmolas. I noted back during The Legend of Zelda that it seemed the moldorms and lanmolas in that game were backward, given A Link to the Past’s boss monsters; now it seems like they have two wormy monsters and just randomly assign names. I even like the name “Twinmola” a little better. As for the actual fight, Link puts on the giant’s mask and hacks away until they die, and this seems to be the intended way for the fight to flow. They didn’t even seem to acknowledge the big guy killing them. It’s a weird, easy fight.
The four giants, now freed, agree to come to Link and Tatl’s aid to stop the Skull Kid. They express some reluctance to do so, and send Link and Tatl back to the world with a parting message, “Forgive your friend.” Defeating Twinmold also lifts the curse on Ikana Canyon, so there are no more gibdos around the music box house.
There’s one last thing to do before resetting time. Back down in the river with the octoroks that make convenient ice cubes, there’s a Secret Shrine behind a waterfall where Link can fight minibosses from each of the four dungeons. Dinolfos are easy, dying in one hit to the Great Fairy’s Sword. The challenge with the wizzrobe is there’s no minimap to track him on. Wart, I’ve decided that the easiest way to fight is to just wade in swinging the sword until it dies. It’s amazing how effective that strategy is against a lot of things. Finally, I continue to refine tactics against the Garo Master. With all four dead, Link is awarded a heart piece.
I’m now ready to go to the final confrontation, but time travel and quests resetting means all those people I’ve helped need helping again. I would bet there’s some kind of magical merging of all the best outcomes, even mutually exclusive ones (although it shouldn’t be that hard to stop Sakon from robbing the bomb lady and then tell Kafei where his hideout is thanks to the magic of time travel; on the other hand, it requires saying something so, yeah, it's beyond Link's ability), but I want to do as much of it myself as I can.
Next: A very busy three days.
Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Majora's Mask: Ikana Canyon
As Link works his way through the canyon, Tatl will sometimes feel uneasy, sensing a nearby Garo ninja. If Link puts on the Deku Mask, the ninja will attack him, and leave a hint about the surrounding area. I probably did this more than I should have; getting to the next dungeon requires a lot of work and I didn’t think to have the Inverted Song of Time running from the start. On the other hand, some of those tips were lifesavers.
The main part of Ikana Canyon has a house surrounded by gibdos, a castle whose entrance proclaims it can’t be breached, a dry river bed leading to a cave, and the entrances to the fairy fountain and the next area. In the cave, Link finds Sharp, who begins playing a song whose music harms Link. Link fulfills Flat’s request and plays the Song of Storms, easing Sharp’s pain and refilling the river. The river turns a wheel at the house, which causes the pipes on top to begin playing a cheerful carousel music piece that causes the gibdos to turn to dust.
As Link approaches the house, a girl sees him and locks herself inside and refuses to talk to him. Link waits for her to leave again, and sneaks in once she’s gone. In the basement, he finds the girl’s father, who’s about half turned into a gibdo himself. Link plays the Song of Healing for him, breaking the curse, leading to a nice scene between father and daughter. As they hug, Link takes the gibdo mask left behind by curing the man, and heads out for the next objective.
At the top of the canyon is a well Link can go down. Inside is a maze filled with gibdos who want various items. Most of them can be found somewhere in the well, but two have to be brought in: a blue potion to go north, or five magic beans to go east. There’s actually a fairy fountain down here, although given how annoying it is to get to, I’ll stick with gathering the fairies near owl statues. The prize down here is the mirror shield, which has been significantly redesigned from Ocarina of Time to have a rather unhappy-looking face that gets projected on the wall when it reflects sunlight. The sunlight trick is needed to escape the well, into Ikana Castle’s courtyard.
Just inside Ikana Castle is a group of ReDeads. One of the Garo ninjas said they used to be a dance troupe, and if Link wears the gibdo mask around them, they dance harmlessly rather than screaming and hugging the life out of him. There are two paths, north and south. The north path is all pathing puzzles for Deku Link. When he gets on the roof, there’s a heart piece he can grab with some quick Dekucoptering, and a switch to step on to help on the southern path. The southern path is more combat-intensive, with the return of floormasters and another wizzrobe fight.
A powder keg is needed to shine the light in the main room to allow Link to open the way to the final boss fight against the late King of Ikana. The king closes the blinds and sends his guards to fight Link; Link burns the blinds away with a fire arrow, stuns the guards with his sword, and shines the light on them to destroy them. Then the king comes down, and it’s pretty much the same except he hits harder and takes more hits to stun. After Link wins, the guards start squabbling over whose fault their defeat was, but the king is glad to be free, and teaches Link the Elegy of Emptiness, the last song, which he’ll need to enter the dungeon in the area and fully break the curse on Ikana. The song lets Link leave a creepy statue of himself behind, and he can apparently use it in each of his transformed forms to leave up to four statues.
With the Elegy of Emptiness, Link is ready to begin his ascent of Stone Tower. There are falling rocks to avoid and beamos to avoid and blow up, and the main feature is zipping around with the hookshot and stepping on buttons to move blocks to create a path across the pit. The switches require Link’s weight to stay down, so he has to use the Elegy of Emptiness to put a goron, zora, and human statue on each set. (Deku Link is too light to press buttons, and so is its statue.) After two puzzles, Link reaches the top of the tower where there’s an owl statue and one last button/statue/block puzzle. After figuring out the button configuration and jumping across the blocks to make sure I know what to do when I tackle the dungeon for real, Link played the Song of Time.
Next: The world turns upside-down.
The main part of Ikana Canyon has a house surrounded by gibdos, a castle whose entrance proclaims it can’t be breached, a dry river bed leading to a cave, and the entrances to the fairy fountain and the next area. In the cave, Link finds Sharp, who begins playing a song whose music harms Link. Link fulfills Flat’s request and plays the Song of Storms, easing Sharp’s pain and refilling the river. The river turns a wheel at the house, which causes the pipes on top to begin playing a cheerful carousel music piece that causes the gibdos to turn to dust.
As Link approaches the house, a girl sees him and locks herself inside and refuses to talk to him. Link waits for her to leave again, and sneaks in once she’s gone. In the basement, he finds the girl’s father, who’s about half turned into a gibdo himself. Link plays the Song of Healing for him, breaking the curse, leading to a nice scene between father and daughter. As they hug, Link takes the gibdo mask left behind by curing the man, and heads out for the next objective.
At the top of the canyon is a well Link can go down. Inside is a maze filled with gibdos who want various items. Most of them can be found somewhere in the well, but two have to be brought in: a blue potion to go north, or five magic beans to go east. There’s actually a fairy fountain down here, although given how annoying it is to get to, I’ll stick with gathering the fairies near owl statues. The prize down here is the mirror shield, which has been significantly redesigned from Ocarina of Time to have a rather unhappy-looking face that gets projected on the wall when it reflects sunlight. The sunlight trick is needed to escape the well, into Ikana Castle’s courtyard.
Just inside Ikana Castle is a group of ReDeads. One of the Garo ninjas said they used to be a dance troupe, and if Link wears the gibdo mask around them, they dance harmlessly rather than screaming and hugging the life out of him. There are two paths, north and south. The north path is all pathing puzzles for Deku Link. When he gets on the roof, there’s a heart piece he can grab with some quick Dekucoptering, and a switch to step on to help on the southern path. The southern path is more combat-intensive, with the return of floormasters and another wizzrobe fight.
A powder keg is needed to shine the light in the main room to allow Link to open the way to the final boss fight against the late King of Ikana. The king closes the blinds and sends his guards to fight Link; Link burns the blinds away with a fire arrow, stuns the guards with his sword, and shines the light on them to destroy them. Then the king comes down, and it’s pretty much the same except he hits harder and takes more hits to stun. After Link wins, the guards start squabbling over whose fault their defeat was, but the king is glad to be free, and teaches Link the Elegy of Emptiness, the last song, which he’ll need to enter the dungeon in the area and fully break the curse on Ikana. The song lets Link leave a creepy statue of himself behind, and he can apparently use it in each of his transformed forms to leave up to four statues.
With the Elegy of Emptiness, Link is ready to begin his ascent of Stone Tower. There are falling rocks to avoid and beamos to avoid and blow up, and the main feature is zipping around with the hookshot and stepping on buttons to move blocks to create a path across the pit. The switches require Link’s weight to stay down, so he has to use the Elegy of Emptiness to put a goron, zora, and human statue on each set. (Deku Link is too light to press buttons, and so is its statue.) After two puzzles, Link reaches the top of the tower where there’s an owl statue and one last button/statue/block puzzle. After figuring out the button configuration and jumping across the blocks to make sure I know what to do when I tackle the dungeon for real, Link played the Song of Time.
Next: The world turns upside-down.
Monday, September 3, 2018
Majora's Mask: Anju and Kafei
The game’s centerpiece sidequest involves a pair of lovers, one of whom has gone missing days before their scheduled wedding. There are events spread over all three days, ending shortly before moonfall. It’s possible – easy, even – to block off completing the event chain by helping someone else in the Bombers’ Notebook (the woman from the bomb shop; the thief who steals the bomb bags won’t show up for a needed appointment if he’s stopped). There’s a branch late in the sequence, and both versions need to be completed to get all the rewards. I’ve seen bits and pieces of this story, but haven’t been able to put it all together.
Until now.
Link can find Madam Aroma, the mayor’s wife, in her room preparing for a meeting with Gorman to inform him that their performance at the festival is off because of the situation with Lulu’s voice. Aroma mistakes Link for an expert she hired to find her son, Kafei, who’s missing with just days left before his scheduled wedding, and gives him a mask that resembles Kafei to help in his search. Kafei’s fiancée, Anju, is the innkeeper at the Stock Pot Inn. Early that afternoon, the postman delivers a letter to her from Kafei, but won’t say where he got it. While she’s still verklempt, Link can check into the hotel, stealing another person’s reservation due to having the same name. He can also talk to her with the Kafei mask, and she’ll say she has an idea, and asks Link to come back at 11:30.
There’s lots of time before then, so Link calls Epona to try to explore the canyon a little more. As Epona reaches the tall cliff, a man (the poe collector from Ocarina) calls down that the canyon is populated by regretful spirits, and Link needs a mask from the ranch before he can enter. Link puts on the Garo mask he got from the Gorman Brothers, and the man acknowledges it’s the right mask and summons a tree to the clifftop so Link can hookshot up. Inside the canyon, Link meets with the bomb thief, who takes an interest in Link’s sword. If Link foolishly offers to let him see the sword, Tatl drives the thief away, saving Link from his own bad decisions. There’s also a business scrub here. Link can cross the river by freezing a pair of octoroks, and can hookshot up trees to find an owl statue waiting atop a cliff, so Epona doesn’t need to be ridden through creepy roads anymore.
At their arranged meeting, Anju gives Link a letter for Kafei, since the postman knows where he is. Link puts the letter in a mailbox, and waits until the postman collects the mail in the morning, then follows him around the city for the better part of the day. Finally, the postman goes to the laundry pool and delivers the letter to a boy. Link can follow the boy into his hiding spot, the curiosity shop’s back room; the boy recognizes him from the description in Anju’s letter, and after confirming that Link can keep a secret, reveals that he’s Kafei. Kafei was transformed into a child by the Skull Kid, but that’s not why he’s hiding. He had a mask for the wedding, but it was stolen, and he doesn’t want to face Anju without the mask. He’s watching the curiosity shop until the thief tries to fence something there, and will follow him back to his hideout, get the mask, and return to Anju. As a token of his promise, he gives a pendant to Link to give to Anju.
Anju’s grateful for the message, and later that night when her family is planning to flee the city to Romani Ranch in hopes it’ll be safe from the moon, she doesn’t want to go. Also that night, Link can watch the thief sell the bomb bags; the curiosity shop man has all the power in the conversation and knows it, buying the whole shipment for less than Link paid for a single bag.
There’s lots of time to kill before the last few stages of this quest start, so Link can get a couple pieces of heart now. First, help the business scrubs move to new homes, and jump from the flower of the one in the canyon to get one last piece of heart. Also in the canyon, the guy from the cliff is in a house with four poes with lingering regrets. If Link can defeat them all in three minutes, he’ll get a piece of heart. First one of the poes attack, then two at the same time, and then the last has illusory doubles that surround Link. (It’s the Poe Sisters from Ocarina’s Forest Temple.) After Link is successful, the man says their spirits have been healed, and so has his.
The next phase of the quest begins when Link finds the curiosity shop man in the backroom the next afternoon. He says Kafei’s gone to Ikana Canyon to go after Sakon (the thief), and gives Link two things: Kafei’s Keaton mask, and a letter from Kafei to his mother. Link finds Kafei watching Sakon’s hideout, and at dusk, Sakon goes in and Kafei and Link follow. Kafei tries to pick up his mask, triggering a trap instead, and he and Link scramble to save the mask from being destroyed. Link returns to town and gives the letter to the postman. He follows the postman to the milk bar. When the postman comes out, he’s been relieved of duty so he can flee the city, so he gives his hat to Link before leaving.
Finally, an hour and a half before moonfall, Kafei returns to Anju with the mask. Tatl giggles at the age mismatch, but after everything that went into getting them back together, it’s a beautiful reunion. They give Link a couple’s mask and tell him that they’re going to stay together to meet whatever fate awaits them. Link’s not ready for the world to end, so he Groundhog Days it.
There are a few last things to wrap up. The mayor has a daily meeting that devolves into chaos and he can’t find the strength to take control unless Link comes in wearing the couple’s mask. He thanks Link with a heart piece. If Link wears the Keaton Mask and cuts one of the patches of grass that runs away after being cut, an actual keaton comes to him and asks questions about the world, with a heart piece as the reward for correct answers. Wearing the postman’s hat, Link can find a heart piece in a mailbox. And finally, after running most of the Anju/Kafei quest, Link can deliver Kafei’s letter directly to Madame Aroma, who gives him a bottle of Chateau Romani. Since this is it for the cycle, the bottle’s more valuable than the milk, but she doesn’t need to know that.
Saving the world may be the big thing, but it’s usually the smaller things that stick with me, and I doubt this will be any different. Even if moonfall happens, Link’s brought Anju and Kafei together so they can be happy in their final moments, and of course when he does finally save the world, they’ll have a full life together. So let’s get back to that.
Next: The land of the dead.
Until now.
Link can find Madam Aroma, the mayor’s wife, in her room preparing for a meeting with Gorman to inform him that their performance at the festival is off because of the situation with Lulu’s voice. Aroma mistakes Link for an expert she hired to find her son, Kafei, who’s missing with just days left before his scheduled wedding, and gives him a mask that resembles Kafei to help in his search. Kafei’s fiancée, Anju, is the innkeeper at the Stock Pot Inn. Early that afternoon, the postman delivers a letter to her from Kafei, but won’t say where he got it. While she’s still verklempt, Link can check into the hotel, stealing another person’s reservation due to having the same name. He can also talk to her with the Kafei mask, and she’ll say she has an idea, and asks Link to come back at 11:30.
There’s lots of time before then, so Link calls Epona to try to explore the canyon a little more. As Epona reaches the tall cliff, a man (the poe collector from Ocarina) calls down that the canyon is populated by regretful spirits, and Link needs a mask from the ranch before he can enter. Link puts on the Garo mask he got from the Gorman Brothers, and the man acknowledges it’s the right mask and summons a tree to the clifftop so Link can hookshot up. Inside the canyon, Link meets with the bomb thief, who takes an interest in Link’s sword. If Link foolishly offers to let him see the sword, Tatl drives the thief away, saving Link from his own bad decisions. There’s also a business scrub here. Link can cross the river by freezing a pair of octoroks, and can hookshot up trees to find an owl statue waiting atop a cliff, so Epona doesn’t need to be ridden through creepy roads anymore.
At their arranged meeting, Anju gives Link a letter for Kafei, since the postman knows where he is. Link puts the letter in a mailbox, and waits until the postman collects the mail in the morning, then follows him around the city for the better part of the day. Finally, the postman goes to the laundry pool and delivers the letter to a boy. Link can follow the boy into his hiding spot, the curiosity shop’s back room; the boy recognizes him from the description in Anju’s letter, and after confirming that Link can keep a secret, reveals that he’s Kafei. Kafei was transformed into a child by the Skull Kid, but that’s not why he’s hiding. He had a mask for the wedding, but it was stolen, and he doesn’t want to face Anju without the mask. He’s watching the curiosity shop until the thief tries to fence something there, and will follow him back to his hideout, get the mask, and return to Anju. As a token of his promise, he gives a pendant to Link to give to Anju.
Anju’s grateful for the message, and later that night when her family is planning to flee the city to Romani Ranch in hopes it’ll be safe from the moon, she doesn’t want to go. Also that night, Link can watch the thief sell the bomb bags; the curiosity shop man has all the power in the conversation and knows it, buying the whole shipment for less than Link paid for a single bag.
There’s lots of time to kill before the last few stages of this quest start, so Link can get a couple pieces of heart now. First, help the business scrubs move to new homes, and jump from the flower of the one in the canyon to get one last piece of heart. Also in the canyon, the guy from the cliff is in a house with four poes with lingering regrets. If Link can defeat them all in three minutes, he’ll get a piece of heart. First one of the poes attack, then two at the same time, and then the last has illusory doubles that surround Link. (It’s the Poe Sisters from Ocarina’s Forest Temple.) After Link is successful, the man says their spirits have been healed, and so has his.
The next phase of the quest begins when Link finds the curiosity shop man in the backroom the next afternoon. He says Kafei’s gone to Ikana Canyon to go after Sakon (the thief), and gives Link two things: Kafei’s Keaton mask, and a letter from Kafei to his mother. Link finds Kafei watching Sakon’s hideout, and at dusk, Sakon goes in and Kafei and Link follow. Kafei tries to pick up his mask, triggering a trap instead, and he and Link scramble to save the mask from being destroyed. Link returns to town and gives the letter to the postman. He follows the postman to the milk bar. When the postman comes out, he’s been relieved of duty so he can flee the city, so he gives his hat to Link before leaving.
Finally, an hour and a half before moonfall, Kafei returns to Anju with the mask. Tatl giggles at the age mismatch, but after everything that went into getting them back together, it’s a beautiful reunion. They give Link a couple’s mask and tell him that they’re going to stay together to meet whatever fate awaits them. Link’s not ready for the world to end, so he Groundhog Days it.
There are a few last things to wrap up. The mayor has a daily meeting that devolves into chaos and he can’t find the strength to take control unless Link comes in wearing the couple’s mask. He thanks Link with a heart piece. If Link wears the Keaton Mask and cuts one of the patches of grass that runs away after being cut, an actual keaton comes to him and asks questions about the world, with a heart piece as the reward for correct answers. Wearing the postman’s hat, Link can find a heart piece in a mailbox. And finally, after running most of the Anju/Kafei quest, Link can deliver Kafei’s letter directly to Madame Aroma, who gives him a bottle of Chateau Romani. Since this is it for the cycle, the bottle’s more valuable than the milk, but she doesn’t need to know that.
Saving the world may be the big thing, but it’s usually the smaller things that stick with me, and I doubt this will be any different. Even if moonfall happens, Link’s brought Anju and Kafei together so they can be happy in their final moments, and of course when he does finally save the world, they’ll have a full life together. So let’s get back to that.
Next: The land of the dead.
Friday, August 31, 2018
Majora's Mask: Great Bay Temple
This game doesn’t have the small fairy fountains that Ocarina did, but I’ve found that the owl statues always have a fairy in a nearby pot or bush for Link to grab, along with arrows, bombs, and a magic refill. It’s a quick way to restock on some of the most important consumables, so of course I figure this out now that I’m trying to empty Link’s bank account and buying arrows and bombs and such in town is a nice way to spend money. Anyway, Link restocks, calls the turtle, and hookshots onto its back. During the turtle ride, the Gerudo pirates make their own attempt at approaching the temple, only to get swept up and blown away by the tornado swirling around it. The turtle safely delivers Link, who cutely waves goodbye as he prepares to head into the temple. (He does the same wave as the great fairies go back into their fountains.)
The Great Bay Temple has none of the things that annoyed me about Ocarina’s Water Temple, and yet it manages to be just as frustrating an experience. I wonder if part of the reason I hated putting on/taking off the iron boots so much is that I wasn’t used to it, having only gotten the iron boots in the minidungeon immediately before the Water Temple; by now swapping out masks is close to second nature. The biggest frustration for me here was the main room with the swirling currents; it could be serious chore to get into the right gateway, and the only thing to do if Link went in the wrong one is work the way through the next several rooms against respawning enemies. Like I said, without the beavers’ swimming challenge actually teaching me the swimming controls, I don’t know that I could have done this. As it is, the first two dungeons I’m pretty sure I could have completed in a normal cycle without the Inverted Song of Time (maybe not in time to get my sword reforged twice), but this one might have gotten pretty dicey.
A lot of that time was spent fighting the first miniboss, Wart. Wart’s a boss in the tradition of patras or Arrghus or Barinade: a central eye surrounded by like a hundred blobs of goo. As such, the idea seems to be to knock the blobs of goo off of it and kill them to reveal the core eye, and I tried it patiently with fire arrows, but like Odolwa it was taking too long so I had Link go in with nothing but nothing but his sword and his lack of caring if there’s a better way. This went pretty quickly, and kicked off phase two, in which Wart zooms around the arena ramming into Link. This was also hard, because it didn’t leave just a whole lot of time to get an arrow shot lined up. This was probably the fight where I took the most damage thus far, even worse than the iron knuckles in the graveyard.
The treasure in the dungeon is the ice arrows, which actually have a use in this game. They can freeze enemies to use as platforms, or when there’s no enemies to freeze, freeze patches of water. They’re also needed against the second miniboss, gekko, who summons a blob of ooze that he tries to smash onto Link but breaks apart if frozen, leaving the gekko vulnerable. The gekko turns into a frog when defeated, and now it’s time to start rounding them up. Link speaks to it wearing Don Gero’s mask, and it promises to return to the mountains come spring.
Halfway through the dungeon, Link needs to reverse the current in the central room by changing which pipes are spinning a giant water wheel, and this leads to the final boss, Gyorg, a gargantuan masked fish. This is kind of an underwhelming fight. He’s dangerous, no doubt, doing big damage when he catches Link before he can get back onto the central platform and his jumps make it hard to stay on that platform if Link’s near the edge (which he needs to be, to shoot Gyorg). But the routine is simple: stand on the platform, shoot Gyorg with an arrow, put on the Zora mask, float down to the bottom, shock him, get out of the water before Link gets eaten. I had more trouble with hitting the wrong button (usually rolling into the water rather than shooting an arrow, which is decidedly Not Ideal) than anything Gyorg did.
Link and Tatl get to meet with the giants again, and Tatl’s demanding that they help. Their response is “Save our friend,” which Tatl takes to mean save the fourth from the canyon dungeon. For rounding up stray fairies, the great fairy in the bay area awards Link with halved damage. Lulu’s voice is back, so the zora band is back on for the Clock Town festival performance, and Link gets to join in as they rehearse the song the bandleader stole from Mikau, Link, and one of the bandmates.
With the pirates’ presence reduced and the waters cleaned up, the fisherman has set up a jumping game that requires riding an automatic boat and hookshotting off to a group of islands. This is a fun and easy game: five islands in an X shape, with torches on the outer islands, and Link has to jump to the island with the lit torch and back. I do wish if the camera were fixed in an odd place, it would be one where I could see all four torches at once. Getting 20 earns a heart piece.
There are four other frogs: one already in the gathering place, one in the swamp, one in Clock Town’s laundry pool, and one left behind after defeating a gekko in Woodfall Temple. Once Link defeats Goht to bring spring back to the mountains, he’s greeted by the reunited frog choir, and thankfully doesn’t have to do anything else after having to visit three different dungeons to get them back together. For his help, he gets a heart piece. While the mountains are thawed, Link can also get a heart piece in the water surrounding the islands leading into Goron Village.
Next: Finishing the Bombers’ Notebook.
The Great Bay Temple has none of the things that annoyed me about Ocarina’s Water Temple, and yet it manages to be just as frustrating an experience. I wonder if part of the reason I hated putting on/taking off the iron boots so much is that I wasn’t used to it, having only gotten the iron boots in the minidungeon immediately before the Water Temple; by now swapping out masks is close to second nature. The biggest frustration for me here was the main room with the swirling currents; it could be serious chore to get into the right gateway, and the only thing to do if Link went in the wrong one is work the way through the next several rooms against respawning enemies. Like I said, without the beavers’ swimming challenge actually teaching me the swimming controls, I don’t know that I could have done this. As it is, the first two dungeons I’m pretty sure I could have completed in a normal cycle without the Inverted Song of Time (maybe not in time to get my sword reforged twice), but this one might have gotten pretty dicey.
A lot of that time was spent fighting the first miniboss, Wart. Wart’s a boss in the tradition of patras or Arrghus or Barinade: a central eye surrounded by like a hundred blobs of goo. As such, the idea seems to be to knock the blobs of goo off of it and kill them to reveal the core eye, and I tried it patiently with fire arrows, but like Odolwa it was taking too long so I had Link go in with nothing but nothing but his sword and his lack of caring if there’s a better way. This went pretty quickly, and kicked off phase two, in which Wart zooms around the arena ramming into Link. This was also hard, because it didn’t leave just a whole lot of time to get an arrow shot lined up. This was probably the fight where I took the most damage thus far, even worse than the iron knuckles in the graveyard.
The treasure in the dungeon is the ice arrows, which actually have a use in this game. They can freeze enemies to use as platforms, or when there’s no enemies to freeze, freeze patches of water. They’re also needed against the second miniboss, gekko, who summons a blob of ooze that he tries to smash onto Link but breaks apart if frozen, leaving the gekko vulnerable. The gekko turns into a frog when defeated, and now it’s time to start rounding them up. Link speaks to it wearing Don Gero’s mask, and it promises to return to the mountains come spring.
Halfway through the dungeon, Link needs to reverse the current in the central room by changing which pipes are spinning a giant water wheel, and this leads to the final boss, Gyorg, a gargantuan masked fish. This is kind of an underwhelming fight. He’s dangerous, no doubt, doing big damage when he catches Link before he can get back onto the central platform and his jumps make it hard to stay on that platform if Link’s near the edge (which he needs to be, to shoot Gyorg). But the routine is simple: stand on the platform, shoot Gyorg with an arrow, put on the Zora mask, float down to the bottom, shock him, get out of the water before Link gets eaten. I had more trouble with hitting the wrong button (usually rolling into the water rather than shooting an arrow, which is decidedly Not Ideal) than anything Gyorg did.
Link and Tatl get to meet with the giants again, and Tatl’s demanding that they help. Their response is “Save our friend,” which Tatl takes to mean save the fourth from the canyon dungeon. For rounding up stray fairies, the great fairy in the bay area awards Link with halved damage. Lulu’s voice is back, so the zora band is back on for the Clock Town festival performance, and Link gets to join in as they rehearse the song the bandleader stole from Mikau, Link, and one of the bandmates.
With the pirates’ presence reduced and the waters cleaned up, the fisherman has set up a jumping game that requires riding an automatic boat and hookshotting off to a group of islands. This is a fun and easy game: five islands in an X shape, with torches on the outer islands, and Link has to jump to the island with the lit torch and back. I do wish if the camera were fixed in an odd place, it would be one where I could see all four torches at once. Getting 20 earns a heart piece.
There are four other frogs: one already in the gathering place, one in the swamp, one in Clock Town’s laundry pool, and one left behind after defeating a gekko in Woodfall Temple. Once Link defeats Goht to bring spring back to the mountains, he’s greeted by the reunited frog choir, and thankfully doesn’t have to do anything else after having to visit three different dungeons to get them back together. For his help, he gets a heart piece. While the mountains are thawed, Link can also get a heart piece in the water surrounding the islands leading into Goron Village.
Next: Finishing the Bombers’ Notebook.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Majora's Mask: Heart Piece Collection
The scarecrow in the astronomy tower has a counterpart in the town’s trading post. In addition to teaching Link tricks he can do with the Song of Time, they respond if Link shows his ocarina and encourage him to play a melody for them. I chose one of the unused songs from Ocarina, Saria’s Song (extended by two notes), and the scarecrow promised to show up if Link played the melody. There are two useful places I found to play it: one on the road to Snowhead, which also takes the Lens of Truth to get, and one near where the pirates’ fortress is, which also requires riding a magic bean plant (which can be grown quickly with the Song of Storms). There’s heart pieces in it for both.
On the way to the beach is a boulder that can be exploded to reveal a hole. In the hole is a pond, and by sinking to the bottom, Link can get another heart piece here.
There are two aquaria in the lab, one to hatch zora eggs and the other with a couple big fish that Tatl notes look hungry. (I didn’t notice the egg aquarium at first, so I spent a bunch of time trying to drop the eggs in to get eaten. Fortunately, it wouldn’t let me, and my frustration eventually led me to the right place.) The hungry fish want Link to bottle fish and drop them in for him. After four, they reward him with another heart piece.
The next stop is Zora Cape, where a couple zoras have set up a pot-breaking game, as if Link needs the incentive. Actually, this one has a bit of a disincentive, threatening to fine people who recklessly break the pots. In other words, it costs 10 rupees to play, but that’s taken after the game is played, not before, so if you come to this broke (or go broke trying to win), there’s no punishment for failure. The pots are set up in a W shape, and there’s a spot and throwing angle where if Zora Link throws at the center pot with the double boomerangs, they’ll smash the other four pots in their return arc. The setup allows for small-scale corrections to Link’s starting position/angle. The reward for this is 100 rupees, minus the pot replacement charge – for the one good throw only; he doesn’t remember all the other times. If I still needed rupees for the bank, this would be the way to make them now.
The last point of interest for this collection is the waterfall at the end of the cape. Under the waterfall is a like like that drops a heart piece when killed. Above the waterfall are a series of ledges with single trees on, which means Link needs to find the lowest one and make his ascent with the hookshot. Finally, he enters a cave and finds a beaver, who doesn’t want to talk to Link. Link presses the issue by putting on the Zora Mask and pursuing the beaver underwater.
The beaver knows Link’s after a bottle, and promises one if Link can beat his swimming challenge. Said challenge involves following the beaver through a river and passing through all of the rings, in order. This gave me fits at first, because I hadn’t gotten a grip on the swimming controls, so if I moved fast enough to make it to the end of the course, I didn’t have enough control to pass through the rings, and if I took my time on the rings, I didn’t have enough to make it through all of them. It was a happy accident that let me stumble on the fact that if I held down the swim button, Link would continually be in swim mode and could be guided with the control stick. So I’m really glad for this minigame, because not knowing how to swim would probably have made the next dungeon miserable [1]. Once Link beat it, the beaver summoned his older brother for help. The brother also challenges Link, and his race has more rings and a trickier path. Once that’s done, the beavers give Link the promised bottle. Link can challenge them again, and after making it through both courses with a stricter time limit, gets a heart piece.
If Link stops the thief from stealing the bomb bags on the first night, the Curiosity Shop owner has a mask on the third night that won’t let the wearer fall asleep. It was apparently used as a torture device, but Link has a different use for it. He starts a new cycle and goes to the inn. The innkeeper’s grandmother mistakes him for her son, and she loves to tell stories, but Link doesn’t find them interesting and falls asleep when she tells them. The All-Night Mask lets him stay up through the stories, and she awards him “candy” (heart pieces) for listening so well. The stories seem to be about the guardians/giants and… the Skull Kid? If so, he’s really old.
Now it’s time for the temple; the stories already took up half a day, so Link resets time to have a fresh cycle.
Next: What is it about water dungeons?
[1] Miserabler.
On the way to the beach is a boulder that can be exploded to reveal a hole. In the hole is a pond, and by sinking to the bottom, Link can get another heart piece here.
There are two aquaria in the lab, one to hatch zora eggs and the other with a couple big fish that Tatl notes look hungry. (I didn’t notice the egg aquarium at first, so I spent a bunch of time trying to drop the eggs in to get eaten. Fortunately, it wouldn’t let me, and my frustration eventually led me to the right place.) The hungry fish want Link to bottle fish and drop them in for him. After four, they reward him with another heart piece.
The next stop is Zora Cape, where a couple zoras have set up a pot-breaking game, as if Link needs the incentive. Actually, this one has a bit of a disincentive, threatening to fine people who recklessly break the pots. In other words, it costs 10 rupees to play, but that’s taken after the game is played, not before, so if you come to this broke (or go broke trying to win), there’s no punishment for failure. The pots are set up in a W shape, and there’s a spot and throwing angle where if Zora Link throws at the center pot with the double boomerangs, they’ll smash the other four pots in their return arc. The setup allows for small-scale corrections to Link’s starting position/angle. The reward for this is 100 rupees, minus the pot replacement charge – for the one good throw only; he doesn’t remember all the other times. If I still needed rupees for the bank, this would be the way to make them now.
The last point of interest for this collection is the waterfall at the end of the cape. Under the waterfall is a like like that drops a heart piece when killed. Above the waterfall are a series of ledges with single trees on, which means Link needs to find the lowest one and make his ascent with the hookshot. Finally, he enters a cave and finds a beaver, who doesn’t want to talk to Link. Link presses the issue by putting on the Zora Mask and pursuing the beaver underwater.
The beaver knows Link’s after a bottle, and promises one if Link can beat his swimming challenge. Said challenge involves following the beaver through a river and passing through all of the rings, in order. This gave me fits at first, because I hadn’t gotten a grip on the swimming controls, so if I moved fast enough to make it to the end of the course, I didn’t have enough control to pass through the rings, and if I took my time on the rings, I didn’t have enough to make it through all of them. It was a happy accident that let me stumble on the fact that if I held down the swim button, Link would continually be in swim mode and could be guided with the control stick. So I’m really glad for this minigame, because not knowing how to swim would probably have made the next dungeon miserable [1]. Once Link beat it, the beaver summoned his older brother for help. The brother also challenges Link, and his race has more rings and a trickier path. Once that’s done, the beavers give Link the promised bottle. Link can challenge them again, and after making it through both courses with a stricter time limit, gets a heart piece.
If Link stops the thief from stealing the bomb bags on the first night, the Curiosity Shop owner has a mask on the third night that won’t let the wearer fall asleep. It was apparently used as a torture device, but Link has a different use for it. He starts a new cycle and goes to the inn. The innkeeper’s grandmother mistakes him for her son, and she loves to tell stories, but Link doesn’t find them interesting and falls asleep when she tells them. The All-Night Mask lets him stay up through the stories, and she awards him “candy” (heart pieces) for listening so well. The stories seem to be about the guardians/giants and… the Skull Kid? If so, he’s really old.
Now it’s time for the temple; the stories already took up half a day, so Link resets time to have a fresh cycle.
Next: What is it about water dungeons?
[1] Miserabler.
Monday, August 27, 2018
Majora's Mask: Last Request
So, it turns out the reason I couldn’t find anything to do in Great Bay Coast is because I didn’t look to the south. There are two houses there. One seems to be abandoned but the name indicates it’s got some eight-legged inhabitants, so that can wait until I’ve quested some. The other is a fisherman’s hut. Apparently the water’s gone hot and murky, and that’s not good for anyone. He says he saw a zora dying out in the water. He’s also got a seahorse who asks Link for help; the fisherman says he’ll let Link have the seahorse in exchange for a picture of the pirates from the fortress. Right, that’s not a creepy request, but I’ve got a feeling I’ve got to do it anyway.
Out in the bay, Tatl sees the seagulls around the dying zora, Mikau, and Link goes out and pushes him to shore. When Link talks to him, it’s plain he’s dying, with just enough strength to get up and perform one final guitar solo while singing about how he was mortally injured, as is customary. The basic story: the singer in his band laid some eggs that were stolen by the Gerudo pirates, and so he went to try to get them back. He failed and now he can’t even die in peace. The song of healing works wonders on his soul, letting him move on and leave behind the zora mask, which will let Link navigate the waters a little easier.
The pirate fortress, like the Gerudo fortress of Ocarina of Time, is largely a stealth mission. The biggest difference: Link has the stone mask from the invisible guard, which makes him invisible to the pirates, and so he can sneak by them. Or, say, up close enough to snap a picture. Link can overhear a conversation between two of the pirates: they have four of the eggs, and three more are lost in the murky waters where they were beset by sea snakes. There are a few scripted encounters with pirates who can see through the stone mask’s illusion; usually one right before each aquarium where an egg is. In addition to the four eggs, Link finds the hookshot and a piece of heart. Then he warps back to the research center, drops the eggs in the hatching aquarium, and sets out to find the other three.
Now Link can tackle the skulltula house. There’s no one to greet Link here, and the building is falling into disrepair. Like the previous skulltula house, there are 30 of them spread throughout. This is mostly a workout for the hookshot and fire arrows, two tools Link didn’t have when he took on the swamp house. He also has to knock some loose from the ceiling with a goron smash, and goron form is needed to roll out of the basement. There are also a bunch of stalchildren here who have researched the solution to a puzzle, which they tell Link if he’s wearing the captain’s mask. He can put the solution in place to get a piece of heart. With the skulltulas all gone, when Link leaves the basement he meets a guy looking for a place to take refuge (from the moon, I’m guessing), who gives Link the second wallet upgrade. Now he can take 500 at a time out of the bank account, which will probably give the banker an aneurysm.
The fisherman gets his picture, so Link gets the seahorse. He take the seahorse out to the entrance to the Pinnacle Rock area, and lets it go and follows it through a signpost maze to a deep chasm with sea snakes living in caves. Three of the snakes are guarding the last three zora eggs, and if Link kills all eight, the seahorse reunites with its mate, and they give Link a heart piece as thanks. Link takes the eggs back to the lab, where when all seven eggs are in the aquarium, they hatch, and in a really clever scene, the tadpoles shape themselves like music notes in front of the background which looks like a staff. The scientist realizes what it is, and zora Link gets out his guitar and plays the song suggested by the notes.
The scentist suggests playing the music for the mother of the eggs, so Link sets out for Zora Hall. Three of Mikau’s bandmates are practicing in their rooms, playing songs from previous Zelda games (the dungeon and game over themes from The Legend of Zelda, and the cave theme from A Link to the Past). Link can find Mikau’s diary, which talks about jam sessions he played with Japas. Then the two get together for another jam session, and Link plays the notes he read to complete the song. The zoras all excitedly listen in, but the bandleader seems uninterested when Link plays it for him. However, if Link takes off the mask and plays the song on the ocarina, the bandleader eagerly steals credit for the song and gives Link a heart piece to ensure his silence. In Lulu’s room there’s a business scrub wanting to move somewhere less wet.
Lulu herself is outside, staring out at the ocean. Link plays the New Wave Bossa Nova for her, which summons a turtle from the deeps who offers Link a ride to the Great Bay Temple. There’s also an owl statue here. I want a new cycle for a dungeon, and the zora mask and hookshot have opened up new opportunities that’ll take some time to explore, but there’s two things to wrap up this cycle. First, Moon’s Tear, city flower, swamp flower, mountain flower, ocean flower, heart piece.
Second, back at the Milk Bar in Clock Town, Link can run a sound check with the zora band’s manager. Gorman, the theater troupe’s leader and brother of the asshats harassing Cremia, complains about the noise. However, after Link’s done the sound check in each of his four forms, Gorman’s reduced to tears because of memories associated with the song and gives Link his mask. The song’s called “Ballad of the Wind Fish,” but it bears no resemblance to the song from Link’s Awakening.
And now it’s time to start the next cycle.
Next: Lots and lots of sidequests.
Out in the bay, Tatl sees the seagulls around the dying zora, Mikau, and Link goes out and pushes him to shore. When Link talks to him, it’s plain he’s dying, with just enough strength to get up and perform one final guitar solo while singing about how he was mortally injured, as is customary. The basic story: the singer in his band laid some eggs that were stolen by the Gerudo pirates, and so he went to try to get them back. He failed and now he can’t even die in peace. The song of healing works wonders on his soul, letting him move on and leave behind the zora mask, which will let Link navigate the waters a little easier.
The pirate fortress, like the Gerudo fortress of Ocarina of Time, is largely a stealth mission. The biggest difference: Link has the stone mask from the invisible guard, which makes him invisible to the pirates, and so he can sneak by them. Or, say, up close enough to snap a picture. Link can overhear a conversation between two of the pirates: they have four of the eggs, and three more are lost in the murky waters where they were beset by sea snakes. There are a few scripted encounters with pirates who can see through the stone mask’s illusion; usually one right before each aquarium where an egg is. In addition to the four eggs, Link finds the hookshot and a piece of heart. Then he warps back to the research center, drops the eggs in the hatching aquarium, and sets out to find the other three.
Now Link can tackle the skulltula house. There’s no one to greet Link here, and the building is falling into disrepair. Like the previous skulltula house, there are 30 of them spread throughout. This is mostly a workout for the hookshot and fire arrows, two tools Link didn’t have when he took on the swamp house. He also has to knock some loose from the ceiling with a goron smash, and goron form is needed to roll out of the basement. There are also a bunch of stalchildren here who have researched the solution to a puzzle, which they tell Link if he’s wearing the captain’s mask. He can put the solution in place to get a piece of heart. With the skulltulas all gone, when Link leaves the basement he meets a guy looking for a place to take refuge (from the moon, I’m guessing), who gives Link the second wallet upgrade. Now he can take 500 at a time out of the bank account, which will probably give the banker an aneurysm.
The fisherman gets his picture, so Link gets the seahorse. He take the seahorse out to the entrance to the Pinnacle Rock area, and lets it go and follows it through a signpost maze to a deep chasm with sea snakes living in caves. Three of the snakes are guarding the last three zora eggs, and if Link kills all eight, the seahorse reunites with its mate, and they give Link a heart piece as thanks. Link takes the eggs back to the lab, where when all seven eggs are in the aquarium, they hatch, and in a really clever scene, the tadpoles shape themselves like music notes in front of the background which looks like a staff. The scientist realizes what it is, and zora Link gets out his guitar and plays the song suggested by the notes.
The scentist suggests playing the music for the mother of the eggs, so Link sets out for Zora Hall. Three of Mikau’s bandmates are practicing in their rooms, playing songs from previous Zelda games (the dungeon and game over themes from The Legend of Zelda, and the cave theme from A Link to the Past). Link can find Mikau’s diary, which talks about jam sessions he played with Japas. Then the two get together for another jam session, and Link plays the notes he read to complete the song. The zoras all excitedly listen in, but the bandleader seems uninterested when Link plays it for him. However, if Link takes off the mask and plays the song on the ocarina, the bandleader eagerly steals credit for the song and gives Link a heart piece to ensure his silence. In Lulu’s room there’s a business scrub wanting to move somewhere less wet.
Lulu herself is outside, staring out at the ocean. Link plays the New Wave Bossa Nova for her, which summons a turtle from the deeps who offers Link a ride to the Great Bay Temple. There’s also an owl statue here. I want a new cycle for a dungeon, and the zora mask and hookshot have opened up new opportunities that’ll take some time to explore, but there’s two things to wrap up this cycle. First, Moon’s Tear, city flower, swamp flower, mountain flower, ocean flower, heart piece.
Second, back at the Milk Bar in Clock Town, Link can run a sound check with the zora band’s manager. Gorman, the theater troupe’s leader and brother of the asshats harassing Cremia, complains about the noise. However, after Link’s done the sound check in each of his four forms, Gorman’s reduced to tears because of memories associated with the song and gives Link his mask. The song’s called “Ballad of the Wind Fish,” but it bears no resemblance to the song from Link’s Awakening.
And now it’s time to start the next cycle.
Next: Lots and lots of sidequests.
Saturday, August 25, 2018
Majora's Mask: Link in Black
Tatl says the next destination should be the ocean dungeon to the east. This is blocked by a fence, which Tatl says Link could jump if he had a horse before having the decency to remember why he doesn’t have a horse. Except Link and Tatl know where the horse is, so it’s time to find a way to convince Cremia and Romani to give her back. There’s a goron in the town shop who sells powder kegs, so Link can blow up the giant boulder blocking Romani Ranch. The man who was hacking at it is annoyed at Link’s intervention, because he doesn’t get to spend two days of back-breaking labor hacking a path through the rock, but decides as long as the path is clear, he’s cool with it. When Link arrives at the ranch, whatever happened to Romani hasn’t yet, and she’s practicing archery near the barn.
Romani explains why she’s training: every year as the festival approaches in Clock Town, aliens (the game calls them ghosts, and they look like poes, but it’s aliens) come to the ranch and steal the cows. This is so out of nowhere that it’s hard not to laugh, but two things make this sidequest work. First, we know the consequences if Link fails. The aliens do something to Romani that leaves her an empty shell, and her sister blames herself for what happened. Second, although it’s ridiculous, it’s played completely straight, so it can be taken seriously. After Link does a quick round of riding the horse around the ranch popping balloons to prove he’s an able helper, Romani teaches him Epona’s song, allowing him to summon Epona (I guess it is her!) from anywhere. She tells him to be back by 2:00 for the alien fight.
There’s a lot of time left before then, so Link and Epona leave the ranch to go exploring. The first stop is the Gorman Brothers’ race track, just off the Milk Road. They make fun of Epona and challenge Link to a race. To be honest, they’re not terribly good at racing, but the one thing they do really well is get in Link’s way. If he’s not way ahead coming over the final obstacles, one brother charges in out of nowhere at an angle that can only be meant to block Link’s progress while his brother sweeps out to the lead. With the bank maxed out and the takkuri right there, the money’s not an issue, but it’s frustrating to come so close and lose and have to do it again. When Link finally beats them, they try to figure out what to give him and eventually settle on a mask.
I’ve still got a lot of time, so let’s go to the ocean and look around. There’s actually not much here; it says don’t swim out to the building, but nothing stops Link if he does, so he can get out there and thwack an owl statue, shoot down Tingle and wish for ear plugs and buy maps, and visit the laboratory inside where the scientist is concerned about a late delivery of zora eggs. Up to the north there’s mentions of a pirate fortress.
I’m probably not going to make it to the dungeon this cycle anyway, so I decide to let the pirate fortress wait for another cycle and see what lies to the east. There are some fences Epona can jump over, but then a giant cliff bars the way. There’s some interesting stuff here: a guard who can only be seen with the Lens of Truth and needs healing, and the graveyard is apparently watched over by a giant sleeping stalfos. Link wakes up the stalfos and chases him down, which makes the stalfos surrender and leave command of his followers to Link. Each night, Link can approach groups of stalfos in the graveyard, open a grave, complete a puzzle, fight a miniboss, and get a reward. The first day’s miniboss is an iron knuckle, which probably means I’m not supposed to be out here yet because fighting that on 11 hearts is mean. After it’s dead, Flat, one of the royal composer ghosts, comes to Link. He says Sharp sold his soul to the devil, and teaches Link a song that represents his anger and sadness over the betrayal, the Song of Storms.
Okay, now it’s time for Link to put on his black suit and go back to the ranch. I don’t know why the game had Link practice alien hunting with Epona, because it’s frankly easier to put on the bunny hood, follow the dog around on foot, kill all the aliens Link can see, and hold out until the break of dawn. Dawn comes, the aliens all poof, and Romani calls him “little hero” and gives him a bottle of milk, then sneaks back to the house to go to bed before Cremia catches her. Cremia’s making a milk run to Clock Town that night, and invites Link to come along. It’s a good thing he does, because the Gorman Brothers put a fence in her way, forcing her to take less safe paths to town, and then ride after her wagon trying to break her jars of milk. Link keeps them at bay enough to stop all the milk from being destroyed, and Cremia rewards him with a mask that lets him visit the milk bar in town. There doesn’t seem to be much interesting here just yet, but Link can buy a special milk that will leave his magic meter maxed out until he resets time.
Now it’s back to the graveyard, stopping en route to heal the invisible guard and receive his mask. The second night’s puzzle involves the Lens of Truth, and after another iron knuckle fight, Link gets a heart piece. The third night Link helps Dampé summon a poe. This puzzle is terrible, because Dampé is so goddamn stupid. Okay, I get he can only follow the light of the fairy. But if I lose Z-targeting on him, does he keep going the way he was? Stop until Tatl comes back? No, of course not. He wanders off in a “random” direction which always seems to be opposite the way Link was trying to drag him. Oh, and there’s a wall master, and if it catches Link, it resets the puzzle. Summoning and killing the poe rewards a bottle, which is nice.
And then it’s reboot time.
Next: Trespassing on their private pirate property.
Romani explains why she’s training: every year as the festival approaches in Clock Town, aliens (the game calls them ghosts, and they look like poes, but it’s aliens) come to the ranch and steal the cows. This is so out of nowhere that it’s hard not to laugh, but two things make this sidequest work. First, we know the consequences if Link fails. The aliens do something to Romani that leaves her an empty shell, and her sister blames herself for what happened. Second, although it’s ridiculous, it’s played completely straight, so it can be taken seriously. After Link does a quick round of riding the horse around the ranch popping balloons to prove he’s an able helper, Romani teaches him Epona’s song, allowing him to summon Epona (I guess it is her!) from anywhere. She tells him to be back by 2:00 for the alien fight.
There’s a lot of time left before then, so Link and Epona leave the ranch to go exploring. The first stop is the Gorman Brothers’ race track, just off the Milk Road. They make fun of Epona and challenge Link to a race. To be honest, they’re not terribly good at racing, but the one thing they do really well is get in Link’s way. If he’s not way ahead coming over the final obstacles, one brother charges in out of nowhere at an angle that can only be meant to block Link’s progress while his brother sweeps out to the lead. With the bank maxed out and the takkuri right there, the money’s not an issue, but it’s frustrating to come so close and lose and have to do it again. When Link finally beats them, they try to figure out what to give him and eventually settle on a mask.
I’ve still got a lot of time, so let’s go to the ocean and look around. There’s actually not much here; it says don’t swim out to the building, but nothing stops Link if he does, so he can get out there and thwack an owl statue, shoot down Tingle and wish for ear plugs and buy maps, and visit the laboratory inside where the scientist is concerned about a late delivery of zora eggs. Up to the north there’s mentions of a pirate fortress.
I’m probably not going to make it to the dungeon this cycle anyway, so I decide to let the pirate fortress wait for another cycle and see what lies to the east. There are some fences Epona can jump over, but then a giant cliff bars the way. There’s some interesting stuff here: a guard who can only be seen with the Lens of Truth and needs healing, and the graveyard is apparently watched over by a giant sleeping stalfos. Link wakes up the stalfos and chases him down, which makes the stalfos surrender and leave command of his followers to Link. Each night, Link can approach groups of stalfos in the graveyard, open a grave, complete a puzzle, fight a miniboss, and get a reward. The first day’s miniboss is an iron knuckle, which probably means I’m not supposed to be out here yet because fighting that on 11 hearts is mean. After it’s dead, Flat, one of the royal composer ghosts, comes to Link. He says Sharp sold his soul to the devil, and teaches Link a song that represents his anger and sadness over the betrayal, the Song of Storms.
Okay, now it’s time for Link to put on his black suit and go back to the ranch. I don’t know why the game had Link practice alien hunting with Epona, because it’s frankly easier to put on the bunny hood, follow the dog around on foot, kill all the aliens Link can see, and hold out until the break of dawn. Dawn comes, the aliens all poof, and Romani calls him “little hero” and gives him a bottle of milk, then sneaks back to the house to go to bed before Cremia catches her. Cremia’s making a milk run to Clock Town that night, and invites Link to come along. It’s a good thing he does, because the Gorman Brothers put a fence in her way, forcing her to take less safe paths to town, and then ride after her wagon trying to break her jars of milk. Link keeps them at bay enough to stop all the milk from being destroyed, and Cremia rewards him with a mask that lets him visit the milk bar in town. There doesn’t seem to be much interesting here just yet, but Link can buy a special milk that will leave his magic meter maxed out until he resets time.
Now it’s back to the graveyard, stopping en route to heal the invisible guard and receive his mask. The second night’s puzzle involves the Lens of Truth, and after another iron knuckle fight, Link gets a heart piece. The third night Link helps Dampé summon a poe. This puzzle is terrible, because Dampé is so goddamn stupid. Okay, I get he can only follow the light of the fairy. But if I lose Z-targeting on him, does he keep going the way he was? Stop until Tatl comes back? No, of course not. He wanders off in a “random” direction which always seems to be opposite the way Link was trying to drag him. Oh, and there’s a wall master, and if it catches Link, it resets the puzzle. Summoning and killing the poe rewards a bottle, which is nice.
And then it’s reboot time.
Next: Trespassing on their private pirate property.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Majora's Mask: Snowhead Temple
The main objective for this round is to compete Snowhead Temple, so Link plays the Inverted Song of Time to maximize the amount of time he has to complete the dungeon. Then he soars up to Snowhead, where a wind is blowing from the temple making approach impossible. Tatl sees something in the storm, and suggests Link take a look, and the Lens of Truth reveals the wind’s caused by a giant goron blowing down the path. So Link shifts into goron form and plays the Goron’s Lullaby, which puts the goron to sleep and stops the wind. The goron rolls off the walkway, but I’m sure he’ll be alright, and even if he won’t, he’d have frozen to death anyway. Or died when the moon hit.
Given the name, location, and ambient weather, it’s little surprise that Snowhead Temple is an ice dungeon. Goron form is essential here, pushing heavy blocks, rolling over ramps, smashing down switches too heavy to be bothered by human Link, and in the final puzzle, punching out segments of the central elevator pillar that have it raised so high it’s blocking the entrance to the boss room. Deku Link isn’t so important, but gets to come out and play a few times. New enemies include snowball-tossing eenos and rodents with bombs on their tails that are called real bombchus.
The dungeon’s miniboss is a familiar face that I’m surprised to realize weren’t in Ocarina: wizzrobes. They’ve been reimagined yet again, teleporting between various pads around the room. Fortunately, the dot on the minimap shows where they’re going to be, so it’s just a matter of turning to face them and hitting them with an arrow before they can get their shot off. After the first few shots, the wizzrobe starts adding illusory doubles, but only the real one shows up on the minimap, so it’s really just a minor distraction. There are two of them in the dungeon. One guards the dungeon’s treasure, the fire arrows, which I now understand to be the replacement for the fire rod. The second wizzrobe guards the boss key.
The boss of the dungeon is a masked mechanical monster named Goht, a giant robot bull. (Or maybe goat, but aside from the name, bull seems more appropriate.) It starts the battle frozen in ice, which I would think would present an opportunity – Link could hack away enough of the ice to hit its weak spot for an easy kill – but apparently that wouldn’t be “sporting” or “fair” or “fun” or “worth the man-hours the people at Nintendo put in designing this thing,” so we have to do it the hard way. Link melts the ice with a fire arrow, and Goht takes off running around a track around the room. Link puts on the goron mask and rolls after it. This is a fun fight, having to dodge all the obstacles Goht summons and poke at his legs with the goron ball spikes. One time I caught a ramp and landed on his back and was able to get a few free hits in that way, and I’d guess that’s how it’s supposed to be done. After enough hits, Goht loses control, plows into the central pillar, and is buried in rubble.
Link and Tatl return to the foggy realm where the figures they’re looking to recruit live. Tatl asks what they are, and they reply “guardians.” The stray fairy collection award this time is a doubled magic meter. And, getting there, I was glad to see the giant goron was okay, if a bit confused about what happened to it.
Back down the mountain, the Mountain Village smith’s forge has thawed so he can work on Link’s sword. It costs 100 rupees and is only a temporary improvement, but the smith hints that if he gets gold dust, he can make the sword better permanently. There’s one more thing to do: in the Goron Village, the powder keg shop has thawed as well, so Link can take the test to get certified to use the kegs. That test is to run with a keg down to the Mountain Village and open up the Goron Racetrack. Link does this safely, so he can buy kegs now. He can also run the goron races, and receives gold dust if he wins. That lets him get the second sword upgrade.
While waiting for that to finish, I started farming the takkuri again, which is so much easier, quicker, and safer with the fire arrows. This maxed out Link’s bank account at 5,000 rupees and earned another piece of heart. So from now on I’ll be removing more rupees from the bank than I put in, which will let me use the Clock Town shops to restock on ammunition items. Anyway, I’m pretty sure those powder kegs will blow up the boulder leading to Romani Ranch, so it’s time to find out what the deal is there.
Next: First, last, and only line of defense.
Given the name, location, and ambient weather, it’s little surprise that Snowhead Temple is an ice dungeon. Goron form is essential here, pushing heavy blocks, rolling over ramps, smashing down switches too heavy to be bothered by human Link, and in the final puzzle, punching out segments of the central elevator pillar that have it raised so high it’s blocking the entrance to the boss room. Deku Link isn’t so important, but gets to come out and play a few times. New enemies include snowball-tossing eenos and rodents with bombs on their tails that are called real bombchus.
The dungeon’s miniboss is a familiar face that I’m surprised to realize weren’t in Ocarina: wizzrobes. They’ve been reimagined yet again, teleporting between various pads around the room. Fortunately, the dot on the minimap shows where they’re going to be, so it’s just a matter of turning to face them and hitting them with an arrow before they can get their shot off. After the first few shots, the wizzrobe starts adding illusory doubles, but only the real one shows up on the minimap, so it’s really just a minor distraction. There are two of them in the dungeon. One guards the dungeon’s treasure, the fire arrows, which I now understand to be the replacement for the fire rod. The second wizzrobe guards the boss key.
The boss of the dungeon is a masked mechanical monster named Goht, a giant robot bull. (Or maybe goat, but aside from the name, bull seems more appropriate.) It starts the battle frozen in ice, which I would think would present an opportunity – Link could hack away enough of the ice to hit its weak spot for an easy kill – but apparently that wouldn’t be “sporting” or “fair” or “fun” or “worth the man-hours the people at Nintendo put in designing this thing,” so we have to do it the hard way. Link melts the ice with a fire arrow, and Goht takes off running around a track around the room. Link puts on the goron mask and rolls after it. This is a fun fight, having to dodge all the obstacles Goht summons and poke at his legs with the goron ball spikes. One time I caught a ramp and landed on his back and was able to get a few free hits in that way, and I’d guess that’s how it’s supposed to be done. After enough hits, Goht loses control, plows into the central pillar, and is buried in rubble.
Link and Tatl return to the foggy realm where the figures they’re looking to recruit live. Tatl asks what they are, and they reply “guardians.” The stray fairy collection award this time is a doubled magic meter. And, getting there, I was glad to see the giant goron was okay, if a bit confused about what happened to it.
Back down the mountain, the Mountain Village smith’s forge has thawed so he can work on Link’s sword. It costs 100 rupees and is only a temporary improvement, but the smith hints that if he gets gold dust, he can make the sword better permanently. There’s one more thing to do: in the Goron Village, the powder keg shop has thawed as well, so Link can take the test to get certified to use the kegs. That test is to run with a keg down to the Mountain Village and open up the Goron Racetrack. Link does this safely, so he can buy kegs now. He can also run the goron races, and receives gold dust if he wins. That lets him get the second sword upgrade.
While waiting for that to finish, I started farming the takkuri again, which is so much easier, quicker, and safer with the fire arrows. This maxed out Link’s bank account at 5,000 rupees and earned another piece of heart. So from now on I’ll be removing more rupees from the bank than I put in, which will let me use the Clock Town shops to restock on ammunition items. Anyway, I’m pretty sure those powder kegs will blow up the boulder leading to Romani Ranch, so it’s time to find out what the deal is there.
Next: First, last, and only line of defense.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Majora's Mask: Frozen Gorons
Before heading up the mountain to meet the gorons, Link needs to gather some bombs and arrows. Losing all consumables is probably my least favorite part of the time loop mechanic, and it feels like a waste of precious time having to go out into Termina Field and hack away at bushes until they’re restocked. Also, on a hunch, I also went through the title deed trading sequence as far as it’s gone. The pass up to the mountain is blocked by a huge block of ice, which Link needs to break by knocking some stalactites free with arrows. Further up are some huge snowballs that need to be blown up.
The Mountain Village isn’t really much of a village. There’s a smithy, but its ability to smith is limited by the forge being frozen by all the cold. They say something about using hot spring water to thaw the forge, but Link doesn’t have any way to help with that right now, and I’ll wait for spring’s thaw before using their services. Outside, there’s a goron who’s stranded and starving, but Link doesn’t have anything for him just yet, either. There’s an owl statue here for quick travel, and then it’s time to head to the larger goron village. Getting there means crossing over a series of islands connected by rope bridges. Tingle’s flying over the center island, but it turns out I already have all his maps, so I don’t need to shoot him down and listen to him introduce himself right now. I did, so I could make sure I didn’t need any of his maps, but… I didn’t need to.
The gorons all seem to be huddling inside their homes for warmth, so there’s just one guy standing guard over the goron shrine. This is yet another case of can’t do anything just yet, so Link makes his way through the village and finds the owl. The owl leads Link over a series of invisible platforms to a cave. Hidden in the cave is the item that will make the return trip much easier, the Lens of Truth. There’s a chance to use the Lens in the cave to kill a skulltula and get a couple chests, then it’s back out and over the platforms, where Link finds a goron ghost waiting for him.
The ghost leads Link back down to the mountain village, then across the river to a wall with a network of hidden ladders. There are many wrong turns and dead ends on the ladder network; once at the top, Link follows the ghost into the Goron Graveyard. The ghost properly introduces himself as Darmani, a goron hero, and he tried heading to Snowhead Temple to try to break the wintry curse that’s killing his people. The winds claimed him, and so he asks Link to bring him back from the dead. That’s beyond Link’s power, so he simply plays the Song of Healing to ease Darmani’s pain. Darmani passes on the duty of saving the gorons on to Link, leaving a mask behind that will let Link assume his form.
Wearing Darmani’s mask, Link investigates the goron shrine. With Darmani dead, the elder has set out to try to fix the situation at Snowhead himself, and his son won’t sleep and his crying is keeping everyone else in the shrine awake and blowing out torches. Link finds the elder just outside the village, not having gotten very far before becoming encased in ice. Link thaws him out and asks him to help with his son. He’s so cold he can only come up with the first six notes of the lullaby he sings, but that’s enough for the son to teach Link the rest. Link puts the baby to sleep with the lullaby and can set out for the temple. The road to the temple requires Link to use the goron rolling ability to jump over gaps. Finally, Link comes to an owl statue in the temple’s shadow, so it’s time to wrap up this cycle.
Before returning to dawn of the first day, there are a few last things Link can do. Back in the goron shrine, if Link lights all the torches now that the baby’s asleep, the chandelier starts spinning. Link can goron roll into it and smash the pots, eventually discovering a rock sirloin that the starving stranded goron will appreciate, giving him a frog mask. Also in the goron village is a business scrub, who’ll sell a goron Link the second bomb capacity upgrade, and trade his deed to the flower to Deku Link. Link can then Dekucopter from the flower to yet another heart piece. And there’s one more heart piece he can get, playing Clock Town’s chest game in goron form. After that, there’s nothing left but to farm rupees and start over with a full day’s time to complete the next dungeon.
Next: Off to the races.
The Mountain Village isn’t really much of a village. There’s a smithy, but its ability to smith is limited by the forge being frozen by all the cold. They say something about using hot spring water to thaw the forge, but Link doesn’t have any way to help with that right now, and I’ll wait for spring’s thaw before using their services. Outside, there’s a goron who’s stranded and starving, but Link doesn’t have anything for him just yet, either. There’s an owl statue here for quick travel, and then it’s time to head to the larger goron village. Getting there means crossing over a series of islands connected by rope bridges. Tingle’s flying over the center island, but it turns out I already have all his maps, so I don’t need to shoot him down and listen to him introduce himself right now. I did, so I could make sure I didn’t need any of his maps, but… I didn’t need to.
The gorons all seem to be huddling inside their homes for warmth, so there’s just one guy standing guard over the goron shrine. This is yet another case of can’t do anything just yet, so Link makes his way through the village and finds the owl. The owl leads Link over a series of invisible platforms to a cave. Hidden in the cave is the item that will make the return trip much easier, the Lens of Truth. There’s a chance to use the Lens in the cave to kill a skulltula and get a couple chests, then it’s back out and over the platforms, where Link finds a goron ghost waiting for him.
The ghost leads Link back down to the mountain village, then across the river to a wall with a network of hidden ladders. There are many wrong turns and dead ends on the ladder network; once at the top, Link follows the ghost into the Goron Graveyard. The ghost properly introduces himself as Darmani, a goron hero, and he tried heading to Snowhead Temple to try to break the wintry curse that’s killing his people. The winds claimed him, and so he asks Link to bring him back from the dead. That’s beyond Link’s power, so he simply plays the Song of Healing to ease Darmani’s pain. Darmani passes on the duty of saving the gorons on to Link, leaving a mask behind that will let Link assume his form.
Wearing Darmani’s mask, Link investigates the goron shrine. With Darmani dead, the elder has set out to try to fix the situation at Snowhead himself, and his son won’t sleep and his crying is keeping everyone else in the shrine awake and blowing out torches. Link finds the elder just outside the village, not having gotten very far before becoming encased in ice. Link thaws him out and asks him to help with his son. He’s so cold he can only come up with the first six notes of the lullaby he sings, but that’s enough for the son to teach Link the rest. Link puts the baby to sleep with the lullaby and can set out for the temple. The road to the temple requires Link to use the goron rolling ability to jump over gaps. Finally, Link comes to an owl statue in the temple’s shadow, so it’s time to wrap up this cycle.
Before returning to dawn of the first day, there are a few last things Link can do. Back in the goron shrine, if Link lights all the torches now that the baby’s asleep, the chandelier starts spinning. Link can goron roll into it and smash the pots, eventually discovering a rock sirloin that the starving stranded goron will appreciate, giving him a frog mask. Also in the goron village is a business scrub, who’ll sell a goron Link the second bomb capacity upgrade, and trade his deed to the flower to Deku Link. Link can then Dekucopter from the flower to yet another heart piece. And there’s one more heart piece he can get, playing Clock Town’s chest game in goron form. After that, there’s nothing left but to farm rupees and start over with a full day’s time to complete the next dungeon.
Next: Off to the races.
Monday, August 20, 2018
Majora’s Mask: Minigames
In a nice design feature, once the boss of a dungeon is defeated, Link gets the ability to teleport right to that boss from the dungeon entrance on future cycles and kill the boss to open up anything in the wider world that requires that specific dungeon being cleared. But I have a couple days left on this cycle anyway, so let’s take advantage of that to clear as much stuff as I can.
Near the Deku Palace in the swamp, there’s a house whose inhabitant bears a familiar curse. Thankfully, freeing him only requires killing 30 skulltulas, and they’re all in the basement of his house. This is basically a mini-dungeon with one type of enemy, and a lot of the skulltulas aren’t easy to find and/or kill and/or collect tokens from. It would have been much easier with a hookshot, but oh well. Once the skulltulas are cleared, the now uncursed man gives Link the Mask of Truth, which functions more or less the same as in Ocarina of Time.
The tourist center’s photo contest has ended, but Koume, once she’s rescued from the woods again, has a new idea: she’ll put the boat on rails and ride around dangling a target from her broom. If Link can hit the target 20 times before the boat ride ends without hitting Koume too many times, he gets a heart piece. My basic strategy for this boiled down to spray and pray, and I had one run end because I hit Koume too much. Once it’s done successfully without making too many holes in the witch, Link gets a heart piece.
Back in Termina Field, there are holes Link can fall down to find groups of four gossip stones. One of the stones in each group is larger than the others, and the Mask of Truth reveals the larger stone changes color if a song’s played near it. The four groups are linked; changing a stone’s color changes the corresponding stones in the other groups as well. Link only knows one of the songs the stones hint at, so he tracks down all four groups and plays the Sonata of Awakening for them, making them all green and getting a heart piece for his trouble.
On the third day, Link can go back to Romani Ranch and visit the entrance he didn’t the first time. There, a woman has set up a dog racetrack, and invites Link to bet on the dogs. With the Mask of Truth, Link can hear the dogs’ opinion of their chances before betting on them, and I never had one with a good opinion of its chances fail to place at least high enough to get my bet back. Actually winning second or first was a rare event, and Link spent most of the day here trying to pick winners. Once he finally won enough, he got a heart piece as a final reward.
There are more minigames, but one’s like the Deku Scrub Playground that requires winning three days in a row, and the other two are archery games which I’m kind of terrible at, so I’d be all for a new set of days even if this set weren’t close to running out.
Three Days of Learning That I Really, Really Hate Archery Games
The three day minigame is run by Honey and Darling, the equivalent of the dancing couple I found so amusing in Ocarina of Time. They dance in the center of a spinning platform while Link gets to try to hit things on the wall before the song finishes. The first day is bombchu bowling, the second day is bombsketball, and the third day is archery. There’s a – I don’t know if it’s a glitch or intentional, but if Honey and/or Darling gets hit by the weapons, they complain about it, and while the text box is on the screen, the timer doesn’t count down. I only discovered this in the third day when my spray and pray style, plus the way archery focus works meaning they constantly entered the line of fire, meant they sometimes got hit, whereas I’d have had to seriously pancake up to hit them with the explosives. I’m better at the other two games, so that was the one I needed this for anyway. Anyway, the first two days they give Link 50 rupees, and the third day a piece of heart.
Then, because you can never have too many archery minigames, there’s one in town, and one near the swamp. The one in town has Link shooting at octoroks, trying to hit the red ones while avoiding the blue ones. Getting a good enough score on this is fairly easy; getting a perfect score is frustrating. The swamp version has waves of enemies who all need to be shot to get a reward. This wouldn’t be bad, except the wolfos and guays can permanently disappear if Link doesn’t shoot them in time, and the reward tiers here are Perfect and Even More Perfect. For both games, the first reward is a quiver upgrade, and the second reward is a heart piece.
By time I get through all this, the moon’s getting awfully close to doing its thing. So – you know. Rupees in the bank, Song of Time, new cycle.
Next: Winter is coming.
Near the Deku Palace in the swamp, there’s a house whose inhabitant bears a familiar curse. Thankfully, freeing him only requires killing 30 skulltulas, and they’re all in the basement of his house. This is basically a mini-dungeon with one type of enemy, and a lot of the skulltulas aren’t easy to find and/or kill and/or collect tokens from. It would have been much easier with a hookshot, but oh well. Once the skulltulas are cleared, the now uncursed man gives Link the Mask of Truth, which functions more or less the same as in Ocarina of Time.
The tourist center’s photo contest has ended, but Koume, once she’s rescued from the woods again, has a new idea: she’ll put the boat on rails and ride around dangling a target from her broom. If Link can hit the target 20 times before the boat ride ends without hitting Koume too many times, he gets a heart piece. My basic strategy for this boiled down to spray and pray, and I had one run end because I hit Koume too much. Once it’s done successfully without making too many holes in the witch, Link gets a heart piece.
Back in Termina Field, there are holes Link can fall down to find groups of four gossip stones. One of the stones in each group is larger than the others, and the Mask of Truth reveals the larger stone changes color if a song’s played near it. The four groups are linked; changing a stone’s color changes the corresponding stones in the other groups as well. Link only knows one of the songs the stones hint at, so he tracks down all four groups and plays the Sonata of Awakening for them, making them all green and getting a heart piece for his trouble.
On the third day, Link can go back to Romani Ranch and visit the entrance he didn’t the first time. There, a woman has set up a dog racetrack, and invites Link to bet on the dogs. With the Mask of Truth, Link can hear the dogs’ opinion of their chances before betting on them, and I never had one with a good opinion of its chances fail to place at least high enough to get my bet back. Actually winning second or first was a rare event, and Link spent most of the day here trying to pick winners. Once he finally won enough, he got a heart piece as a final reward.
There are more minigames, but one’s like the Deku Scrub Playground that requires winning three days in a row, and the other two are archery games which I’m kind of terrible at, so I’d be all for a new set of days even if this set weren’t close to running out.
Three Days of Learning That I Really, Really Hate Archery Games
The three day minigame is run by Honey and Darling, the equivalent of the dancing couple I found so amusing in Ocarina of Time. They dance in the center of a spinning platform while Link gets to try to hit things on the wall before the song finishes. The first day is bombchu bowling, the second day is bombsketball, and the third day is archery. There’s a – I don’t know if it’s a glitch or intentional, but if Honey and/or Darling gets hit by the weapons, they complain about it, and while the text box is on the screen, the timer doesn’t count down. I only discovered this in the third day when my spray and pray style, plus the way archery focus works meaning they constantly entered the line of fire, meant they sometimes got hit, whereas I’d have had to seriously pancake up to hit them with the explosives. I’m better at the other two games, so that was the one I needed this for anyway. Anyway, the first two days they give Link 50 rupees, and the third day a piece of heart.
Then, because you can never have too many archery minigames, there’s one in town, and one near the swamp. The one in town has Link shooting at octoroks, trying to hit the red ones while avoiding the blue ones. Getting a good enough score on this is fairly easy; getting a perfect score is frustrating. The swamp version has waves of enemies who all need to be shot to get a reward. This wouldn’t be bad, except the wolfos and guays can permanently disappear if Link doesn’t shoot them in time, and the reward tiers here are Perfect and Even More Perfect. For both games, the first reward is a quiver upgrade, and the second reward is a heart piece.
By time I get through all this, the moon’s getting awfully close to doing its thing. So – you know. Rupees in the bank, Song of Time, new cycle.
Next: Winter is coming.
Friday, August 17, 2018
Majora's Mask: Woodfall Temple
I don’t know how long dungeons are in this game, and would rather allow too much time and end up Groundhog Daying back to the first day halfway through Day 2 than end up racing the clock to defeat the boss, so I have Link play the Inverted Song of Time to allow as much time in the dungeon as possible, then warp to Woodfall and use the Sonata of Awakening to open the path to the Woodfall Temple; all it takes is Dekucoptering from across the swamp.
As the great fairy in Clock Town mentioned, each dungeon in this game has a bunch of stray fairies that can be gathered up to give Link access to other great fairies. The fairy mask helps by identifying when a fairy is near and attracting the fairy to Link if it’s not trapped. There are fifteen in all, and it’s generally a fun little diversion rounding them up.
The dungeon’s treasure is the Hero’s Bow, and it’s about goddamn time Link gets a ranged weapon he can use in human form. The addition of masks to Link’s items is wreaking havoc with the nice system I had set up for using the equipped item slots in Ocarina: I had the boomerang/hookshot pinned to one slot, the ocarina to another, with the third usually set to the slingshot/bow but could be set for whatever other item Link needed at the moment. Now any equipped mask needs a slot, and I had it set where the boomerang/hookshot went, which was usually fine except when I needed to ranged attack, I’d instinctively hit that button which would take Link out of Deku scrub form, taking away his one ranged attack.
The turtle-like snappers Link saw on his path through the Woods of Mystery are here in the dungeon, and Deku Link can take them out by diving into a flower and popping up from underneath them. This is a good skill to learn, because one of the dungeon’s minibosses rides a snapper during the second phase of the battle and has to be continually dismounted.
The dungeon’s boss is a masked jungle warrior named Odolwa. I’m pretty sure the idea for this fight is to stun him with the bow and thwack him with the sword while he’s stunned, but after doing that once or twice and then being swarmed by insects I had to fight off, I decided to go with a different tack. Namely, I charged at him, blocked or dodged his attacks, and hacked at his shins till he died. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to work, but screw it, it did.
After Odolwa is defeated, Link is transported to… I’m not sure what it is, actually. It’s misty and cloudy, and there’s a humanoid figure in the distance that starts singing a song that Link repeats on his ocarina that turns out to be called the Oath to Order. The figure says “Call us” before Link returns to the normal world.
With Odolwa gone, the swamps have cleared up, and Link can free the Deku princess to take her home. She’s a little more accommodating than Ruto was, and is able to be transported in Link’s bottle, which I was shocked to learn was empty because I’d had a fairy before resetting time. I guess it’s better than discovering bottle contents don’t carry over between loops by Link not being fairy-rezzed if Odolwa had killed him. Before taking the princess home, Link stops at the nearby fairy fountain to drop off the stray fairies, and the reconstructed great fairy teaches him the spin attack.
When the Deku princess is released in the Deku throne room, she’s rather furious about the treatment of the monkey and jumps up and down on the king (one of the scrubs in the background imitates her, too) and demands the monkey’s release. Out of gratitude to Link, she offers him a reward, which involves entering a cave and then chasing the Deku butler as he runs through. I tried to do this with the Deku mask, but yeesh. It’s much easier, if slightly twitchy, with the bunny hood. The butler apologizes for his competitiveness, saying that Link reminds him of his missing son. The reward turns out to be a pig mask, the Mask of Scents, which can be used to find mushrooms.
All in all, this took just over a (slowed down) day.
Next: Why.
As the great fairy in Clock Town mentioned, each dungeon in this game has a bunch of stray fairies that can be gathered up to give Link access to other great fairies. The fairy mask helps by identifying when a fairy is near and attracting the fairy to Link if it’s not trapped. There are fifteen in all, and it’s generally a fun little diversion rounding them up.
The dungeon’s treasure is the Hero’s Bow, and it’s about goddamn time Link gets a ranged weapon he can use in human form. The addition of masks to Link’s items is wreaking havoc with the nice system I had set up for using the equipped item slots in Ocarina: I had the boomerang/hookshot pinned to one slot, the ocarina to another, with the third usually set to the slingshot/bow but could be set for whatever other item Link needed at the moment. Now any equipped mask needs a slot, and I had it set where the boomerang/hookshot went, which was usually fine except when I needed to ranged attack, I’d instinctively hit that button which would take Link out of Deku scrub form, taking away his one ranged attack.
The turtle-like snappers Link saw on his path through the Woods of Mystery are here in the dungeon, and Deku Link can take them out by diving into a flower and popping up from underneath them. This is a good skill to learn, because one of the dungeon’s minibosses rides a snapper during the second phase of the battle and has to be continually dismounted.
The dungeon’s boss is a masked jungle warrior named Odolwa. I’m pretty sure the idea for this fight is to stun him with the bow and thwack him with the sword while he’s stunned, but after doing that once or twice and then being swarmed by insects I had to fight off, I decided to go with a different tack. Namely, I charged at him, blocked or dodged his attacks, and hacked at his shins till he died. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to work, but screw it, it did.
After Odolwa is defeated, Link is transported to… I’m not sure what it is, actually. It’s misty and cloudy, and there’s a humanoid figure in the distance that starts singing a song that Link repeats on his ocarina that turns out to be called the Oath to Order. The figure says “Call us” before Link returns to the normal world.
With Odolwa gone, the swamps have cleared up, and Link can free the Deku princess to take her home. She’s a little more accommodating than Ruto was, and is able to be transported in Link’s bottle, which I was shocked to learn was empty because I’d had a fairy before resetting time. I guess it’s better than discovering bottle contents don’t carry over between loops by Link not being fairy-rezzed if Odolwa had killed him. Before taking the princess home, Link stops at the nearby fairy fountain to drop off the stray fairies, and the reconstructed great fairy teaches him the spin attack.
When the Deku princess is released in the Deku throne room, she’s rather furious about the treatment of the monkey and jumps up and down on the king (one of the scrubs in the background imitates her, too) and demands the monkey’s release. Out of gratitude to Link, she offers him a reward, which involves entering a cave and then chasing the Deku butler as he runs through. I tried to do this with the Deku mask, but yeesh. It’s much easier, if slightly twitchy, with the bunny hood. The butler apologizes for his competitiveness, saying that Link reminds him of his missing son. The reward turns out to be a pig mask, the Mask of Scents, which can be used to find mushrooms.
All in all, this took just over a (slowed down) day.
Next: Why.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Majora's Mask: Exploring the Swamp
Okay, the vacation’s over, it’s time to get back to work figuring out how to save Clock Town. After grabbing some rupees in case he needs them (there’s a silver rupee in a chest in town that’s pretty easy to get to with the bunny hood), Link and Tatl head south to the swamp. Tatl sees a carving of the Skull Kid with her and Tael on a tree near the swamp entrance, providing a perfect segue to a flashback of how the two of them met the Skull Kid and became his friends. After a few scenes of the three playing together and making the carving, we see the Skull Kid steal Majora’s Mask. The whole thing makes the Skull Kid look a little more sympathetic, like he’s just one more person who needs saving from the mask’s evil power.
On the road into the swamp, there’s a heart piece in a tree for Link to collect, and Tingle’s floating overhead just waiting to be shot down for his chance to sell a couple more maps. His introduction speech is getting really old, and I’d admire Link’s patience with him if it wasn’t apparently supposed to be shared by the player. A little farther into the swamp Link meets Tingle’s father running a tourist center and complaining about his son. Outside the swamp, there’s a Deku scrub wanting to move to greener pastures, and I didn’t start the trading sequence so I’ll have to come back to this in a bit.
The swamp’s water is poisonous, so instead of Link swimming to explore, Deku Link hops between lily pads to go deeper into the swamp. He passes by a potion shop to find a Lost Woods-esque area called the Woods of Mystery. A monkey offers to show Link the way through the woods if he can keep up, and leads Link to an injured witch, Koume. Link doesn’t have anything to give the witch to help her, so he has to double back to the potion shop, where Kotake, Koume’s twin sister works; Kotake gives Link a potion to help Koume. Link brings the potion to Koume, and gets to keep his first bottle as a token of gratitude. Koume returns to her job at the tourist shack; as Link exits the woods, a bunch of monkeys ask him to help another monkey who’s been taken prisoner by the Deku scrubs.
Link returns to the tourist center, where Koume gives him a boat ride deeper into the swamp, and a pictograph box to take a picture to enter in the center’s contest. She drops him off at the Deku Palace, which will only let him in if he’s wearing the Deku mask, and even then only to see the monkey’s humiliation. Apparently the Deku scrubs believe the monkey kidnapped their princess and may have eaten her, but the monkey insists that the princess’ is in trouble and it’s not his fault but someone needs to help her out. Before leaving the throne room, Link uses the camera to take a picture of the Deku King. As Link leaves the throne room, the monkey’s brother comes to him to suggest sneaking into the cage using a magic bean to reach the upper level of the palace. The bean salesman is hiding in a hole under the palace gardens, which Link has to sneak through or the guards will throw him out. Beans work differently in this game because we don’t have seven years to wait for them to grow; spring water will immediately do the trick. Also hidden in the gardens is a heart piece.
Link leaves the palace, goes around the side, and finds a place to plant the bean. Then he sneaks back into the palace and uses flowers to platform over the gardens and work his way into the monkey’s cage. The monkey explains that he and the princess went to the Woodfall Temple to try to cleanse the swamp, but the princess got captured and he escaped, only he can’t convince the Deku scrubs that’s the truth. So he teaches Link the Sonata of Awakening, the song to open the temple, and unfortunately Link’s playing it to confirm he knows it attracts too much attention. Link is thrown out and the scrubs begin to prepare to punish the monkey.
There’s nothing Link can do for the monkey right now, so he heads for the temple. It’s a lot of platforming and enemies who like to knock Link off platforms. Before Link enters Woodfall, an owl (Kaepora Gaebora?) comes to him to teach him the Song of Soaring, which will let Link teleport to any of the owl statues around Termina that he’s activated. It’s a much more useful quick travel system than Ocarina of Time had. In Woodfall, there’s another heart piece just waiting to be claimed, and an owl statue conveniently located by the temple entrance.
I’m going to wait for a fresh cycle before trying to tackle a dungeon, so let’s wrap some stuff up and reset. Link uses the Song of Soaring to zip back to Clock Town, and gets the Moon’s Tear and trades it for the flower title deed. Then he teleports to the swamp tourist center and gives the deed to the scrub, who trades his flower’s deed for it. Link uses the flower to get on top of the center where there’s another heart piece, and goes inside to enter his picture in the contest. The man is impressed by Link managing to get a picture of the Deku King and awards him another heart piece. Then it’s back to Clock Town, put rupees in the bank, and play the Song of Time to start anew.
Next: Save the princess, save the monkey.
On the road into the swamp, there’s a heart piece in a tree for Link to collect, and Tingle’s floating overhead just waiting to be shot down for his chance to sell a couple more maps. His introduction speech is getting really old, and I’d admire Link’s patience with him if it wasn’t apparently supposed to be shared by the player. A little farther into the swamp Link meets Tingle’s father running a tourist center and complaining about his son. Outside the swamp, there’s a Deku scrub wanting to move to greener pastures, and I didn’t start the trading sequence so I’ll have to come back to this in a bit.
The swamp’s water is poisonous, so instead of Link swimming to explore, Deku Link hops between lily pads to go deeper into the swamp. He passes by a potion shop to find a Lost Woods-esque area called the Woods of Mystery. A monkey offers to show Link the way through the woods if he can keep up, and leads Link to an injured witch, Koume. Link doesn’t have anything to give the witch to help her, so he has to double back to the potion shop, where Kotake, Koume’s twin sister works; Kotake gives Link a potion to help Koume. Link brings the potion to Koume, and gets to keep his first bottle as a token of gratitude. Koume returns to her job at the tourist shack; as Link exits the woods, a bunch of monkeys ask him to help another monkey who’s been taken prisoner by the Deku scrubs.
Link returns to the tourist center, where Koume gives him a boat ride deeper into the swamp, and a pictograph box to take a picture to enter in the center’s contest. She drops him off at the Deku Palace, which will only let him in if he’s wearing the Deku mask, and even then only to see the monkey’s humiliation. Apparently the Deku scrubs believe the monkey kidnapped their princess and may have eaten her, but the monkey insists that the princess’ is in trouble and it’s not his fault but someone needs to help her out. Before leaving the throne room, Link uses the camera to take a picture of the Deku King. As Link leaves the throne room, the monkey’s brother comes to him to suggest sneaking into the cage using a magic bean to reach the upper level of the palace. The bean salesman is hiding in a hole under the palace gardens, which Link has to sneak through or the guards will throw him out. Beans work differently in this game because we don’t have seven years to wait for them to grow; spring water will immediately do the trick. Also hidden in the gardens is a heart piece.
Link leaves the palace, goes around the side, and finds a place to plant the bean. Then he sneaks back into the palace and uses flowers to platform over the gardens and work his way into the monkey’s cage. The monkey explains that he and the princess went to the Woodfall Temple to try to cleanse the swamp, but the princess got captured and he escaped, only he can’t convince the Deku scrubs that’s the truth. So he teaches Link the Sonata of Awakening, the song to open the temple, and unfortunately Link’s playing it to confirm he knows it attracts too much attention. Link is thrown out and the scrubs begin to prepare to punish the monkey.
There’s nothing Link can do for the monkey right now, so he heads for the temple. It’s a lot of platforming and enemies who like to knock Link off platforms. Before Link enters Woodfall, an owl (Kaepora Gaebora?) comes to him to teach him the Song of Soaring, which will let Link teleport to any of the owl statues around Termina that he’s activated. It’s a much more useful quick travel system than Ocarina of Time had. In Woodfall, there’s another heart piece just waiting to be claimed, and an owl statue conveniently located by the temple entrance.
I’m going to wait for a fresh cycle before trying to tackle a dungeon, so let’s wrap some stuff up and reset. Link uses the Song of Soaring to zip back to Clock Town, and gets the Moon’s Tear and trades it for the flower title deed. Then he teleports to the swamp tourist center and gives the deed to the scrub, who trades his flower’s deed for it. Link uses the flower to get on top of the center where there’s another heart piece, and goes inside to enter his picture in the contest. The man is impressed by Link managing to get a picture of the Deku King and awards him another heart piece. Then it’s back to Clock Town, put rupees in the bank, and play the Song of Time to start anew.
Next: Save the princess, save the monkey.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Majora's Mask: Six Happiness Seals
First Night in Clock Town
There’s a lot to do in the wee hours of the morning/night on the first day. Shortly after midnight, a thief accosts a woman carrying items for her shop; Link can stun him with a bubble and return her items to her, and she rewards him with a Blast Mask which lets him blow stuff up at point-blank range (yes, it hurts), and tells him to stop by the store tomorrow. The Stock Pot Inn’s doors are locked after check-in time, but Link can Dekucopter his way into a second-floor entrance and look around. There’s not much of interest, but there is a hand sticking out of a toilet and desperate for paper. Link can’t help him just yet, but he goes back outside, finds the business scrub selling his flower, and brings the deed back to Mr. Handy. Mr. Handy repays him by bringing out a heart piece that fell in, and Link apparently has no problem using a heart piece that had fallen into a toilet given to him by a hand that just been used to wipe its owner’s bum.
In the little secluded area where Link found the missing piece of the great fairy, there’s the game’s equivalent of the organ player from the Kakariko windmill, still playing the Song of Storms. He tells Link he was once part of an animal troupe, and was jealous of the leader’s Handle Animal skill, and stole his mask; after the confession, he gives the Bremen Mask to Link. North of town, there’s a dancing ghost who teaches Link his dance and gives him a mask in the hopes that the dance will be spread further. Link gets his chance when he finds a pair of twin sister dancers wearing really really short dresses who are trying to figure out new moves for the festival. He puts on the ghost’s mask and teaches the sisters the dance, and they give him a piece of heart out of gratitude.
Falling Down Holes
Link returns to the Astral Observatory and uses the telescope again. He notices the business scrub who bought the Moon's Tear flying over the town and landing in a hole in Termina Field near the observatory. So, it’s time to run out into the field and fall down holes. The scrub’s still in the hole Link saw him fly into, and sells him a heart piece to keep the location a secret to everybody. (He abandons it anyway, just to be on the safe side.) There are two more holes: one near where Link saw the ghost dancer with a pair of dodongos inside, and one near the takkuri’s spawn point with a peahat. Falling in these holes and killing the enemies therein awards Link two more pieces of heart.
Going past the takkuri leads Link to the Milk Road, which will ultimately lead to Romani Ranch, but the way is blocked by a giant boulder. A man is chipping away at the boulder, and tells Link to come back tomorrow and maybe it’ll be gone. There’s not much else here, except Tingle. Shooting Tingle down lets Link buy maps from him… after Tingle goes through his whole introduction speech again. Back in town, Link can buy a bomb bag from the woman whose inventory he saved, and even skip right to having the first bomb capacity upgrade.
Romani Ranch
On the third day, the boulder is gone blocking access to the ranch. The music is the same from Lon Lon Ranch in Ocarina of Time, and as Link wanders the ranch, he discovers that the people here have taken in his horse. But something terrible has happened. There’s a young girl more than a little reminiscent of Malon in the fields with a terrible expression on her face and unable to say much. Her older sister (who resembles the older Malon) in the barn blames herself what happened to her, as well as to their cows, because she didn’t listen. There’s not much Link can do for them except add their names to the notebook and hope that on a later rotation he’s able to get past the boulder in time to prevent whatever happened.
In the cucco house, the man tending the chicks says he’s not too upset about the world ending, but he wishes he could have seen his chicks grow up. Remembering what he was told about the Bremen mask, Link puts it on and starts marching around the area, and the chicks all fall in line behind him. This is a really cute sequence, between the cheerful music Link’s playing and the little lemons lining up. Once they’re all caught, the chicks grow one-by-one into full-grown cuccos, and the man is happy to see it and has no regrets about his impending demise. He gives Link the Bunny Hood, which now allows Link to run faster. After a brief stop to kill the takkuri one last time and drop all the rupees in the bank, it’s finally time to reset the clock and start over.
Next: Monkey business.
There’s a lot to do in the wee hours of the morning/night on the first day. Shortly after midnight, a thief accosts a woman carrying items for her shop; Link can stun him with a bubble and return her items to her, and she rewards him with a Blast Mask which lets him blow stuff up at point-blank range (yes, it hurts), and tells him to stop by the store tomorrow. The Stock Pot Inn’s doors are locked after check-in time, but Link can Dekucopter his way into a second-floor entrance and look around. There’s not much of interest, but there is a hand sticking out of a toilet and desperate for paper. Link can’t help him just yet, but he goes back outside, finds the business scrub selling his flower, and brings the deed back to Mr. Handy. Mr. Handy repays him by bringing out a heart piece that fell in, and Link apparently has no problem using a heart piece that had fallen into a toilet given to him by a hand that just been used to wipe its owner’s bum.
In the little secluded area where Link found the missing piece of the great fairy, there’s the game’s equivalent of the organ player from the Kakariko windmill, still playing the Song of Storms. He tells Link he was once part of an animal troupe, and was jealous of the leader’s Handle Animal skill, and stole his mask; after the confession, he gives the Bremen Mask to Link. North of town, there’s a dancing ghost who teaches Link his dance and gives him a mask in the hopes that the dance will be spread further. Link gets his chance when he finds a pair of twin sister dancers wearing really really short dresses who are trying to figure out new moves for the festival. He puts on the ghost’s mask and teaches the sisters the dance, and they give him a piece of heart out of gratitude.
Falling Down Holes
Link returns to the Astral Observatory and uses the telescope again. He notices the business scrub who bought the Moon's Tear flying over the town and landing in a hole in Termina Field near the observatory. So, it’s time to run out into the field and fall down holes. The scrub’s still in the hole Link saw him fly into, and sells him a heart piece to keep the location a secret to everybody. (He abandons it anyway, just to be on the safe side.) There are two more holes: one near where Link saw the ghost dancer with a pair of dodongos inside, and one near the takkuri’s spawn point with a peahat. Falling in these holes and killing the enemies therein awards Link two more pieces of heart.
Going past the takkuri leads Link to the Milk Road, which will ultimately lead to Romani Ranch, but the way is blocked by a giant boulder. A man is chipping away at the boulder, and tells Link to come back tomorrow and maybe it’ll be gone. There’s not much else here, except Tingle. Shooting Tingle down lets Link buy maps from him… after Tingle goes through his whole introduction speech again. Back in town, Link can buy a bomb bag from the woman whose inventory he saved, and even skip right to having the first bomb capacity upgrade.
Romani Ranch
On the third day, the boulder is gone blocking access to the ranch. The music is the same from Lon Lon Ranch in Ocarina of Time, and as Link wanders the ranch, he discovers that the people here have taken in his horse. But something terrible has happened. There’s a young girl more than a little reminiscent of Malon in the fields with a terrible expression on her face and unable to say much. Her older sister (who resembles the older Malon) in the barn blames herself what happened to her, as well as to their cows, because she didn’t listen. There’s not much Link can do for them except add their names to the notebook and hope that on a later rotation he’s able to get past the boulder in time to prevent whatever happened.
In the cucco house, the man tending the chicks says he’s not too upset about the world ending, but he wishes he could have seen his chicks grow up. Remembering what he was told about the Bremen mask, Link puts it on and starts marching around the area, and the chicks all fall in line behind him. This is a really cute sequence, between the cheerful music Link’s playing and the little lemons lining up. Once they’re all caught, the chicks grow one-by-one into full-grown cuccos, and the man is happy to see it and has no regrets about his impending demise. He gives Link the Bunny Hood, which now allows Link to run faster. After a brief stop to kill the takkuri one last time and drop all the rupees in the bank, it’s finally time to reset the clock and start over.
Next: Monkey business.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Majora's Mask: Human Again
Link goes back into the clock tower to meet with the mask salesman again. The salesman is happy that Link got his ocarina back and teaches him the Song of Healing. Link plays the song and returns to normal, keeping a Deku scrub mask to allow him to transform back should he wish it. The salesman then asks for the mask the Skull Kid stole.
Well, crap.
The salesman explains that the mask he wants is indeed Majora’s Mask, which is said to have been used in witchcraft and now gives its wearer “an evil and wicked power.” Like, the ability to crash the moon into the world. So, Link intends to honor the original quest and get the mask back. After all, he got the ocarina, and thanks to the Song of Time, he’s got as long as he needs. How much harder can the mask be?
As Link leaves the clock tower again, Tatl says that the four areas Tael mentioned lie to the north, east, south, and west of Clock Town. She has no idea what he meant by “the four who are there,” but we’ll figure that out when we go. She first points Link to the swamp south of town, but Link just got his human form back and is a little freer to explore Clock Town, plus the Song of Time pretty much kills any urgency no matter how close the moon gets, so let’s take a three-day vacation to explore the city and a little of its surrounding environments, and heck, use the inverted Song of Time to make those three days more like… I don’t know, it felt like forever, to be honest. In hindsight, it may have been a bit overkill. On the bright side, Tatl has stopped bugging Link about what to do next.
Link’s lost the deed to the deku flower, so he goes to the astral laboratory, lets the Skull Kid wiggle his butt at him again, and claims another Moon’s Tear. On the way out, the leader of the gang of kids asks how he figured out their code, and figures if he did that he should be in the gang, and formally inducts Link into the Bombers Secret Society of Justice. It turns out the group’s main purpose is to help people with problems, so Link should fit right in. He gets a notebook to help keep track ofsidequests people he’s yet to help, with the Bombers themselves the first entry and marked off with a happiness seal.
The Great Fairy offered further help to Link if he ever returned to human form, so that’s the next stop. Except, oops, she’s back to being exploded, so Link needs to round up the stray fairy again, return her to the Great Fairy’s pond to be reassembled. She gives Link a Great Fairy’s Mask, which will help him find other stray fairies. It’s also worth revisiting the Deku Scrub Playground, as it turns out part of my difficulty was that it gets harder each day, so I was jumping right into Hard Mode without having a chance to familiarize myself with Easy Mode. Link gets 50 rupees each time he sets a record, and a piece of heart (and banned from playing further… at least for that cycle) if he does it all three days. And finally for this area, there’s a heart piece in a tree that Link can get now that he’s human again.
With the Inverted Song of Time running, I had a lot of time to kill on this cycle, so Link spent a good deal of time out in Termina Field. Most of that was headed to the entrance of the Milk Road and fighting the takkuri, a big bird that made its home there. The takkuri knocks rupees loose from Link when it hits, but that’s okay because when it dies it drops more rupees than Link can hold (max 99) [1]. So, I’d take these back to the bank and come back for another round. After Link deposits 200 rupees, he gets the Adult’s Wallet, increasing his rupee capacity to 200 – still not more than the takkuri drops. I got the bank account up over 1000 this cycle, which rewarded Link with a measly 5 extra rupees in interest.
In West Clock Town, there are a couple more heart pieces Link can get now. One involves mastery of a Z-targeting swordsmanship game, cutting ten logs in half before they despawn. The second involves talking to the postman, who’s playing a game where he tries to stop at exactly 10 seconds. I used a stopwatch to help me with this, and got it on the third try, which is better luck than I usually have even with a stopwatch. (My cat was not impressed, glaring at me when I shouted in triumph.)
Next: A helping hand.
[1] I've since discovered it can steal Link's sword or a bottle, which is less okay, and I was just lucky the first several times I killed it.
Well, crap.
The salesman explains that the mask he wants is indeed Majora’s Mask, which is said to have been used in witchcraft and now gives its wearer “an evil and wicked power.” Like, the ability to crash the moon into the world. So, Link intends to honor the original quest and get the mask back. After all, he got the ocarina, and thanks to the Song of Time, he’s got as long as he needs. How much harder can the mask be?
As Link leaves the clock tower again, Tatl says that the four areas Tael mentioned lie to the north, east, south, and west of Clock Town. She has no idea what he meant by “the four who are there,” but we’ll figure that out when we go. She first points Link to the swamp south of town, but Link just got his human form back and is a little freer to explore Clock Town, plus the Song of Time pretty much kills any urgency no matter how close the moon gets, so let’s take a three-day vacation to explore the city and a little of its surrounding environments, and heck, use the inverted Song of Time to make those three days more like… I don’t know, it felt like forever, to be honest. In hindsight, it may have been a bit overkill. On the bright side, Tatl has stopped bugging Link about what to do next.
Link’s lost the deed to the deku flower, so he goes to the astral laboratory, lets the Skull Kid wiggle his butt at him again, and claims another Moon’s Tear. On the way out, the leader of the gang of kids asks how he figured out their code, and figures if he did that he should be in the gang, and formally inducts Link into the Bombers Secret Society of Justice. It turns out the group’s main purpose is to help people with problems, so Link should fit right in. He gets a notebook to help keep track of
The Great Fairy offered further help to Link if he ever returned to human form, so that’s the next stop. Except, oops, she’s back to being exploded, so Link needs to round up the stray fairy again, return her to the Great Fairy’s pond to be reassembled. She gives Link a Great Fairy’s Mask, which will help him find other stray fairies. It’s also worth revisiting the Deku Scrub Playground, as it turns out part of my difficulty was that it gets harder each day, so I was jumping right into Hard Mode without having a chance to familiarize myself with Easy Mode. Link gets 50 rupees each time he sets a record, and a piece of heart (and banned from playing further… at least for that cycle) if he does it all three days. And finally for this area, there’s a heart piece in a tree that Link can get now that he’s human again.
With the Inverted Song of Time running, I had a lot of time to kill on this cycle, so Link spent a good deal of time out in Termina Field. Most of that was headed to the entrance of the Milk Road and fighting the takkuri, a big bird that made its home there. The takkuri knocks rupees loose from Link when it hits, but that’s okay because when it dies it drops more rupees than Link can hold (max 99) [1]. So, I’d take these back to the bank and come back for another round. After Link deposits 200 rupees, he gets the Adult’s Wallet, increasing his rupee capacity to 200 – still not more than the takkuri drops. I got the bank account up over 1000 this cycle, which rewarded Link with a measly 5 extra rupees in interest.
In West Clock Town, there are a couple more heart pieces Link can get now. One involves mastery of a Z-targeting swordsmanship game, cutting ten logs in half before they despawn. The second involves talking to the postman, who’s playing a game where he tries to stop at exactly 10 seconds. I used a stopwatch to help me with this, and got it on the third try, which is better luck than I usually have even with a stopwatch. (My cat was not impressed, glaring at me when I shouted in triumph.)
Next: A helping hand.
[1] I've since discovered it can steal Link's sword or a bottle, which is less okay, and I was just lucky the first several times I killed it.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Majora's Mask: Ocarina of Time
Clock Town is the town that was shown in the intro, and everybody’s working toward a big celebration on the third day. Deku Link seems to be beneath notice, so he’s free to go about trying to get his ocarina and the salesman’s mask back. Tatl suggests visiting a Great Fairy in town, which is a good idea in theory, but the fairy apparently got careless dealing with the Skull Kid, and got blasted into a bunch of tiny fairies, and one of them’s gone missing. So, of course, it’s up to Link to track down the missing fairy and bring her back to the fountain, where the Great Fairy becomes whole again and rewards Link for his help by giving him the ability to blow bubbles.
The bubbles allow Link to pop a balloon, gaining the attention of the leader of a gang of kids running around town. The leader challenges Link to find them all in a game of hide-and-seek before sunrise. They’re easy to find, but difficult to catch unless Link hits them with more bubbles, which stun them and let Link close the gap. And so, Link wins the game, but the group apparently has a “no scrubs” policy and refuses to let him join. They are fairly sporting, however, and teach him the password to the tunnel to the astral observatory.
After going through the tunnel, Link finds a scarecrow who teaches him further tricks he can do with the Song of Time once he learns it. The astronomer, Professor Shikashi, complains about the Skull Kid’s antics and offers to let Link take a look through his telescope. Link sees the Skull Kid atop the clock tower; the Skull Kid seems to realize he’s being watched because he does something to the moon to make a Moon’s Tear fall, and then taunts Link by waving his butt at him.
Link can take the Moon’s Tear back to Clock Town, where he finds a business scrub willing to sell Link the flower it’s occupying for it. It’s a good trade, that will let Link wait at the door to the clock tower until it opens on the night of the festival. There’s not a lot left to do right now, so here’s some stuff going on in the town:
Next: The curse lifted.
The bubbles allow Link to pop a balloon, gaining the attention of the leader of a gang of kids running around town. The leader challenges Link to find them all in a game of hide-and-seek before sunrise. They’re easy to find, but difficult to catch unless Link hits them with more bubbles, which stun them and let Link close the gap. And so, Link wins the game, but the group apparently has a “no scrubs” policy and refuses to let him join. They are fairly sporting, however, and teach him the password to the tunnel to the astral observatory.
After going through the tunnel, Link finds a scarecrow who teaches him further tricks he can do with the Song of Time once he learns it. The astronomer, Professor Shikashi, complains about the Skull Kid’s antics and offers to let Link take a look through his telescope. Link sees the Skull Kid atop the clock tower; the Skull Kid seems to realize he’s being watched because he does something to the moon to make a Moon’s Tear fall, and then taunts Link by waving his butt at him.
Link can take the Moon’s Tear back to Clock Town, where he finds a business scrub willing to sell Link the flower it’s occupying for it. It’s a good trade, that will let Link wait at the door to the clock tower until it opens on the night of the festival. There’s not a lot left to do right now, so here’s some stuff going on in the town:
- I didn’t mention this earlier because it’s irrelevant to the main quest so far, but Link met Tingle selling maps of Clock Town. It was five rupees and marks all the points of interest in town, so it’s a good deal. Tingle is a 35-year-old man who wants to be a fairy, to the point of dressing like one, to his father’s embarrassment. I’m aware he’s not overwhelmingly popular, but I’m trying not to let that color my perception too much.
- Tatl is a lot more demanding than Navi was, even if her alert noise isn’t “Hey!” Navi’s hints were like “Here’s what we should be doing next, in case you’ve gotten so caught up playing music for singing frogs that you’ve forgotten,” while Tatl’s more like, “What are you doing? We have a quest to finish!” I guess it makes sense given the strict time limit.
- There’s a bank in Western Clock Town that records deposits by stamping them on the account holder. This will protect Link in case he has a catastrophe like being sent back in time three days, so I deposited some to test it out at first, then everything before going to confront the Skull Kid at the end.
- I played a couple minigames while waiting for nightfall on the third day. One of these is to find the way through a maze whose walls only pop up as needed to block Link’s path to a treasure chest that contains Deku nuts. This is a pretty pointless game, so I found a better one. In a corner that can only be accessed by Deku flower, a couple business scrubs run a platforming game. The reward is more substantial here (50 rupees), but the game is a giant pain in the nostrils. The first jump is a nightmare, and they don’t get much easier.
- Dawn/dusk of each day having a cutscene that interrupts Link: A good way to mark milestones on the passing of time, but it’s already getting old, and I can only imagine it’s going to get worse.
Next: The curse lifted.
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Majora's Mask: Introduction and Story
I remember, when I first heard of Majora’s Mask, thinking it was a surprise that Nintendo had come out with a new Zelda game so soon after the previous one. I know almost nothing about this game beyond what I’m going to cover in the intro here. The only things I think I might know are that after three days the moon will crash into the world for a game over, but Link can Groundhog Day himself back to the start to buy himself more time.
Story
There are two short videos introducing the game before the start. Neither one is particularly informative. In both, Link watches as familiar-looking people (there are a lot of character designs reused from Ocarina of Time) go about their business. The first loop has the inhabitants of a small town working; the second seems to focus on a farm/ranch, and then gets bizarre with stalfos dancing around a fire. Both videos end with a discordant theme taking over from the more relaxing one as the camera pans up a clock tower to a skull kid wearing an evil-looking mask and a very large moon with an evil-looking smile/grimace.
The skull kid’s mask is also seen being admired by a character who looks like (and might actually be) the mask shop salesman from Ocarina of Time, and it appears in the title screen, so I’m going to guess it’s Majora’s Mask. Now it’s time to start the game.
In the land of Hyrule, there echoes a legend. A legend held dearly by the Royal Family that tells of a boy…
A boy who, after battling evil and saving Hyrule, crept away from that land that had made him a legend…
Done with the battles he once waged across time, he embarked on a journey. A secret and personal journey…
A journey is search of a beloved and invaluable friend…
A friend with whom he parted ways when he finally fulfilled his heroic destiny and took his place among legends…
So this is the young Link from Ocarina of Time, having come up with and enacted a new plan with Zelda to stop Ganon, and now gone to locate a friend, who’s probably Navi. It could be Saria, but since this is before she had to become a sage, she’s probably hanging about at her spot in the Lost Woods.
As Link rides through a forest, a brother/sister pair of fairies – one light, one dark – spook his horse (Epona?), who throws Link. While Link’s still out, the Skull Kid comes up to him and takes his ocarina, playing a few notes on it while the fairies titter. Link comes to and tries to get the ocarina back, but the Skull Kid jumps up on the horse and rides off. Link grabs onto something and holds on for quite a while, but ultimately can’t anymore.
That doesn’t mean he’s giving up the chase, however. He eventually finds the Skull Kid again, who says he got rid of the horse, and when Link tries to fight again, goes all scary. After a brief vision sequence of Link’s, he finds that he’s been turned into a Deku scrub. The Skull Kid runs off, and Link tries to pursue, so one of the fairies blocks his pursuit, only to be separated from her brother and the Skull Kid by a closing door. The fairy blames Link for their separation, but reluctantly teams with him in the hopes of being reunited. Her name is Tatl, and the developers apparently realized how annoying people found Navi because she doesn’t say “Hey!” to get the player’s attention. Instead, when she gets Link’s attention, there’s a small bell ringing sound.
The game’s still in tutorial mode, both for people who aren’t familiar with the controls for Ocarina, and for everyone getting used to the Deku scrub form. Deku scrubs can’t use swords, but they have a nice spin attack that can destroy plants (if they don’t run away and hide first, wtp). Also, they can merge with Deku flowers, then pop out and glide for short distances. There’s an area where Link gets to test this out with the ability to fall to the floor but climb back up, and then a larger area where it’s just the platforms. One of those platforms has a chest with Deku nuts in them, which Link can use as bombs while flying.
Link makes it over the platforms and passes through a warped hallway like the ones in Ocarina’s Forest Temple into a building. As he comes to the door out near the top, someone speaks to him from behind, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” Link turns to see the man from the mask shop in Hyrule Castle Market, who’s traveling in search of new masks. He says the Skull Kid stole a mask from him, and he’d like it back, and is willing to help Link return to his original form if Link will help get the mask back. To that end, Link needs to get his ocarina back from the Skull Kid. And one more thing: the Mask Salesman is only going to be around for three days, after which he’ll have to move on.
Armed with a mission, Link steps out into Clock Town to begin his quest.
Next: Three days in Clock Town.
Story
There are two short videos introducing the game before the start. Neither one is particularly informative. In both, Link watches as familiar-looking people (there are a lot of character designs reused from Ocarina of Time) go about their business. The first loop has the inhabitants of a small town working; the second seems to focus on a farm/ranch, and then gets bizarre with stalfos dancing around a fire. Both videos end with a discordant theme taking over from the more relaxing one as the camera pans up a clock tower to a skull kid wearing an evil-looking mask and a very large moon with an evil-looking smile/grimace.
The skull kid’s mask is also seen being admired by a character who looks like (and might actually be) the mask shop salesman from Ocarina of Time, and it appears in the title screen, so I’m going to guess it’s Majora’s Mask. Now it’s time to start the game.
In the land of Hyrule, there echoes a legend. A legend held dearly by the Royal Family that tells of a boy…
A boy who, after battling evil and saving Hyrule, crept away from that land that had made him a legend…
Done with the battles he once waged across time, he embarked on a journey. A secret and personal journey…
A journey is search of a beloved and invaluable friend…
A friend with whom he parted ways when he finally fulfilled his heroic destiny and took his place among legends…
So this is the young Link from Ocarina of Time, having come up with and enacted a new plan with Zelda to stop Ganon, and now gone to locate a friend, who’s probably Navi. It could be Saria, but since this is before she had to become a sage, she’s probably hanging about at her spot in the Lost Woods.
As Link rides through a forest, a brother/sister pair of fairies – one light, one dark – spook his horse (Epona?), who throws Link. While Link’s still out, the Skull Kid comes up to him and takes his ocarina, playing a few notes on it while the fairies titter. Link comes to and tries to get the ocarina back, but the Skull Kid jumps up on the horse and rides off. Link grabs onto something and holds on for quite a while, but ultimately can’t anymore.
That doesn’t mean he’s giving up the chase, however. He eventually finds the Skull Kid again, who says he got rid of the horse, and when Link tries to fight again, goes all scary. After a brief vision sequence of Link’s, he finds that he’s been turned into a Deku scrub. The Skull Kid runs off, and Link tries to pursue, so one of the fairies blocks his pursuit, only to be separated from her brother and the Skull Kid by a closing door. The fairy blames Link for their separation, but reluctantly teams with him in the hopes of being reunited. Her name is Tatl, and the developers apparently realized how annoying people found Navi because she doesn’t say “Hey!” to get the player’s attention. Instead, when she gets Link’s attention, there’s a small bell ringing sound.
The game’s still in tutorial mode, both for people who aren’t familiar with the controls for Ocarina, and for everyone getting used to the Deku scrub form. Deku scrubs can’t use swords, but they have a nice spin attack that can destroy plants (if they don’t run away and hide first, wtp). Also, they can merge with Deku flowers, then pop out and glide for short distances. There’s an area where Link gets to test this out with the ability to fall to the floor but climb back up, and then a larger area where it’s just the platforms. One of those platforms has a chest with Deku nuts in them, which Link can use as bombs while flying.
Link makes it over the platforms and passes through a warped hallway like the ones in Ocarina’s Forest Temple into a building. As he comes to the door out near the top, someone speaks to him from behind, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” Link turns to see the man from the mask shop in Hyrule Castle Market, who’s traveling in search of new masks. He says the Skull Kid stole a mask from him, and he’d like it back, and is willing to help Link return to his original form if Link will help get the mask back. To that end, Link needs to get his ocarina back from the Skull Kid. And one more thing: the Mask Salesman is only going to be around for three days, after which he’ll have to move on.
Armed with a mission, Link steps out into Clock Town to begin his quest.
Next: Three days in Clock Town.
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