You play as Link (No, not Zelda, that's the princess.) who falls prey to a prankster and japester by the name of Skull Kid who steals his Ocarina of Time. You then fall down a hole and confront him. It doesn't end well and he turns you into a Deku Scrub. (Sad plant that shoots bubbles.)
In a quest to find a cure, you find yourself in the land of Termina, a land parallel to Hyrule.
There's just one problem. You have 72 hours of game time to do anything you wish, which equates to 54 real minutes or the meth-face moon will smash into Clock Town and you'll be obliterated by the apocalypse.
Obviously, not great. So to avoid that you have to retrieve your Ocarina and learn a special song that stops the moon from falling.
Well, I say stop. What I mean is, reset the the clock.
So essentially when you're on the final day, you have to reset the clock. You will lose all items and rupees and stray fairies, but keep all key items and masks.
And you do that forever, playing the game in 55 minute segments, trying to get all you need before the clock chimes the final night of the final day.
In Dead Rising 2, you may remember that I hate it when the game times you, but here it only serves to add pace to the gameplay and make sure you're hurrying along.
THEN WHY ARE THERE THOUSANDS OF MINI-GAMES AND SIDE-QUESTS TO TRY AND STOP YOU FROM HURRYING, NINTENDO?
Jeez, it wouldn't be so bad if the game was easy to understand, but some of the tasks are literally impossible to think up. I was lost in a forest for half an hour before realising that I have to go in at a certain time, in order to talk to a witch who flies out on the second day to look for her sister, talk to her sister first and then talk to her for the item to give to her.
It really isn't a game that's accessible to younger kids. For gods sakes, this is not a children's game. And not just because half the models will give them nightmares but because it's just so needlessly complex.
In order to fix the complexity, there is a large stone you can crawl into near the starting point of the game which will tell you what you need to do in order to progress.
You'll be visiting that stone a lot.
And it will judge you and call you a loser as you climb in.
But it's pretty, the textures are awful but colourful and diverse, so the graphics generally shine.
It's only given a disservice by it's complexity. Each character has a timeline so you know where they'll be for each minute of the 54 minutes.
With many masks to collect, many side paths to follow and many things to collect, Majora's Mask is an overall fun game with interesting fights, different mechanics based on what mask Link is wearing and a fun soundtrack.
It also has a fairy who's a middle aged Asian man who sells you maps. So there's that.
