25 Years Ago the Most Melancholy Zelda Foreshadowed the Rise of Roguelikes

By Marc Normandin | April 25, 2025 | 10:30am

Video Games Features The Legend of Zelda

25 Years Ago the Most Melancholy Zelda Foreshadowed the Rise of Roguelikes

Majora’s Mask, which was originally released 25 years ago this weekend, is something of an outlier in the long-running Legend of Zelda series. It fits the early conventions of the series in that it’s a direct sequel that gets a little weird with it—a time-honored tradition that, in the case of games like Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask itself, produced a better game than its Triforce-centered predecessor—but otherwise… well, there’s nothing quite like it. Not structurally, not thematically, not gameplay-wise.

At its most basic level, the gameplay of Majora’s Mask is quite like that of Ocarina of Time. You enter some dungeons, you solve some puzzles, you get new items and powers, you progress. There’s an overworld, there are familiar faces and tropes, but it’s all filtered through a different lens here. Whereas Ocarina of Time was Nintendo EAD showing everyone what an action-adventure title could be in this brave new 64-bit world, the transfer of the Zelda formula from its top down, 2D origins to an expansive 3D space, Majora’s Mask was focused on something altogether different—a return to a Zelda concept that never saw the light of day, at least not in its original form. Majora’s Mask was Zelda as roguelike.

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It’s the time loop that does it. You—famously—get three repeating days, and they repeat exactly, unless your own actions change the shape of things within those days. Those changes are temporary, however, even when you’ve done something right or to completion, unless we’re talking about things like acquiring a bow or a bag for your bombs or some heart pieces or the masks that are so central to the entire game. Whenever you play the Song of Time in order to travel back to [dramatic audio cue] the dawn of the first day, you’ve ended a loop, and started a new one. A loop, a run, call it what you will: It’s a roguelike in action.

Majora's Mask 30th

Every run in Majora’s Mask teaches you something new about the world, or the people in it, or the layout of it. What treasures it holds, what dangers there are, the most efficient paths you must take, the secrets that will help you survive longer and more effectively. Link has possession of a notebook that is constantly being filled out with more specific information that doesn’t have to be contained in your head, where it will bump up against all of your pathfinding and curiosity and obsession with getting things just right. This is where you keep your memories of the people of Clock Town and the surrounding areas—memories that only you possess, since they are otherwise wiped clean every time you kick yourself back to that first dawn. This structure, and these notes, are why people have so long referred to the structure of Majora’s Mask as akin to Groundhog Day. Bill Murray’s character in that movie constantly relives the same day over and over again, trying to solve its mystery, to find the key that will free him from this particular prison, bettering himself in myriad ways until he can use all of his accumulated knowledge to escape. Does this mean that Groundhog Day is also a roguelike? The evidence says what the evidence says, you know?

Majora’s Mask was released two whole decades before Hades, which—among other games—helped make roguelikes a more popular genre in the present, internationally, than they’d been at the time of this offbeat Zelda. While the structure of the two is different in a number of ways, the length of the loops are about the same, and they both have in common the protagonist—and the player controlling them—coming to an understanding of the game world through those repeated loops. An understanding they would not have otherwise. That’s just the core gameplay of these titles, which can be dressed up and presented in different ways in different structures. In the end, though, loops and runs, loops and runs, that’s what we’re talking about here. Slay the Spire is a deck-building roguelike. Balatro used playing cards for a fake poker roguelike. Shiren the Wanderer was supposed to be a kinder, welcoming roguelike even as it hid whether items were cursed from you or what their function was, which tells you a lot about roguelikes. Fatal Labyrinth made death by starvation possible, but also death by overeating, and did not tell you the size of the food items you found on the ground that could solve the first problem or cause the second one. It’s a pretty broad genre with all kinds of subgenres and rudeness attached, which is why Majora’s Mask can have loads of roguelike elements but still not really be considered a real one by, say, the “Berlin Interpretation” of the genre, due to the lack of randomization or procedural generation or permadeath. Which, call Majora’s Mask a roguelite rather than roguelike if you want to satisfy your urge for pedantry, but the main point here is to emphasize how different this particular Zelda game is from the rest, based on a gameplay structure it borrowed from a genre as old as the one it had recently brought to 3D. If not a roguelike itself, it’s at least got some of the genre’s soul dwelling within.

Namco’s arcade smash hit—in Japan, anyway—The Tower of Druaga was a predecessor to roguelikes. Not the predecessor, but a stepping stone on the path that brought us to the invention of the term nearly a decade later. It’s got a lot of the Zelda thing going on, actually, in that you could classify it a number of ways—action-adventure, action RPG, roguelike, dungeon crawler—if for no other reason than its existence helped along the refinement of all of those genres. Shigeru Miyamoto was smitten with it, to the point that Nintendo’s headquarters had a Druaga cabinet within, and the original The Legend of Zelda was, at one point by Miyamoto’s own admission, far more Druaga-like than the final product ended up being. Before Nintendo’s team discovered how wonderful the open-world portion of the game they were making was, Zelda was a game about descending further and further down a dungeon, one floor at a time, progressing via item discovery and use and continually solving environmental puzzles and the like. In some ways, Majora’s Mask is a return to that original promise that required a notebook stuffed with secrets to solve. It’s obviously a much different game than either Druaga or the original vision of The Legend of Zelda, one married to the series’ expansive open-world and its villages and its people and so on, all the parts developed over years and many games until it was much more difficult to detect what it might have had its origins in, but Majora’s Mask did end up as more of a nod to that version of Zelda that never happened thanks to those loops, and their purpose.

And part of what makes Majora’s Mask feel so special these 25 years later is not just that Nintendo EAD nailed what they were going for here, but that it remains unique in the series. These particular threads were not pulled on again elsewhere, and other than the fact that they probably did not want to just do Majora’s Mask again but slightly different—especially when there are other ways to mess with time and mirror dimensions and perspective and that could be explored instead—presumably because of how un-Zelda-like Majora’s Mask is.

To power this different form of Zelda required more than just changes to the game’s structure, but also its themes and purpose. Majora’s Mask is, in a word, unsettling. It’s a far darker Zelda, thematically speaking, than anything else in the series, and this is a franchise with Link’s Awakening among its ranks—a game where, at the end, Link wakes a magical creature from its nap and disappears an entire island and its inhabitants in the process, who were all part of its elaborate, life-giving dream, rather than just staying and living there with them. It is a much darker Zelda, visually. As cartoonish as Zelda’s art can be, Majora’s Mask was still designed to haunt you, and it succeeds at this goal. (And not just because a Nintendo rep once explained why Link screams when he puts on one of the masks of the deceased people of Majora’s Mask and begins to transform with, “It’s very simple! The boundless sorrow surrounding each mask comes rushing inside the wearer when they put it on, so the urge to scream is quite understandable, really.” Can’t argue with that.) Musically, its themes, while cheery and familiar enough at first, have a darkness inhabiting them that sounds as if it’s struggling to break free, which all sets the mood of impending doom. The world surely is coming to an end, and you know as well as Link does that this is true. Not just because both of you have seen it play out, time and time again, but because you, at least, can hear it happening in real-time.

The darkest thing about the game, however, is in how it changes the relationship between Link and the people he meets. Like with every other Zelda, Link devotes himself to remedying not just the big picture evils of the world, but he gets involved in helping every person with every problem of theirs, regardless of the size. It’s a noble path that allows him (and you) to learn about these people and their world along the way, as usual. In Majora’s Mask, however, Link hasn’t actually helped any of them with their personal problems. He’s solved nothing, in this regard, because nothing sticks—the moment you’re back at the dawn of the first day, all of these issues are back once more, waiting to be taken care of by a brave enough hero.

Majora’s Mask works in no small part because it fully understands what a Zelda is and is not supposed to be, just as you do, and then it doesn’t allow it to be that. You get a taste of the satisfaction you’re used to getting, but then it’s ripped away with each loop. Majora’s Mask is a bit different from your typical roguelike for many reasons, but outside of mechanical and structural bits, there’s also this: the goal of a roguelike is to pull off a perfect run. You are working toward something, you are building toward something, you are furthering relationships and acquiring knowledge, and then you—with a little bit of luck—utilize all of that to finally make your way to the end. In Majora’s Mask, most of that is just not the case, and is even impossible given the structure. You have successfully completed Majora’s Mask when you complete the big picture portion of the game’s narrative at the expense of Link’s usual, traditional behavior and successes. When the festival goes off without a hitch and no one in Clock Town is even aware of Link’s presence there, nor aware that disaster has been averted, that’s the true successful loop. Link has failed at being the kind of hero he is typically presented as.

All of this is a bit melancholy for Zelda, which is regularly about hope, about what Link accomplishes and brings to the world outside of simply taking down the big bad, be it Ganondorf or Ganon or Vaati or Null or whomever. Hope that the world can be rebuilt, that lives and relationships can be put back together, that some kind of order can be restored to the people of Hyrule and its surrounding kingdoms, one person at a time—there is none of that here.

Link was merely passing by Clock Town on his way to some other adventure we never got to experience post-Ocarina of Time, when his horse was stolen and he was cursed, leading him into the events of Majora’s Mask. Three days have passed for the world, none of them very eventful for anyone besides the hero of this adventure, because Link, doing his best Bill Murray impression, helped that world escape from its loop-based prison. Majora’s Mask is a bit of a bummer, in that regard, but hey, at least the moon is back where it belongs.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.