Majora's Mask Solved The Legend of Zelda's Most Common Problem
Most games in The Legend of Zelda series severely lack endgame catharsis, but The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask found a way to deliver this kind of experience to players not just once, but as many times as they wanted. Even though Majora's Mask is set during a three-day window of time, it did something no other Legend of Zelda video game had properly done before - it gave players a sense that they were actually making a change in the world around them.
Nearly all games in The Legend of Zelda series do a great job of putting the player in Link's shoes and conveying to them exactly why the current evil in the world needs to be destroyed, but very few of them actually show signs of those changes occurring along the way. While the most recent game in the franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, allows players to build up an entire town from scratch, it doesn't actually allow them to change any of the ruined buildings around them. Likewise, although The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess let players make minor improvements to the world like rebuilding bridges, these functions served more as gameplay-centered gatekeeping methods and didn't really represent a net loss of evil in the world of Hyrule.
Things are even worse in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where players travel seven years into the future to find the bustling town of Hyrule Market reduced to a dilapidated wasteland full of Redeads. The years under Ganondorf's rule have not been kind to much of Hyrule, and although Link can restore Lake Hylia and rebuild the bridge to the Gerudo Hideout, he can never completely remove the evil from the world. To do that, Link must always once again defeat Ganon, and, more often than not, this will result in a short cutscene, a credits roll, and then the game will reload the player to their last save - before the final battle began.
In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, this feeling of "nothing I do matters" may initially be stronger than in previous titles thanks to the game's three-day time limit, but really the opposite is true. Because of this, anything Link can accomplish in Majora's Mask is designed to be completed within that three-day window, with the majority of the game's minor tasks taking much less time. Nintendo clearly worked hard to make sure players could try and accomplish as many things as possible within the schedule provided, even making sure that all of Majora's Mask's boss fights could be completed in a single loop - something made much easier by completing the dungeon first and unlocking a non-temporally-affected teleporter to the boss' lair.
It's what happens after The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask's bosses are defeated, however, that give this game the sense of catharsis other Zelda titles lack. Defeating bosses in Majora's Mask drastically changes the way the world around them works. Defeating Odolwa in Woodfall Temple removes the poisonous qualities of the surrounding swamp. Eliminating Ghot in Snowhead allows for Spring to finally arrive and the Goron Races to open. It's not just the boss battles in Majora's Mask that make these changes, either - everything from the use of Powder Kegs to bringing water to Ikana Canyon makes a tangible impact in the world of Termina, and efficient players making smart use of the Song of Double Time can easily finish many of these quests in the same cycle.
While it's nice to defeat Ganon and see an end cutscene, the jarring nature of bringing players back to the starting point of the final battle tends to slightly ruin the effectiveness of most Legend of Zelda game endings. Since Majora's Mask has time loops and three-day cycles built directly into the plot, however, it doesn't feel surprising to wake back up at Dawn of the First Day in Clock Town after saving multiple parts of the world, or even all of it. Because Majora's Mask does what so many Legend of Zelda games doesn't and actually shows the effects of Link's efforts on the surrounding world, players can intrinsically feel more satisfied by their actions - even if they've been forgotten to time.
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