The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D review: time after time

More than any other Zelda title, Majora's Mask is all about the things you do when you're not dungeoneering. It's about meeting people and solving their problems before the game's three-day play clock expires, sending you back to the start. Over your countless cycles through the 72-hour loop, you become intimately familiar with the world of Termina and its citizens, giving the game a level of character and charm that outshines any other entry in the franchise.

As magical as that framework is, the game's original iteration on Nintendo 64 also had the propensity to be super annoying. Majora's Mask's repetitive nature occasionally got the better of it; there were a few menial tasks that needed doing with nearly every loop, and a few quests that required mindless waiting around for the in-game clock to crawl to a prescribed time.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D does a lot of things right, but its biggest success is how it's sanded off all those rough edges from the original's core conceit. It is, 15 years later, the grand, time-traveling adventure this game always deserved to be.

Majora's Mask 3D's structure is as novel as ever, tossing Link into an unfamiliar land, and giving him three days to conquer its dungeons before the moon comes crashing down. At any point, you can reverse time back to the start of the three-day loop, but you'll lose your non-major items and any side quest progress you made during that cycle.

There really isn't another game out there like Majora's Mask, in the Zelda franchise or otherwise. Figuring out not only the solutions to the land's problems, but the timing of those solutions makes for a brilliant, non-linear quest. It's still a bold design for Nintendo, giving the game an urgency the series has never known, and a melancholic streak a mile long.

What's remarkable about Majora's Mask 3D is how it refines that structure, and does so without compromising the premise — save for one notable exception.

The star of the show is the revamped Bomber's Notebook, a key item from the original that tracked the requests and schedules of each notable character. In Majora's Mask 3D, the notebook is far more thorough, providing detail on each step of each quest as you discover them. It's not just the big stuff that lands in the book, either — almost every Heart Piece and every treasure you encounter on the map gets an entry.

This is a massive booster shot of modernity for the Zelda franchise, functioning like a proper quest log. Townspeople can tell you rumors, adding leads to your notebook on the location of the game's super-powered Masks, mini-games you haven't discovered and chests you left unopened. All these clues add up to give time loops a much clearer and more rewarding sense of direction.

There are other major upgrades, too. You get the Song of Soaring, a tune that lets you fast travel to discovered locations, earlier in the game, making the beginning of your journey much smoother. The best tweak was made to the Song of Double Time, which used to toss you forward to the next night or day — now you can choose the hour you fast-forward to, meaning you'll never have to just stand around and wait for a certain event to start.