Suduiko, A. (2014, November 16). Want to learn how to design sidequests? Play “Majora’s Mask.” With A Terrible Fate. https://withaterriblefate.com/2014/11/16/want-to-learn-how-to-design-sidequests-play-majoras-mask/

Summary

The third entry in Suduiko's "A Comprehensive Theory of Majora's Mask" ([[Comprehensive Theory Majora's Mask]]).

Notes

There are two ways to make sidequests: Collection sidequests and Discovery sidequests.

Collection sidequests are designed to pad out the length of a game, requiring the player to go to less interesting or traveled areas in a big world to find hidden collectables.

Discovery sidequests, in contrast, are meant to help the player discover more about the world they're in. They typically relate better thematically. Think Wind Waker ([[The Wind Waker]]) and taking sidequests to the different islands around the map.

Majora's Mask ([[Majora's Mask]]) takes discovery sidequests to a level far beyond the typical discovery sidequest. Rather than mapping out the physical world through discovery quests, the player maps and relieves the pain felt by the individual members of the world. Each character is trapped in a perpetual cycle of living the final hours of their lives.

Three main takaways here:

1. Each sidequest is a microcosm of the game’s macrocosmic framework of saving the world from annihilation. Every single sidequest that rewards Link with a mask is tied to saving someone or something before it's too late: just like he must do for Termina as a whole.
2. Link never actually saves anyone because when he resets the time (Why Majora's Mask is Unique) back to the beginning of the three day loop, he also erases the goodness he brought into the world, with only a mask for a permanent token. This allows Link to see his effect on the world - with or without intervention - in many different angles. This is an example of the player experimenting with the philosophical concept of possible worlds.
3. In the end, there exists no possible world such that everyone can be saved. While Link may save Termina from destruction, he cannot save everyone from defeat of spirit. Even collecting all the masks to obtain the Fierce Deity mask only serves to turn Link into the dark projection of an unloving and abusive adult figure that punishes a lonely child (Majora’s Mask should terrify you) for acting out.

In true counterfactual analysis form, we are told by the game to save everyone. But we learn that saving Terminians is only a fleeting effort.

"It is this picture of Link saving no one but making everyone happy that emanates from the universe of the sidequests of “Majora”; if any other game can effect such meaning through the framework of auxiliary stories, I have yet to find it."

Citations