What Are you Playing 7: Deadly Sims

[Zevox]

I have now completed up through the Great Bay Temple in Majora's Mask. And I remembered right, the Zora Mask is definitely the highlight of the game. Underwater areas and swimming mechanics that work this well are quite rare - hell, I don't know if anything else of this sort has ever beaten this game in that regard. Not that Action-Adventure games of this sort that have underwater areas are particularly common, but still.

I also like that the game's dungeon items are the bow in the first dungeon, and the three elemental arrows in the subsequent dungeons (I assume for the fourth, since I haven't gotten there yet and don't definitively remember, but it seems like a safe bet at this point). And I have to give Majora's Mask this much over Ocarina of Time, it sure does give the elemental arrows more of a purpose than its predecessor. In Ocarina only the Light Arrows mattered, and only for the final dungeon and boss fight; the fire and ice arrows were optional, easily missed (especially the ice arrows), and didn't really do much for you even when you got them. The ice arrows in particular were basically just a cosmetic effect and bonus damage, and the fire arrows were mostly redundant with Din's Fire, or even just deku sticks for lighting most of the torches you needed to. Where Majora's Mask builds dungeons around them, allowing the ice arrows to freeze enemies or the surface of the water to create platforms, or to stop falling water at points in the Great Bay Temple, while the... Goron Mountain Temple (I don't remember its real name) had plenty of ice that the fire arrows were needed to melt due to the absence of any other fire abilities in your arsenal, and still had some uses in the Great Bay Temple, including against a mini-boss. It is nice to have them go from afterthought in one game to dungeon centerpiece in its sequel.

I also find it quite amusing just how easy it is to get rich in this game. There are two easily acquired 100-rupee chests right in Clock Town that refill every time you go back in time, so you can and should be gaining +200 rupees per cycle before even doing anything, and the bank existing means that your wallet size doesn't really limit the number of rupees you can accumulate anymore. I almost wonder if they didn't originally intend to include the banker who can remember your rupee count even after you go back in time, and the point of those chests was to make sure you weren't really going back to 0 every time, assuming you poked around enough to have found them, and then they just didn't bother to take them out after they did put the banker in.