What Majora’s Mask does right

The final boss is

the moon.

It’s not rocket science. The game spends all it’s time hyping up this single villain/goal that acts as the centerpiece of everything in the game.

You first see it about five minutes in; It’s above the exact center of the map. After that, you can see it in almost every single level just by looking up. As time goes by, it gets closer and closer – right before the end, it takes up the entire sky. The timer at the bottom of the screen means you feel it’s presence wherever you go, even indoors.

In three days, it destroys the earth, and you are sent back in time. Which means that you have to live through the final moments of the villain winning the game over and over again a hundred times before you get the chance to defeat it. Everything you’re achieving in the entirety of this game is constantly being destroyed by this moon. You can attempt to attack it at any time during the game. You’ll fail. It genuinely feels unstoppable.

Ascending the tower to finally defeat the moon is momentous, but that’s almost beside the point. What matters is how the massive doom foreshadowing has coloured the entire game up to that point. Having your goal laid out to you in the first moments of the game and constantly overshadow you for the rest of it is fundamentally Right.

Here’s the moral of the story: Take the final moments of your game, and stretch them back until every single part of the game is leading to- or at least overshadowed by- those moments. Do this, and your game will have purpose, direction and doom.

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About Jack McNamee

In the third year of a game design course in Queensland, Australia. Thinking a whole lot about games. Scrabbling desperately against the oncoming future.
This entry was posted in More games should do these things. Bookmark the permalink.

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