obvious answer is having a nightmare from watching my older brother and dad play Doom (1993). but for whatever reason, amidst all the horrible ways to die or suffer in Oregon Trail II, this NPC's visage scared the hell out of me. apparently he was just a programming analyst at MECC in a costume, lol
![Played via 2Ship2Harkinian. 100% clear (for the first time ever.)
When I was doing my Metroid series playthrough, I skipped replaying and reviewing Super Metroid for the same reason I'm skipping Ocarina of Time now. I am just too familiar and too emotionally connected to those two games to be able to approach them objectively or play them like a first-timer. I am slightly less familiar with Majora's Mask but it was still in that territory where I found myself ignoring cutscenes and doing small sequence breaks out of habit. 100%ing it for the first time did restore some novelty, as there were a handful of heart pieces I had never collected before, and a few more I didn't even know existed.
Ocarina of Time is an incredibly formative and important game to me, but I used to iconclastically say Majora's Mask was my favorite. And the reasons for that are still there: it's so oddball and character-driven and dreamlike and dark for a Zelda game. It really is Zelda Gaiden, with a very significant number of Shenmue-like planner-studying and day-night cycle managing sidequests.
Ocarina of Time had 8 main dungeons, 2 mini-dungeons (Ice Cavern and Bottom of the Well), 1 optional dungeon (Gerudo Training Ground), and 1 mega-dungeon (Ganon's Castle). Majora's Mask comparatively has only 4 main dungeons, though there are plenty of mini-dungeons, which is a sore spot for many players. With hindsight, this exactly presages the dungeon numbers of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, with the sprawling, interactive world only getting orders of magnitude larger. Breath of the Wild and Ocarina of Time are the bold step into a design for a series that settled into a formula; and Tears of the Kingdom and Majora's Mask are the iterations on that break with precedent, using asset reuse as an opportunity to iterate and refocus on what new expressions can be made within this possibility-space.
[etc.]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2i4owalc2vpcfqhph36jsnh5/bafkreigjwupok5kiduizg4u4jzhvjvfumeq7sw5mlkhl5n5pbsmc6yktua)
