Majora's Mask says hello
Games excel in telling stories when story and gameplay are treated as the same thing. Honestly, a game can have all the world-building and deep lore it wants, but that doesn't mean the story will be good or even interesting. Most stories are, ultimately, the same thing and we resonate with
how they are told more than anything else.
Video games can tell stories in ways no other medium can, and it's when they use that advantage that those stories become masterpieces. Majora's Mask is an example of this, in my view. It uses its game mechanics to create a world more believable than any other in the series, with a richness of character and a real sense of being lived in. The NPCs all feel like actual people with their own lives, and the game asks you follow them and learn
who they are and what they want in order to actually help them.
It's all well and good killing a dragon in OOT, but it doesn't have even half the emotional weight of reuniting a son with his missing father. It's cool finding a magic sword and using it to defeat an evil wizard, but it doesn't come close to the intimacy of reuniting two lovers so they're together for the end of the world. It's epic to joust with a monster riding a giant boar on a bridge over an abyss, but that'll never break your heart as much as a woman getting her little sister drunk so she sleeps through the apocalypse.
Majora's Mask uses its central mechanic of a repeated time cycle to tell real, emotional, and engaging stories. Yes, they're on a smaller scale, but their impact is significantly larger because of it. And all of those interactions are what weave together the atmosphere and motivation for the main story. It's through understanding
exactly what will be lost when the moon falls that we fear that moment. It makes the loss tangible, and thus more threatening, more terrifying. And it gives us a concrete, personal reason to fight it. We don't just fight because it's our destiny. We fight for Anju to marry Kafei. We fight for Pamela to have her daddy back. We fight for peace between the monkeys and Deku Scrubs. We fight so that Cremia doesn't have to put her sister to sleep.
Creating a narrative masterpiece isn't reliant on lore or scale or world-building. It's reliant on making the story and the gameplay one and the same, for them to feed into and reinforce each other. Sure, you can tell an excellent story in a game in a more traditional,
cinematic way, but in such cases you end up rating the story separate from the
game. When you can't do that is when you have something truly special. Zelda has done it before, so I see no reason why it can't do it again.
You don't need lore. You just need good design.
