I tend to see a clear divide between a good and bad horror game pretty quickly, in fact, most of the time it usually just comes down to whether I was scared because it scared me, or whether it scared me momentarily because something screamed loudly. It’s a problem a lot of artistic mediums have when they try to make someone uncomfortable, they go for the low-hanging fruit. But then there are games that hold the horror back, keep it subtle and have it reside fully within the world. They pump their world with the intricacies that others don’t have the ability to catch on to.

Majora’s Mask, he types as if you didn’t see that coming, is one of those games. I write this not just to flatter the newly released Majora’s Mask 3D, but because playing through it in the past few days has made me realize something.

Zelda games, collectively as a series, had pretty much effortlessly created the ‘perfect series’ by changing the formula, building on past ideas and not listening to the fans. I feel that when they stopped doing this, Zelda ran into its first missteps. Someone once told me that everyone has opinions, but not everyone has an educated opinion. I relate this to the subject because a lot of my friends, as an example, love New Super Mario Bros. U… and that’s fine. The first Super Mario Bros. game they played was New Super Mario Bros… and that’s fine too. The one thing I would note however, is that when they say that those are their favorite Mario games, they are saying this blind to the games that came before, which is… well, most of them. I have talked to Zelda fans who started their journeys with Wind Waker, which is a fantastic game and when Twilight Princess was released, they believed it was also a classic… I guess I have some issues with this and to get to the point: I think Nintendo needs to shake things up and stop listening to fans.

Zelda II, a sharp left turn in the Zelda series, a turn I don’t think it gets enough credit for. Let’s forget the incredibly overused “black-sheep of the franchise” mantra that follows the game around Youtube video to Youtube video, Zelda II involved a more progressive story, RPG mechanics, a leveling system and a way of playing never seen before and hardly seen after: Side-Scrolling. Fast forward to the year 2000, the release of Majora’s Mask shows just how arduous the process was for the creators to develop a game within a year and just how much it paid off, an atmosphere unlike anything in any Zelda game before it, a game that involved you far more in the actual world and situations of the characters than the dungeons and the puzzles. And guess what? You weren’t in Hyrule no more, no no, you were in Termina. A land of great mystery, the epitome of uncomfortable, the world made you feel helpless, the strength you gained over the course of the game was eradicated when you realized that by reversing time, your deeds were also reversed… and so also the happiness of completing said deeds. It was a game emotionally ahead of its time and it was an experience Zelda hadn’t provided yet.

After the curve-ball that was the Wind Waker, considering the Gamecube’s Zelda demo previously, fast forward to 2006. Twilight Princess came out… and it seemingly came to replace any bad-will that Nintendo had created between themselves and the fan-base. It was a Teen rated adventure, a much darker aesthetic than the previous Zelda’s and described by many as Ocarina of Time for adults. This description puzzled me personally, subjectively I had never played Zelda and suddenly prayed for a slightly more mature iteration of the series. But what puzzled me even more was the sloooooow build up at the start of the game, the needless goat-herding and the amount of time it took me to actually get to the adventure. Zant was disappointing and Ganon’s throw into the mix was… urgh. Twilight felt too by the books and didn’t shake up anything like the previous games did. Even Wind Waker with its backbone mechanics and progression coming straight from Ocarina of Time had the ocean and the graphical style to really show you how it differentiates from its predecessors. Like good Zelda games, it’s a synthesis of previous Zelda games, with original concepts that completely shatters expectations. Twilight Princess had the art style of a more mature Zelda, but it felt more like a re-tread and less like its own thing.

Skyward Sword didn’t deter my stance, in fact, it could have made it worse. With what I would wager was the worst tutorial system of any Zelda game thus far, far too long, too much hand-holding and far too linear, Skyward Sword pushed all the stuff fans had been complaining about into the spotlight again, a tactic that would serve to be the reasoning A Link Between Worlds would be the antithesis of this style and in my opinion, the much better game. Skyward Sword was a lesson for Nintendo, a backlash they risk when toying with the same game mechanics and game progression for the sake of ‘tradition’. Nintendo needs to take a lesson from Majora’s Mask, from Zelda II and surprisingly from A Link Between Worlds. While all three certainly borrow from previous games, they all had game mechanics that managed to turn the series on its head and while they may be controversial, they’re anything but hated.

The Legend of Zelda is a series that stands to be stripped down and analyzed, taking some of its previous ideas and throwing others away, but it mostly importantly needs shaking up more often. Majora’s Mask is one of my favorite video games ever made because it makes me more uncomfortable that any other game, it throws me into a world that can’t be saved, a world that can’t be helped without it being reversed, a world which has false hope. I love Zelda II because up to that point, there was one Zelda game and this was a completely new experience with new ideas and concepts. I love A Link Between Worlds because Nintendo somehow managed to steal a concept down to its core and at the same time completely refurbish it, changing how we can run around the world and changing how we manage our inventory. I just want Nintendo to make a world I can get invested in and to me, that takes shaking up.