/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5402283]

can I play these games out of order or is there some continuity to the story?
I wanna play majora's mask but don't wanna play ocarina unless I have to
I also don't mind playing the first two games but right now I just wanna play MM

[Anonymous No.5402289]

Why do you want to start with Majora?
Ocarina of Time is a must play, and Majora's Mask is a direct sequel to it.

[Anonymous No.5402293]

>hurr durr should I play the sequel first

[Anonymous No.5402296]

>>5402293
In the case of Zelda, you can play any one of them in any order and it really makes no difference.

>>5402283
Majoras Mask is a sequel to Ocarina of Time in the sense that it's the same Link from OOT going on an adventure in MM. It has almost no actual connection besides a brief flashback to a character from OOT talking to Link.

[Anonymous No.5402297]

>>5402283
>actually wanting to play this shit
Are you a bugchaser, by any chance? Homo.

[Anonymous No.5402301]

>>5402293
zelda didn't strike me as the kind of game that has an epic overarching plot
though it might be more like FF where it shares some characters and locations (zelda, link, hyrule) but has stand-alone narratives

[Anonymous No.5402302]

>>5402296
>it's a sequel in the same sense that it's literally a fucking sequel

[Anonymous No.5402304]

>>5402283
MM may be a sequel, but considering it's a gaiden offshoot and not a sequel with many (if any) real tie-ins to OoT you wouldn't be missing out. Just play Majora's Mask if that's what you want.

[Anonymous No.5402314]

>>5402301
>>5402296
Majora's Mask works the way it does because it is a sequel. Yes it has a different setting, but it's still the same Link, right after the events of Ocarina of Time. His whole motivation for this quest in the first place was because of an OOT character.

Second, Majora's Mask functions almost like an anti-OOT. It has a much stronger narrative, the plot is more emotional with a greater level of psychology going on in with the characters. The Skull Kid, and the characters you get your masks from, for example. Ocarina doesn't really have that.
Instead, OOT focused more a having more dungeons, a larger world, stronger gameplay. Majora's Mask focuses more on characters, setting and narrative.
You play both, in order, to get the full experience of N64 Zelda. You can see how Majora's Mask builds off Ocarina of Time's existing mechanics, what it does with a plot when it's free of Zelda and Ganon, even the improvement in lighting, textures and models. You can kind of say, OOT is the foundation, MM is the experiment.

Play OOT, then MM.

[Anonymous No.5402315]

> Continuity
> Zelda

Pick one

[Anonymous No.5402323]

>>5402283
There is absolutely zero continuity with the story. The story in Zelda games is completely irrelevant, they tack it on at the end of development and it's the same in every game - it's just not important. Play them in any order you want.

[Anonymous No.5402324]

>>5402314
Forgot to mention.
A lot of the Majora's Mask NPCs reuse the models of Ocarina of Time NPCs (and in one or two cases they're actually the same character).
By doing so it creates a world full of familiar faces doing unfamiliar things and unfamiliar setting. It greatly improves the atmosphere and general surreal sense going on within the world of Majora's Mask.

[Anonymous No.5402327]

>>5402324
fuck.
>And you'd really only get that feeling if you played the games in order

[Anonymous No.5402328]

>>5402296
>In the case of Zelda, you can play any one of them in any order and it really makes no difference.

Nintendo designed their Zelda series to be enjoyed out of order. They basically reboot the franchise with every new console. Link to the Past on the SNES is a soft reboot of the NES games. Links Awakening on the GameBoy is like a sequel to LTTP but can be played as a stand alone game. Ocarina of Time is another soft reboot. You don't have to play any of the previous games to get into OOT. Majora's Mask is to OOT as Link's Awakening was to LTTP. It is some weird sequel, but still can be enjoyed on its own. It's like Nintendo doesn't really like story baggage with their games. They want every Zelda game to be somebody's first entry into the series if they have never played a previous one in the series.

[Anonymous No.5402329]

>>5402314
>a larger world

no sweetie

Ocarina still has a fantastic collection of dungeons, but the overworld is absolutely tiny yet barren

Majora improves on the exploration aspect ten-fold

[Anonymous No.5402361]

>>5402329
In OOT you explore the world, twice
In MM you explore characters motivations

[Anonymous No.5402396]

>>5402283
So you know how people say the first Zelda is so obtuse that you need to buy a players guide to get through it?
Well that's the same thing for Zelda's shoddy continuity. They're still pulling the same tricks by making everything in the continuity so subtle that you need to buy a bunch of expensive hard cover books to know it. Hyrule Historia was the first one and they just keep making more.
You're better off mostly ignoring the series continuity, it's not like the games even have particularly good stories, it's mostly just an interesting setting and cast of characters that Nintendo rarely does anything meaningful with.
Even the games that are direct sequels are more like stand alone adventures that don't build off of what happened in the previous game.

There is only one single branch of the timeline that actually puts in the effort to make it pretty crystal clear when each game takes place, and that's the adult timeline: Ocarina of Time -> Majora's Mask -> Wind Waker -> Phantom Hourglass -> Spirit Tracks )

And the only time the connection in those games feels meaningful and the experience is better if you play the previous game is Ocarina of Time and the Wind Waker. ( And I guess the Oracle of Seasons and Ages but that's basically just one giant game split into two )

Every other game in the series either has overly subtle or superficial connections. Just play Zelda for the adventure and gameplay, don't worry about the continuity.

[Anonymous No.5402420]

>>5402361
>>5402329
I think both games are good, and I prefer OOT overall, but I'm gonna have to agree that Majora has the edge in exploration department. The game is probably about the same size, but it's by far more dense, while Ocarina has so much wasted space in it

[Anonymous No.5402456]

Of all the soft and hard sequels of the Zelda franchise Majora's mask and OoT are the only ones you should make sure to play in order. You can ignore the anti continuity fags too btw, while it may not be super important it's still there and not just subtext, most games in the series connect to each other pretty explicitly.

[Anonymous No.5402494]

>>5402420
>most games in the series connect to each other pretty explicitly.

Can you list some meaningful examples?

[Anonymous No.5402625]

Fun fact. Continuity isn't just a concept exclusive to story.
Games can have continuity between their mechanics and gameplay.

Majora's Mask is both a continuation of Ocarina of Time's Link's life and an extension of OoT's experience from gameplay, atmosphere, mechanical standpoints. It builds on so much of Ocarina that it's only logical that you withhold playing it until you've experienced Ocarina.

[Anonymous No.5402653]

>>5402625
A lot of what mm does are either escalations or revisitations of things introduced in oot

An escalation would be an expansion of mechanics. In oot the song of time moves blocks, in mm your whole experience hinges on having that song as it allows you to reset the clock. Another escalation would be in oot you basically have two links to play, child and adult. In majora's mask you have four links.

Revisiting can be stuff meeting the oot NPCs and see how they're different in mm, like the dying guard becomes shire in mm. Or simply relearning old songs in new ways, sharp and flat hold the sun's song in oot, in mm it's the song of storms.

[Anonymous No.5402702]

>>5402653
And one of the biggest escalations are the masks. In they're items you were for npc reactions and are part of a side quest.
In mm, you have a whole item screen dedicated just to masks, all having some sort of function. And in-universe they are more than just masks, but they represent certain feelings or motivations of the characters. The couple's mask is a good example.

And in terms of revisiting and masks. Those transformations you have, all of them are species introduced in ocarina of time. It's no coincidence, nintendo wanted transformations of races that would be familiar to the player. So you in majora's mask you revisit those races and you can now become those races and interact with them in different ways.

These are just some of the ways majora's mask builds off ocarina of time. Which is why I think it is best to play them in order

[Anonymous No.5402949]

>>5402494
Zelda used to have a very easy-to-follow continuity before OoT actually. Zelda 2 is the obvious continuation of Zelda 1. ALttP was the prequel to both since it dealt with the origin of Ganon and the Triforce. It's explicitly stated on the back of the box and in the japanese version also mentioned in the manual. LA was of course just the direct sequel to ALttP.

OoT is the odd case here. Everything in the game points to it being the backstory to ALttP, and almost all of the details fit (Hylians not being extinct but alive, Ganondorf not being Ganon yet, Triforce still in the sacred realm without an owner etc), but then the ending comes around and screws things up. Worse still, there's time shenanigans involved too so there's technically two different endings happening simultaneously. Nintendo might've saved themselves from the mess they created here but instead they started making sequels to OoT that made the connection with ALttP even more vague. And on top of that you had games like the four swords trilogy which was officially stated to be canon but the creators obviously didn't care about any connection to the mainline games, which turned people to either headcanon to somehow fit them in with the rest or outright made them dismiss any connection between any of the games like this >>5402315 guy.

And then of course we get the clusterfuck that is HH, with its sloppily pieced-together almost arbirtary reordering of some of the games.

[Anonymous No.5402965]

>>5402283
overarching story is shit, play it in any order and revisit them if you want to follow a timeline

[Anonymous No.5402972]

>>5402283
The games are loosely connected, its best to play them in chronological order but ultimately it matters very little. Orcarina of Time at the time was supposed to be the earliest point in the series(this got changed). Wind Waker and Majora's mask both take place after the events of Orcarina of Time. Its not really vital, but you can miss out on a lot of references and story beats.

Majora's Mask takes place almost immediately after OoT ending, it could be a few months, but Link is on a journey to find a friend. The only thing he carries is the magical ocarina from Zelda, Kakiro sword and his horse from OoT. The journey is completely new. Wind Waker takes place in a timeline where the Hero from OoT never returned to stop ganon again, throwing the world into this new weird post apocalyptic version of the world where everything was flooded.

Besides Zelda 1 and 2 and some of the handheld games, these three are the most closely related Zelda games. Twilight Princess has the heroes shade who we find out is the hero from Orcarina of Time who is regretful that because time travel he was never remembered as a hero and he never got to to pass his sword skills down. Beyond that, Twilight Princess has very little to do with OoT.

[Anonymous No.5402976]

>>5402283
True enjoyment of MM comes from being an OoT fan and recognising that MM is a novel variation that never tries to eclipse the original.

[Anonymous No.5402979]

Majora's mask is a shitty romhack that focuses on the worst parts of zelda, open world side quests.

[Anonymous No.5402980]

>>5402979
Majora's mask is buy and large the first zelda with actual side quests though

[Anonymous No.5402984]

>>5402980
Side quests existed in previous games, but they were mostly shit, besides some upgrades you never got anything worth while. You don't even get a decent sword unless you sidequest in MM.

[Anonymous No.5402985]

>>5402980
MM fanboys paved the way for things like collecting 8 shards in windwaker and botw as a whole.

[Anonymous No.5402986]

>>5402283
when youre reading about the meaning behind zelda games you will have needed to play Ocarina of Time to understand imo

[Anonymous No.5402993]

>>5402985
Shard collecting was the concept introduced in the First Zelda, its bad in WW because its only there to pad out the game length. Even then it wasn't so bad on the first playthrough since it forced my exploration of the sea which hadn't lost its luster and story progression was novel enough. Its a annoying check list now, MM is not responsible for it.

[Anonymous No.5402995]

>>5402980
>buy and large

[Anonymous No.5402998]

>>5402995
It's not nice to pick on the literal retards who love MM.

[Anonymous No.5403001]

>>5402985
Boy you're retarded if majora's mask affected anything in wind waker's development.

[Anonymous No.5403005]

>>5402984
It's a game with four dungeons. You don't need a sword upgrade to beat it.

[Anonymous No.5403009]

>>5402993
It's bad in WW because it's open world sideshit that's forced on you. The entire flow of the game stops because they wanted to force sideshit.
Comparing it to Zelda 1 where you get a shard for completing a dungeon isn't a fair comparison.
Zelda has always been about the dungeons. And when they take the focus off that it falls apart. Which started with MM.

[Anonymous No.5403014]

>>5403009
Wind waker has a "focus" on side quests because it was a rushed piece of garbage where the main game is practically nonexistent

[Anonymous No.5403021]

>>5403014
Windwaker has decent dungeons. Even the exploration that you get nothing for is fine.
Windwaker is a much longer game than say OoT only because after the final dungeon you need to find 8 charts and then farm 400 rupees for each chart. Some charts are gated behind other sideshit. Like joy pendants or just randomly hoping you come across the ghost ship charter.
And to top it off if you never rescued tingle you don't even get the incredible chart so you have literally no direction in the game once you reach the end. All you have is your boat saying collect the shards.
There's a reason they cut a lot of that segment out of the HD remake.

[Anonymous No.5403037]

>>5403021
Wind waker had embarrassing dungeons if that's what you mean. Easier puzzles and combat than both oot and mm. Literally no aesthetic value in any of them, even with wind waker's art style the dungeons are visually boring if not outright awful (wind temple).

[Anonymous No.5403231]

>>5402949
If it has to be told in the manuals and the boxes, with no in-game hints, then it's not really that clear. Zelda 2 is given because it was the first sequel and nobody expected wacky chronology in the series yet. But nothing in game indicates ALTTP as a prequel to Zelda 1.
There's definitely nothing clear about LA being the sequel to ALTTP, even Nintendo seems uncertain of that since they set the Oracles between those two games and then later removed them.

OOT being a prequel to ALTTP almost worked, what with introducing Ganondorf, and having him obtain the Triforce. But if Ganon being sealed in the sacred realm is meant to be the "Sealing War" then, it's not a very big "War" ...In any case, there is absolutely no way i'm going to believe Nintendo planned this "Link was defeated" timeline. They were obviously just disregarding continuity as usual when they made Wind Waker.

Ironically, Wind Waker is the one instance where the connections actually ARE really clear, outside of direct sequels. They mention the hero of time by name, there's stained glass windows of the sages, the new sages are pretty obviously descendants of the old ones ( though there only being two sages is an unfortunate product of the game being rushed. ) And then there's Ganondorf, who seems to remember all his experiences in Ocarina of Time. Being sealed, fighting Link, growing up Gerudo, ect.

The games that followed in that branch of the timeline were pretty easy to follow since they start with montages detailing "the story so far" and re-use character models like MM did.

Everything else that happened afterward is too fucky to continue approaching the character limit with.

[Anonymous No.5403382]

>>5402329
>but the overworld is absolutely tiny yet barren

How? It has a fantastic array of locations that are each interesting.

>Majora improves on the exploration aspect ten-fold

There's barely anything to do that isn't part of some quest or other. Most of the content is crammed into the central town or otherwise is stuffed into a single area en-masse like the skultula.

[Anonymous No.5403390]

>>5402283
Fell for the contrarian vr meme that oot isn't a literal first-class must-play that surpasses any retro game you could possibly think of

[Anonymous No.5403428]

>>5403231
Literally everyone treated LA as the sequel to LttP because what the hell would it otherwise be? A sequel to Zelda 2? That makes no sense.

[Anonymous No.5403442]

>>5403390
This. Why the hell would you not "wanna play ocarina unless I have to". It's the most critically acclaimed game of all time for a reason.

[Anonymous No.5404121]

>>5403231
ALttP is, like another anon said, in terms of gameplay a soft reboot of LoZ like for example Super Metroid is to Metroid or Castlevania 4 is to 1, which makes it easy to play for a newcomer. ALttP not having a cut-and-dry clear connection to Zelda 1 doesn't matter because most of its story is self-contained. However, anyone who's played the first two games can tell you just from the game that it's supposed to be a prequel. ALttP happens right after Ganondorf turned into beast Ganon, a fact referenced ingame, which can't happen if Zelda 1 is the prequel, and the Triforce isn't split up yet per the backstory of Zelda 2. It's also established in Zelda 2 that Ganon is able to resurrect from the dead, so there's no contradiction in the ending. You're right in that the story connection doesn't have a lot of importance, but what is important that it takes place in the same world among the same canon as the first two games, as has been stated numerous times by the developers.

OoT indeed works perfectly as the prequel to ALttP, down to the details (it even has a big connection to AoL with the sage and town names), with the big exception being the Seal War, which doesn't involve any knights and leaves Ganondorf locked up with only a piece of the Triforce. I'd argue that this ending not being the Seal War is the original wrench in the proverbial machine and the first thing to cause major confusion for anyone that played all the previous games. In fact, it seems like this story element was a late development change as even Nintendo didn't know what to do with it. They could've easily made a game involving Ganondorf breaking out and then having a proper Seal War, but they never did and both WW and TP kind of sealed the deal on that ever happening.

[Anonymous No.5404129]

>>5404121
Speaking of WW, I disagree it's a perfect continuation. Of course there's all the stuff from OoT it mentions, but there's also stuff from MM in there, especially everything relating to Tingle, which is more than just a cute easter egg. You could argue that the concept of two timelines wasn't there yet and was only retroactively jammed in there, but in an interview during WW they already confirmed that OoT had two completely seperate endings and that WW would only follow one of them.

I guess that left the MM branch possibly open for the 2D games, but was also cut off when TP got moved from inbetween OoT and WW to after MM late in development as well. Or in other words, where Zelda used to conserve a strong connection between the games, now they appeared to didn't care what happened to the 2D games anymore and we got a strong connection between the 3D games instead. That is of course until SS flopped and they started having renewed interest in the earlier games again, which is why every new game since then has been connected to the older 2D games instead.

[Anonymous No.5404218]

You do not want to ruin the fantastic narrative of the zelda series for yourself

[Anonymous No.5406596]

>>5403428
That one crazy timeline that was popular pre-WW with a single Link going on all the adventures claimed that Awakening was an *interquel* to Zelda 2.

[Anonymous No.5406672]

>>5403442
>>5403390
I think OP is a retard who plays games purely for their stories.
He bought into majora's mask's hype and wants to experience the setting and atmosphere but not the gameplay.
Which is also why he's avoiding oot like a faggot. He doesn't want to play great games because they're great fucking games, but so he can parade around his gamer cred and show how intellectual he is by playing mm for its story.

[Anonymous No.5407624]

>>5406672
>playing mm for its story

The thing is, you can't just "play MM for the story", since MM's storytelling is highly non-linear and demands the player actively explore the game's 'space-time' in order to experience it properly.

[Anonymous No.5407691]

>>5406672
>I think
let me stop you there bucko
shove the rest of your conjecture up your flaccid ass