There are exactly two abiding criticisms of Ocarina of Time: the Water Temple sucks, and Navi is annoying. “Hey!” Are you taking longer than twenty seconds to solve a puzzle? Well, you’d just better “Listen!” Want to take your time exploring the overworld? “Hey!” Better get back to the main quest!
“Hey!”
“Listen!”
“Hey!”
“Hey!”
(...)
“Listen!”
(...)
(...)
(...)
“Listen!”
(...)
(...)
“Hey!”
It would have been so easy to simply cut Navi from the sequel and not replace her. Many would rejoice! And indeed, Navi’s successor Tatl is significantly less involved in hint giving and sidequest shaming than Navi was. Perhaps the criticisms were heard. But the developers of Majora’s Mask still saw fit to give Link a fairy again. There’s a simple reason for this that goes beyond game mechanics.
Link has a fairy in Majora’s Mask because Tatl is the protagonist of the game.
The story of Majora’s Mask can be summed up as follows: a feisty fairy goes on a quest to save her brother from their possessed former friend, bringing along a taciturn boy as a meat puppet.
In every previous Zelda game, Link is straightforwardly the protagonist. He’s more than that: he’s the Chosen One, the canonical Most Important Special Boy in the whole world. In Majora’s Mask, he’s nobody. An interloper from afar, foreign and distrusted. At the risk of misremembering something fundamental, I don’t think there’s a single reference to Link being the one who’s destined to save Termina. At the end of every dungeon, when a released giant appears before Link and Tatl, they don’t talk to Link. “Forgive your friend,” one of them says. That’s a reference to the Skull Kid, who sure isn’t Link’s friend. The giants are talking to Tatl, because she’s the one on a quest. Link’s an accessory. Tatl owns her protagonist status, too. She’s happy to step in and talk in Link’s place, or annoy an NPC when necessary. Huge little sister energy.
This solves not just one but two problems with Ocarina of Time. It solves the Navi problem, where one of the game’s most omnipresent characters is annoying to the player and largely superfluous to the plot. And it also solves the Link problem. For five games running, he’s been a silent avatar for the player to project onto: hardly a problem until Ocarina of Time begins trying to give him some small amount of character. In Majora’s Mask, it doesn’t matter that Link is a cipher. That’s the joke. He doesn’t need any character, because this time he’s a sidekick in his own series.
In a reasonable world, we’d have a line of Tatl spinoff games.
Tatl for Smash.
