Time passes here - at the rate of an hour a minute, it fair gushes down the drain - and Link's magical ocarina no longer carries him back and forth at will until the timeline is arranged to your satisfaction. This is the bitter twist of time-travel in Majora's Mask. Not the first time, and probably not the next dozen times either. In three days' time, the moon will fall and burn the world, killing everyone. This isn't happening because of some evil scheme, but because a lost and lonely bundle of rags called the Skull Kid played with something he shouldn't - the cursed mask of the title - and succumbed to its destructive urges. The moon is falling on the land of Termina - its looming, grimacing face as sinister as only the most childish horrors can be. One song you learn is called the Elegy of Emptiness and leaves a hollow effigy of yourself behind. It really is a subtly but surprisingly dark game. Majora's Mask isn't the stuff of myth, it's the school of hard knocks and broken dreams, dressed up like an eerie fairy tale. It asked: what's it like to be a child in an adult world that's falling apart? Never mind facing evil, how do you face sadness and regret? And how do you deal with the inevitability of failure? You pick yourself up, go back to the beginning and start again - clawing a little victory for yourself each time, banking a little experience for later. And yet, at heart, it could not have been a more different game. It was built on the same engine and used much of the same artwork and designs. It was set just after Ocarina of Time, with the same Link returned to childhood and continuing his adventures in a strange new land. Two years later there was a sequel, Majora's Mask - now available in this splendid remake for 3DS - and it returned to the time-travel theme. He will master his destiny and the world around him. He will travel to the future to undo the wrongs of the past, and travel to the past to prevent the wrongs of the future.
The boy will venture through time to become a man, it foretold. When Nintendo decided to tackle time-travel in its 1998 masterpiece, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the approach it took was mythic, built on moral fulfilment. Eurogamer has dropped review scores and replaced them with a new recommendation system.