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‘Majora’s Mask’ Dungeon by Dungeon: Snowhead Temple

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Halfway through my analysis of Link’s Awakening, Nintendo unveiled an adorable chibi-clay “reimagining” of that game for the Switch. In celebration of its upcoming launch, I will turn my eye from the strangest, darkest, most surreal portable Zelda to the strangest, darkest, most surreal console Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Majora’s Mask is arguably the Zelda game most open to hermeneutic critique, as its narrative themes run deep but somewhat vague, and it’s wholly original structure feels like postmodern art compared to the conservative story and character arcs of nearly every other Zelda. In this series, I will be looking specifically at the dungeon design of the 3DS version of the game, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D. While this version makes several changes to the Nintendo 64 version, some of which are rather consequential and controversial, I am choosing to scrutinize this version because it is probably how most players currently play the game (plus, it’s the version I own that isn’t hundreds of miles away at my mom’s house). In this entry, I will be looking at the game’s second dungeon, Snowhead Temple.

The entrance to Snowhead Temple lies at the top of a snow-frosted mountain at the far-flung reaches of northernmost Termina. While most of the dungeon is covered in snow or outright frozen, the bottom floor is laden with lava. At five stories tall, Snowhead’s mountainesque structure is one of its quintessential characteristics, as it plays into navigation and the dungeon’s tall central chamber, which houses a giant pillar that Goron Link can shorten by punching away its frozen parts. While the focus on ice and height both establish a strong sense of place, Snowhead lacks the nuanced, if inconsistent, character of Woodfall Temple. Here, both aesthetically and procedurally, it often feels as though Snowhead doesn’t take full advantage of its setting.

In terms of layout, the defining feature of Snowhead Temple is its height, as it spans five stories despite only having thirteen rooms. Despite this verticality lending to more interconnectedness between rooms, the first half of the dungeon is just as linear as Woodfall Temple. But once the player earns the Fire Arrows, Snowhead perfectly walks the coveted line between linearity and openness by allowing the player to make meaningful, organic choices rather than mandating they take a linear path or only choose which door to use a small key on. Thus, efficient progression demands a coherent understanding of the dungeon’s space, which further frames the dungeon as its own holistic puzzle. Unfortunately, that puzzle (comprised of manipulating the central pillar in the dungeon’s main room) is a mixed bag since solving it typically feels just as much about aimlessly searching for the right path as it does figuring out an underlying logic or pattern. This could have been solved by being more explicit about how the dungeon fits together, perhaps by color-coding floors, more naturalistically giving each floor its own identity based on its temperature, or simplifying the map. 

Indeed, maps in especially vertical Zelda dungeons are often subpar because they focus on conveying the relationship only between laterally arranged spaces. This is particularly true of Snowhead, in which the central room is five stories tall, with each story having its own unique layout. It’s unfortunate the intricacies of the room and how they relate to the central pillar puzzle isn’t more clearly conveyed, since instead of deliberately deciding to go to a particular floor to solve the puzzle, the player may end up wandering around, thereby making the dungeon a more haphazard (and potentially stressful, given the time limit) experience than it could have been. Fortunately, room-by-room, the dungeon feels much more cohesive than this puzzle would let on, as almost all rooms contain some mixture of combat, traversal, and puzzle-solving, which far exceeds the depth and nuance of Woodfall Temple’s piecemeal design. However, it would be misleading to disregard Snowhead’s often ridiculous fairy placement, which frequently requires the Fairy Mask and in one instance asks the player to slowly float down with Deku Link for an in-game hour and then re-traverse the dungeon all the way back to the top. Instead of asking the player to use their wits, most fairies in Snowhead require thoroughly scanning a room with the Lens of Truth and donning the Fairy Mask. These fairy placements are a huge missed opportunity that in many regards have the opposite effect they ideally would, often feeling repetitive, boring, and resentful of the player.

Just as Woodfall Temple was built around Deku Link, Snowhead Temple is primarily built around Goron Link. The Goron Mask gives Link two primary abilities — rolling and increased strength. Rolling is used most effectively in the final boss fight but is also enjoyable while traversing the central chamber, especially toward the top when Link must quickly roll off a ramp to land on the other side of the chamber in a high-stakes Evel Knievel-like stunt. While Goron Link may be the most enjoyable of the three main transformations in the 3DS version of the game, rolling is made slightly more difficult by the 3DS’ imprecise circle pad. Meanwhile, Goron Link’s increased strength is felt solely in dealing added damage in hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, there are no Goron-specific puzzles in the dungeon, though there could have easily been one about carrying something heavy or pushing something otherwise unmovable. Instead, Goron Link pushes blocks at the same speed as normal Link, which seems like an oversight. 

Unsurprisingly, Snowhead Temple’s theme is its frigidness. While some might say it combines ice and snow tropes, snow rarely meaningfully impacts gameplay, so it feels primarily like an ice dungeon. Falling stalactites and icy block puzzles make for a couple of engaging ice-themed rooms, but ice otherwise feels eschewed from gameplay. In fact, the dungeon seems a little bit torn on how it wants to integrate its temperature, hinting at several possibilities but never fully delivering. For example, having a fire pit on the bottom floor seems to establish that the temperature will get colder as the player moves upward, but this isn’t the case beyond some minor aesthetic components. And its central tower kind of uses the iciness of certain blocks to justify the Goron’s ability to knock them out of the tower, but it never feels adequately explained. Meanwhile, the Ice Cavern in Ocarina of Time, despite being less than half Snowhead’s size, plays with certain properties of ice (such as its slipperiness and semi-transparency) that go curiously overlooked here.

The dungeon’s item is Fire Arrows, which are an oddball dungeon item for tin that they are a variation of the first dungeon’s item. While they could theoretically be used for a variety of unique purposes, they are primarily used to melt frozen things so that Link can interact with them. This means the Ice Arrows ultimately only help to bypass frozen obstacles that are really only frozen to justify the existence of the Ice Arrows. Meanwhile, they they are essentially identical to normal arrows in combat, which is especially obnoxious considering Majora lacks the one enemy type in Ocarina that was only susceptible to fire. It’s an odd exclusion that Majora probably should have doubled-down on through a themed mini-boss or more heat-sensitive enemies, but instead the Fire Arrows remain characterless and underused.

Snowhead Temple features eight enemy types, only three of which the player has likely not yet run across (Flying Pots, Freezards, and Red Bubbles). While few enemies are endemic to the dungeon, five of the eight types are temperature-themed and appropriately placed considering the dungeon’s varied temperatures, lending further credence to the dungeon’s theme. Moreover, a few of them (like Freezards and White Wolfos) feel especially well-balanced against the Goron Mask. In general, combat is hugely improved over Woodfall Temple, primarily because most battles are incorporated into rooms with puzzles, platforming, or unique architecture that impacts strategy. No longer do fights feel like a string of disparate one-offs, but they are part of a cohesive whole, in turn contributing to the sense that Snowhead Temple is less a man-made construct than a living ecosystem.

The dungeon’s mini-boss is Wizzrobe, a wizard that teleports from one select tile to another and fires magic at Link. While he is enjoyable enough to fight once (especially with arrows, which make the him feel like a mini-game), Wizzrobe appears twice in Snowhead and again in later dungeons, making him one of the most tiresome enemy types in the game. Even in his second appearance, he already feels shoehorned into the game since he doesn’t remotely play into the dungeon’s ice theme, nor does he have any special relationship with the dungeon’s item. Fortunately, the final battle against Goht more than makes up for Wizzrobe’s inadequacies. As a proto-Stallord, seemingly Excitebike-Zelda hybrid, the battle against Goht has Goron Link aggressively roll into Goht as he runs around the ramp-laden racetrack-like arena. It is one of the most unique, memorable, and enjoyable bosses in any Zelda game — in contention for the GOAT title after which it is undoubtedly named.

Snowhead Temple is full of numerous small missteps, from terrible fairy placement, to a repetitious mini-boss, to tepid integration of its central theme, but room-by-room the dungeon is quite strong. As a whole, Snowhead Temple holds together with remarkable unity and ushers in an entirely new type of Zelda dungeon where the entire dungeon acts as a meta-puzzle combining puzzle-solving with thoughtful navigation. Though not flawless, it is extremely ambitious, and would go on to spawn Breath of the Wild’s controversial take on dungeons, the Divine Beasts. It may not be as instantly memorable as Stone Temple Tower, but Snowhead Temple is a sleeper hit. A dungeon for the dungeon connoisseur, Snowhead Temple melds tried-and-true ingredients with cutting-edge technique to craft an experience a little rough around the edges but nonetheless singular.

For deep dives into other levels from Majora’s Mask, as well as levels from other classic Nintendo games such as Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, click here.

Kyle is an avid gamer who wrote about video games in academia for ten years before deciding it would be more fun to have an audience. When he's not playing video games, he's probably trying to think of what else to write in his bio so it seems like he isn't always playing video games.

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