Nintendo is remaking N64 game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask for 3DS and 2DS. Speaking during a Nintendo Direct presentation today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata confirmed that the 3D-enabled remake would be released on the handheld console in Spring of 2015. The game, first released in 2000, was the second Zelda title to be released for the Nintendo 64 after the superlative Ocarina of Time, which received its own 3D remake in 2011.
Majora's Mask uses a similar graphical style to Ocarina of Time, but the second N64 Zelda has a very different structure to previous Zelda games. It takes player character Link away from the series' familiar setting of Hyrule, placing him instead in the land of Termina, and tasks him with saving the world by halting the imminent collision of the moon. Players can travel forward and backwards in time, but they only have three in-game days to stop Termina's complete destruction.
'Majora's Mask' is the only Zelda that could've been directed by David Lynch
It's also delightfully dark in tone. The moon — with glowing red eyes and a rictus grimace — is a constant and genuinely menacing presence that reminds the player of their coming doom. The unsettling tone is compounded by the presence of a particularly creepy mask salesman and the apparently painful transformations Link has to go through to morph into the game's other races, helping the game spawn creepy internet folklore, and making Majora's Mask feel like the only Zelda game that could've been directed by David Lynch.
Nintendo used the same presentation to announce that the NES classic Duck Hunt was making its way to the Wii U's Virtual Console. The venerable lightgun game will require players to use a Wii remote to aim at the screen in order to murder innocent virtual ducks for sport. No specific price or release date has been set yet for either Majora's Mask 3D or the Virtual Console's Duck Hunt.