The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [62]
Eternal recurrence is a good place to start thinking about temporality in Majora’s Mask, because the temporal structure of the game relies on the idea of repetition, of Link going back in time to re-encounter the same three days over and over. In this way, the game resists the conventions of linear, serial narrative; playing the Third Day after logging twenty hours of gameplay is not “later” than a Third Day played near the beginning of the game, at least in the narrative sense. The three-day cycles are not sequenced one after the other, but rather it is implied that they temporally coexist.
Despite the grand and bold efforts of Nietzsche, I would be remiss if I left the discussion of temporality here. A number of philosophers have raised interesting ideas about the philosophy of time that can be used to productively question and challenge Nietzsche’s version of eternal recurrence, and the structure and design of Majora’s Mask likewise present elements that complicate a mapping of eternal recurrence onto the game’s temporality.
Putting That Ocarina to Good Use
The first item complicating the matter is the very thing that allows the three-day cycle to happen in Majora’s Mask : Link’s Ocarina of Time. After learning the Song of Time, the player can have Link play the song on his Ocarina to save the game and go back to the beginning of the First Day. The Ocarina, though, can also be used to manipulate the flow of time, thus disrupting the three-day cycle. Play the Inverted Song of Time, and the flow of time is changed to half its normal speed. The Song of Double Time skips directly ahead to the next evening or morning, depending on the current place in the cycle.
Unlike other games where the player can select the game speed or even control the pace of event time mid-game (as in various versions of SimCity), Majora’s Mask allows the player to manipulate the flow of time entirely within the diegesis of the game. The player is not simply intervening with a controller or interface to change the pace of the game; rather, we can read this as a narrativized event with Link playing his Ocarina to somehow alter the progression of linear time.
What this suggests is that each iteration of the three-day cycle is not a repetition, in the sense that the same events occur in the same order. Additionally, three days is no longer really three days. With the player’s ability to manipulate time in this way, the “day” cannot represent a stable period or amount of time—it could take more or less time to elapse. The illusion of repetition is still here; the same clock at the bottom of the screen runs, and the player still gets the same reminders to serve as notification of how many hours are left. However, the player knows that time in this context functions more as a commodity to be controlled (“out of time, better withdraw some from the Bank of Time”) than an absolute limiting factor.
This presents an alternative scenario to that of the Eternal Recurrence Demon. The addition of an unstable, day-hopping, forward-backward, slow-fast mode of temporality throws into question the idea that events must eventually occur in the same, infinite sequence. The very idea of sequentiality is no longer reliable. Similarly, while some philosophers have gone along with Nietzsche’s formulation of eternal recurrence, some have found it more problematic. For example, David Wood writes in The Deconstruction of Time,
As it stands, I am not persuaded either that a finite number of elements could not generate an infinite number of qualitatively different states, thus making the necessary infinite repetition of each state a non sequitur. Nor, if everything were to be repeated infinitely, is it clear why it must take the form of exact cycles of complete sequences of permutations.” (Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 16)
The ability