The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is the black sheep of 3D Zelda games. On a timer with only four dungeons, it’s mostly mad🎃e up of side content. Funny enough, despite differing immensely on a fo🍰undational level, Breath of the Wild has more in common with Majora’s Mask philoso🌜phically ﷽than any other 3D entry in the franchise.
This is a game where ignoring side content means facing the final bജoss with seven Heart Containers. It ain’t pretty. With so much side content to wade through, encompassing the entire game, Majora’s Mask can afford to play with the difficulty curve of different minigames. More so than any other 3D entry in the franchise. Naturally, some Heart Pieces a🌌re too hard for their own good.
10 Mamamu Yan’s Doggy Racetrack
The worst Heart Pieces tend to either require far more effort than they’re worth, or just come down to pure luck. M🌠amamu Yan’s Doggy Racetrack is a dog racing minigame where Link picks one of many dogs from her pen and gambles on them to win. Earn a 150 Rupee payout and the Heart Piece is Link’s.
But this is a very quick 🎶way of wasting money as there’s no way to tell which dog will win without the Mask of Truth, a mask that’s inconvenient to get until much later in the game. Any players who want this Piece of Heart before the halfway point should either pick the gold or black dog and pray they win. Of all the dogs, they seem to win the most often (though they also make a habit of 𒁏placing dead last.)
9 Postman’s Game
A tricky minigame that’s trivialized by the Bunny Hood, players who attempt ꦛto get this Heart Piece asap will find themselves needing to stop an invisible timer right as it hits 10 seconds. Not 9.99, not 10.01– 10 second exact. Needless to say, this is an incredibly difficult task to pull off. Even with the Bunny Hood, it still requires quick reflexes.
It’s not impossible to get the Pieඣce of Heart without the Bunny Hood, but it wouldn’t be featured here otherwise. It’s possible, but it’s going to require quick fingers. Using a timer actually does help considerably, but it still requires perfect t🐎iming to get the timer right.
8 Oceanside Spider House
Most players may not even real💖ize that there’s even a Piece of Heart in the Oceanside Spider House without looking it🃏 up. Since Stalchildren litter the Spider House, and most players will only get the Captain’s Hat after doing everything in the Great Bay, Link won’t be able to communicate with the Stalchildren to get hints for the H♕eart Piece.
Even with the Captain’s Hat, overeager players may just kill the Stalchildren without thinking. They respawn, but it’s easy enough to forget to talk to them. Even when speaking to them, the hints require players ☂to piece together a shooting order for four different masks.
7 Town Shooting Gallery
This one is real rough on original 🧔Nintendo 64 hardware. The Nintendo 64’s joystick just isn’t up to the challenge, at least not without some getting used to. The sensitivity is tough, Link isn’t as smooth as he should be, and getting the Heart Piece requires perfect aiming. No ifs, ands, or buts. Make a mistake? Might as well just giv♔e up.
Worse yet, players need to complete this minigame twice as Link can unlock a Quiver upgrade alongside the Piece of Heart. This 🐼can end up🌠 one of the most time-consuming minigames in Majora’s Mask for anyone playing with an original N64 🍰controller. Shockingly, the minigame is even worse when playing with a GameCube controller.
6 Swamp Shooting Gallery
The Swamp Shooting Gallery is harder than the Town Sꦛhooting Galle🐻ry, but at least it’s more forgiving. So long as players can almost hit a perfect score, they can keep playing and൩ memorizing the gallery for free. It makes practicing far less stressful than in the Town Shooting Gallery, but th💞e trade-off is that the Swamp Shooting Gallery is incredibly busy.
Enemies come and they go, popp🦩ing out via sound cues alone. Players need to be incredibly perceptive and remember enemy patterns. It’s one of the most challenging activities in the game and, like with the 🥀Town Shooting Gallery, it has to be done twice for every upgrade.
5 Honey & Darling’s Shop
One of the ways Majora’s Mask keeps Termina dynamic is by having NPCs actively acknowledge Link over the course of the 72-hour schedule. So long as he keeps beatin♊g their minigames, Honey and Darling ꧑will recognize Link from day to day. Day 1 has Link letting Bombchu loose at targets, day 2 has Link playing basketball with bombs, and day 3 has a shooting gallery.
Day 3 is th🎶e easiest. That alone is enough to send chills down a man’s spine, but days 1 and 2 are an enormous pain if you don’t have a grasp of bomb and bombchu throwing. Which you realistically might not since they’re not that important.
4 Ikana Graveyard Tomb (2nd Night)
Iron Knuckles were some of the mo⛄st formidable opponeꦯnts Link faced in Ocarina of Time. They could toss him around with ease, tear into his hearts, and generally just ruin a careles🙈s player’s day. They return in Majora’s Mask, but unlike in Ocarina of Time when they come fairly late in the game, players can rea🌠listically run into an Iron Knuckle with only six hearts.
Doing the 🎶Ikana Graverobbing side quest without doing enough side content to at least have 10 hearts is basically asking the Iron Knuckle guarding this Piece of Heart to personally tear Link limb from limb. It makes for an incredibly exciting fight if nothing else– a rarity for 3D Zelda.
3 Couple’s Mask Heart
Locked behind the single longest side quest in the game, the Couple’s Mask is only obtained after players reunite Anju and Kafei a mere hour & a half before the Moon crashes into Termina and wipes every♉one out. It’s morbid, it’s sad, but at least Link gets a new mask out of it! The road there requires some effort, though.
Anju and Kafei’s side quest is going to make up the bulk of the entire cycle. Don’t even think about doing anything else while attempting the side quest. Simply dedicate the whole cycle to it. Straying cꦺan easily result in forgetting where to go when, potentially locking the quest early and requiring players to start all over. To say nothing of Sakon’s Hideout, a timed mini-dungeon where players have to control both Link and Kafei.
2 Frog Concerto
A really good side quest in theory🦹 that’s actually made a🦋 bit tedious by Majora’s Mask resetting things every cycle. To get the Heart Piece locked behind the frog concerto, players need to be able to: restor༒e spring to Snowhead, defeat the Gekko in Woodfall Templeꦐ, defeat the Gekko in Great Bay Temple, along with knowing where the frogs are in Clock Town and Southern Swamp.
Attemptin꧋g this side quest too early is an enormous pain. It requires so much effort, and needing to 𓄧fight Goht again can be a time sink. Plus, it’s not particularly fun having to head back into Woodfall and Great Bay Temple to hunt down mini-bosses. Especially since players likely won’t remember where said mini-bosses are.
1 Gyrog’s Moon Heart (3DS Only)
Zora Swimming is a bad change, b🧸ut it doesn’t make getting through the Great Bay aggressively worse. Worse, yes, but not to the point where it’s frustrating or unpla♓yable. Requiring a mastery of it to get a Heart Piece in Gyorg’s Moon Dungeon, however, is just plain cruel. No one in their right mind would take the time to master such an unfun mechanic, and suddenly it’s necessary.
This also makes getting the Fierce Deity’s Mask way more frustrating by the way. Players essentially have to stop and teach themselves how to properly Zora Swim under the 3DS remake’s stri🎃ct new laws. It’s obnoxious and a pace killer right before the end of the game.