Something that makes me a little insane is that Majora’s Mask and Code: Veronica came out within a couple of months of each other in Japan in 2000.
They were both direct follow-ups to two of 1998’s defining games—Ocarina of Time and Resident Evil 2—and therefore inherited the fairly miserable assignment of following games that had already become monumental. How do you follow something considered one of the greatest accomplishments of its generation? Apparently, in both cases, you make a deeply strange nightmare that resembles its predecessor just enough to make all of its differences feel even stranger.
Neither game attempts to recreate the triumph immediately preceding it. Majora’s Mask takes Ocarina’s familiar models, mechanics and faces and traps them inside three repeating days in a parallel world awaiting its destruction. Characters have schedules. People continue going to work, planning weddings, arguing, hiding and grieving beneath a moon that is visibly coming down to kill them. Link does not simply collect new tools; he wears the remains of the dead and temporarily becomes them.
Code: Veronica, meanwhile, takes the structure of classic Resident Evil out of Raccoon City and drops it into an absurdly elaborate Gothic family tragedy. It begins with Claire looking for her brother and eventually becomes a story about another pair of siblings entirely: an extinct aristocratic dynasty, inherited madness, secret identities, dolls, music boxes, private prisons, a military island and an Antarctic palace. It is Resident Evil by way of a diseased fairy tale and a particularly feverish stage melodrama.
They are also both made from recognizable remains. Majora reuses Ocarina’s characters while assigning them different lives. Code: Veronica retains Resident Evil’s fixed perspectives, keys, puzzles, resource management and backtracking while using new technology to render its environments in real time. Both feel familiar at first glance, but the familiarity becomes uncanny. These are the people and rules you recognize, rearranged into worlds where something is profoundly wrong.
Both games were successful and remained important to their series, but they have the aura of cult classics because neither one became the model for what followed. Zelda never returned to a world quite as intimate, scheduled and apocalyptic as Termina. Resident Evil never again combined its old survival-horror structure with quite this degree of ornate, deranged, operatic family drama. Later games borrowed pieces from them, but the particular doors these two games opened seemed to close behind them.
I love them because they feel like strange evolutionary dead ends: two enormous series standing at the edge of a new era and, instead of safely repeating themselves, briefly wandering into some beautiful and deeply peculiar territory they would never inhabit in quite the same way again.
Two weird sequels from the year 2000. Two familiar worlds transformed into bad dreams. Two games given the impossible job of following masterpieces—and becoming far stranger, sadder and more singular than anyone could reasonably have expected.
✦ An addendum, because apparently these two games also agreed that following a masterpiece should involve mildly tormenting the player.
Both are famously capable of frustrating anyone who actually decides to play them, although they do it in revealingly different ways. Majora’s Mask turns time itself into a limited resource. Its challenge is not simply defeating enemies or solving isolated puzzles, but learning an entire clockwork world: who will be where, which events depend upon one another, how much can be accomplished before the cycle ends and when to accept that the only way forward is to surrender your progress and begin the three days again. It demands planning, memory and a willingness to fail before you fully understand what the game was asking.
Code: Veronica is punitive in the more traditional language of survival horror. It asks the player to ration ammunition and healing supplies, anticipate dangerous encounters, remember distant locks and mechanisms, and decide what to carry without knowing exactly what waits ahead. Its traps, long journeys, character transitions and notoriously cruel bosses can make a mistake committed hours earlier suddenly reveal itself as a catastrophe. Where Majora’s Mask makes you fear running out of time, Code: Veronica makes you fear arriving at the next horror with the wrong things in your pockets.
Their difficulty is therefore part of the same quality I love in their stories: neither game is especially interested in making its strange new world comfortable for the player. One forces you to learn the rhythms of a doomed place by repeatedly living through its final days. The other makes survival depend upon respecting a sprawling Gothic death trap that refuses to explain itself in advance.
They can be maddening, and sometimes downright unfair, but that friction is part of what makes them linger: playing either one feels like being trapped inside the peculiar obsessions of the people who designed it.
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