The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask AMV: It's Me

Many thanks to Ecclesiastes for looking over this rant and making sure it doesn't suck!  At least, not any worse than usual.  You're the best, sir!



How long’s it been since an AMV impressed me so much that I felt compelled to make an entire rant all about it and it alone?  Over 3 years?  Sounds about right; quality of such degree doesn’t come around often.  And hey, bonus, this time it’s not about Final Fantasy 8!  So let’s take a look at the treat that its creator, who prefers to go by Eldritchdraaks, has to share with us.


The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask: It’s Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIqnrE-zcOw


Look.  Look with Your Special Eyes: This AMV is a damn treat to see.  The basic graphical quality is high, the visuals having been taken from the 3DS HD version of the game, and although TLoZMM is a dated game technologically, it nonetheless has an iconic aesthetic that puts its polygons to work in a way that piques the player’s interest as much in the present as it did in the past.

The use of visual effects here is excellent, in my opinion.  For the most part, Eldritchdraaks is quite content to let the energy and strength of Majora’s Mask speak for itself, doing little to alter or distract from the strength of its creepy and often striking imagery, and that’s a smart move--it’s usually better as a rule of thumb to be reserved about interfering with the game’s part in an AMV, and that’s especially true when the game’s look plays a huge role in its identity and the identity of the AMV as a whole.  But that doesn’t mean that Eldritchdraaks’s limited himself just to smooth and artfully logical scene selections and transitions: he has, in fact, found a way to increase the power of Majora’s Mask’s screen presence in this video by editing in text boxes, styled after the game’s own, to display the song’s lyrics.  It’s a good idea that has a great payoff for the video, as with the game itself seeming to be the one singing the song’s lyrics, it’s all the more immersive an experience.  The text even changes in color and loses its box at times when the game scene it’s supposedly playing over would normally have had an accordingly different style--now that’s dedication to detail!

Similarly, Eldritchdraaks’s ability to insert the series-signature musical score text boxes at moments when the character on-screen is playing an instrument is a clever and very cool trick, particularly the way that he has the button-press notes appear in perfect sync with the music’s beats--it flawlessly looks like it’s real footage of a gamer managing to play along to the AMV’s song.  In fact, I at first didn’t even realize it wasn’t authentic, until I realized that these score boxes show up even when characters other than Link are playing music.  Very neat!

Eldritchdraaks really threw his all into the visual presentation of this AMV, and it shows, even in ways you don’t necessarily pick up on consciously.  There is, for example, a substantive effect at 2:39 in which the screen keeps reducing in size to the beat of the music.  To me, it simply represented a special effect that emphasized the increasing tension in the music and scene (and it’s very effective in this capacity), but the creator has told me that that’s actually 1 of his favorite moments of editing, because beyond just its great harmony with the music and cutscene, it also references the way, in TLoZMM, the screen shrinks at the end of each day, when the clock tower rings.  I’m not too proud to admit that this allusion went right over my head, but it’s a great example of the level of dedication and subtlety Eldritchdraaks put into this work to not only make it really cool to watch, but a great representation of the source material in even the most subtle ways.  These are the hallmarks of a real artist, and It’s Me is filled with’em.


If Music be the Food of Love, Play On: The song used in this AMV is It’s Me, an original fan creation by TryHardNinja for the 5 Nights at Freddy’s series.  I can’t say that it’s my kind of music at all, any more than 5 Nights at Freddy’s is my kind of game, but I can at least recognize that the song, for what kind of music it is, seems really good.  Far too good for the franchise it was inspired by, really.

Which actually is fitting, because it’s kinda hard for me to imagine that this song could possibly fit better to the game it was actually created for than it does to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.  At least, that’s how I feel after seeing this AMV, which so perfectly matches, from start to finish, this unsettling and spooky song to both the blatant and the out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye sense of disturbing wrongness that TLoZMM revels in.  Additionally, lyrics that (I assume) have literal meaning when applied to 5NaF take on an even more sinister and fitting feeling as Eldritchdraaks pairs them as metaphors and symbols to the visuals of Majora’s Mask, while maintaining at least if not more surface-level relevance, as a song about a creepy and hostile setting, masks, and the cycle of night to day.

Of course, finding the music that matches the game so well is only a quarter of the battle, and the rest is managing to match it all together to create a product that’s both fitting and entertaining.  Eldritchdraaks is up the task.  I love the individual scenes that fit into the lyrics like a glove, such as 0:34, in which the song declares that the subject is in the dark but not all alone, and we see Link falling in the dark, but surrounded by the many masks which will assist him on the journey (thus he’s not alone, albeit in a much more positive sense than the music originally intended).  And I love 1:56, talking of making the listener “one of them” and showing the scene of Link as a wooden creepy-as-hell figure*

I love the way the scenes used for the chorus not only match the lyrics, but follow a theme, with the first one at 0:37 connecting the chorus’s subject of masks with the main 3 transformation masks that Link wears in TLoZMM and their origins, and then the second chorus at 2:07 continuing that theme by now focusing on other characters wearing less-central masks that also transformed them, or at least hid the truth of who they were.  I love the similar thematic way that the second part of the chorus each time is used to highlight the evil infesting Termina, the first time emphasizing the major story bosses, the second time focusing on the background villainy, all perfectly building up to the proclamation of the titular evil “It’s Me.”  Damn elegantly done, too, with each embodiment of the expressed evil being slotted into a single repetition of the lyrics.  And I love that the last part of the chorus, having no lyrics to coordinate with, seamlessly blends together with the song’s overpowering tune, giving us a montage both times of scenes that synchronize with each beat that once again follows a theme (music the first time, settings in sequential order of game completion the second time).  And I love that the end of the song coincides with the Dawn of a New Day.

This is pretty much as good as it gets in terms of joining the right visuals and the right game to a song.  I wasn’t kidding before; I earnestly couldn’t imagine how you could make this song better suit 5 Nights at Freddy’s, that which it was specifically created for, than this AMV makes it fit to The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.  This is just masterful music video craftsmanship, plain and simple.


Lucy, You Got Some ‘Splainin’ to Do: The purpose of this AMV is that of most game music videos: to pay tribute to its subject and tell its story.  And it does it darned well.  As noted, the music is a great match to the discomforting atmosphere and imagery of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, and the visuals capitalize on that nicely.  Additionally, Eldritchdraaks represents a wide range of both the most narratively important and the more memorable scenes, characters, and props of the game, furthering the effectiveness of the video as a tribute to the style, and mentality of Majora’s Mask.

It’s also cool, though, in that it not only emotionally tells the story of the game, but also does so more literally, too.  The AMV opens with early content from the game that sets the overall plot up, ends with the game’s own finality, and between these moments contains the majority of the signature, vital parts of the game--the scene selection of this AMV manages to represent Majora’s Mask’s most important plot devices and concepts (the masks, the musical component, the moon, the time repetition, etc), its most important characters, its antagonists, and its settings.  But it goes a step further than just laying out all the pieces of the game: in the last part of the second chorus, we get to see a quick sequence that represents the course of the game itself, showing us each major dungeon to overcome in its beginning state and then the results of Link’s actions, in the order they’re visited in the game, finishing with the climactic showdown in Clocktown and the destruction of the moon.  It’s essentially like a tiny snapshot of the game’s own course...and by having previously showed us all the characters and plot devices and whatnot, the AMV has, in a sense, told us the whole story of the game.  It showed us all the actors and props in the play, and then the events in the order they transpire--a stylized little way of telling TLoZMM’s story without doing a conventional play-by-play.  Very neat!

It’s Me is a really great AMV.  It tells the story and sells the feeling and style of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask extremely well, it’s technically excellent, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch, and its every part seems to have been made with care.  You’re lucky if you can find a single decent RPG AMV for every 20 you come across, but quality outweighs quantity to me, and it’s AMVs of quality like this that keep me an avid watcher of this fan art-form.












* I’m not alone in this; this is also Eldritchdraaks’s favorite part of the video.  To quote the man himself, “My absolute favorite part of the video is 1:53-2:22. With the way the lyrics talk about "making you one of us" and showing the creepy link statue as if to imply Majora wished for Link to fall and become yet another of those to leave behind nothing but a mask. And it's followed up with talking about "doing it all again" because HEY! that's the whole point of the game! the constant resets, falling through the void of clocks to land right back where you started at 6am. Time to do it all again.”