(Yeah, it’s not Majora’s Mask but it’s an awesome pic, so close enough :) )

Hello everyone and happy October! This month’s UWG Community Post is about our favorite gaming secrets! Those things we’ve come across in our games the were so great they made us smile, laugh out loud, or take your breath away (in my case, the two latter options)! As we all share our favorites a how we experienced them, it is our hope that you will share yours too. We’re all looking forward to comparing notes with you!

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. In all seriousness, it’s my favorite Zelda game. There’s just something about it that appeals to me in an almost perfect way. It’s unusual, it’s challenging, funny at times, all around fun, and it’s freaking Dark! Seriously, this game is right up there with Twilight Princess in terms of darkness in tone. It perhaps even surpasses Twilight Princess due to the premise (It’s the end of the world! How do you get darker than that?!) and in how it puts on this bright and sunny facade that develops more and more cracks as the game progresses. But I digress. I could keep going but I’ve already discussed this once before. If you’d like to follow this line of thought further, you can check out the post here.

So as I said, Majora’s Mask is my favorite Zelda, and as such my favorite secret can be found here. Here’s the setup: In the game, there is a theif known as “Sakon”. You can play the whole game without ever speaking to him or even coming into contact with him. He plays minor role in a couple of sidequests and will steal your sword if you let him hold it. That’s all. Not a character you’d ever associate anything special with right? Well, there is something special about this thief: You can kill him. Yes, you read that right. In Majora’s Mask, you can kill a person. I don’t mean in a glitchy sort of way where it looks like you kill him and the game doesn’t notice. In the game, this is real.

I cam across this probably a year after the game came out (so 2001). I was at a friends house and we were goofing around doing all kinds of silly things to try and see what would happen in the game. Most of it was trying to jump into odd places to clip through walls or donning the Bunny Hood to run circle around people (…we must have been pretty bored.). Eventually, we started playing normally again and decide to unlock the Blast Mask, which you earn by preventing Sakon from robbing the owner of the Clock Town Bomb shop. It was easy to do, all you needed to do was be at there at the time of the robbery, slash Sakon with your sword to make him drop the bag, and boom! Blast mask for you!

We must have each run through this encounter several times, having played through the game so much, so this time we thought we’d try something different, something…fancy. I had the controller at this point and decided that I was going to shoot the bag off of Sakon instead of running up and slashing him, I wanted to play it cool. So when the Sakon stole the bag this time, I lined up the shot, loosed and arrow, and…BOOM! The bag explodes in a flash and a puff of smoke, and Sakon is nowhere to be seen. My friend and I both just sat there for a minute or two, mouths agape, processing what just happened. I still remember exactly how the conversation went afterward:

Me: “Wh-…Where did he…go?”

Friend: “I..don’t know…”

Me: “He just…”

Friend: “…just…”

Me: “disappeared…Did I just…blow him up?”

Friend: “…Yeah.”

Me: “You can do that?”

Friend:” I guess so.”

Me: “So I just blew up Sakon…”

Both: *uproarious laughter*

We couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of the situation; we had just accidentally discovered the only person you can outright kill in a Zelda game! We discovered later that the game treats the death as real. You can’t complete the Kafei sidequest, the owner of the Curiosity shop mentions he hasn’t seen his supplier in a while, and Sakon is never seen in Ikana valley after this happens.

This isn’t the most elaborate secret I’ve ever found, but it is simultaneously the most shocking and entertaining. It’s a perfect measure of surprise discovery and out-of-character allowance of the game that makes this secret so perfect. It’s so easy to find but is also something you’d never expect to see in a Zelda game.  After 12 years I’ve never forgotten how that discovery felt. I will likely never forget.

Never.