Majora's Mask Part 5: Link wins a horse race, beats up a giant stalchild, turns into a mummy, gets the ugliest shield in Zelda history, and gets a song from a floating head.

So now we're off to Ikana Canyon, the fourth and final area in Majora's Mask. It's all very exciting. This place is barren and sucks, even after you beat the temple - everything's dead and brown, and there are tons of Gibdos (mummies) hanging around. You can't even enter this area yet, though, because there's a freaky looking one-eyed weirdo on top of a cliff who is blocking your path. She/he/it wants you to get a mask that you can find by the ranch before you proceed, so we have to backtrack. There's a lot of backtracking in this part of the game.

"Sorry about that. I have
a business agreement with the Gorman bros. that
gives me five rupees for every moron
who I can get to bring back one of those masks."

Anyway, near the ranch is the Gorman bros. racetrack. Both of these guys look like Ingo from Ocarina of Time, and they're kind of dodgy. You can challenge them to a horse race, and if you win, you'll receive the Garo's mask. The Gorman bros. apparently have a few of these masks hanging around, because they both wear them whenever they're beating up Cremia's milk cart. (You have to fight them off after you save Romani ranch from aliens.)

The Garo are scary spirits that hang around the Ikana Canyon area who you can fight to get information about what to do next, but they'll only show up if you wear the Garo's mask in the right places. Otherwise, it's pretty irrelevant.

This sprite swap from Ocarina of Time is so lazy that they
didn't even bother to change their names. Or maybe
they just spent a really long time coming up with the Sharp
and Flat puns and didn't want to let them go to waste.

Upon exploring the area a little bit, you'll notice a few things. One, there's a stupid-looking house surrounded by Gibdos, and two, there's a dry creek that runs by that house which leads into a cave. If you go into the cave, you're greeted by one of the two composer brothers from Ocarina of Time. He doesn't like the fact that you've come to Ikana since you're all alive and stuff, so he offers to kill you, which is some good problem-solving on his part I guess. Anyway, he starts playing a song which slowly does damage to you and if you don't leave, you'll run out of hearts and die. Good stuff.

So off we go to the Graveyard, which is another area in and around Ikana Canyon. If you come here at night, there are a bunch of stalchildren who will try to kill you. In the daytime, it's pretty peaceful. There is a huge stalchild who is apparently asleep under an arch who you naturally have to beat up, 'cause that's how Link rolls. Play the Sonata of Awakening and he'll wake up and start running away from you. You have to catch him while beating up a bunch of other stalchildren (normal-sized) within a certain amount of time or else he's all like SCREW YOU BRO and goes back to sleep.

That's one big skeleton.

Once you beat up this guy, he gives you the Captain's Hat, which makes all the little stalchildren who run around at night think that you're their leader. They patrol around the graves at night and if you ask them to open the one they're patrolling on the first night, you can drop down there and get the Song of Storms from Flat, Sharp's brother, who he totally murdered. Flat asks you to play the song to Sharp, so off we go back to the cave.

Once you play the song to Sharp, he is suddenly not a bastard and apologizes. The creek is also restored to normal, which allows us the joy and pleasure of watching a terrible cutscene. The creek flows by the weird house, which turns out to be a music box house that plays music that kills Gibdos. Hooray! Once all the Gibdos have been killed by horrible music and rainbow light, a little girl from inside the house runs out and examines the now-flowing creek. If she sees you, she will run into the house and lock the door, so you have to sneak by her like a boss with the Stone Mask.

Inside the house is her father, the Gibdo researcher, who is (incidentally) slowly being turned into a Gibdo and tries to attack you and stuff. Link solves the problem in his usual way by playing the Song of Healing, which actually doesn't kill the guy this time but does result in you getting the Gibdo's Mask from him. Hooray! Watch a touching scene between him and his kid and then leave, 'cause there's other stuff to do.

The Gibdo's Mask makes Gibdos think you're one of them, so like the Captain's Hat, you can now chat them up. This leads to probably the worst part of this game, hands-down. I can put up with a lot of fetch questing, don't get me wrong, but this sequence is long and unnecessary. There's a well in the Ikana Canyon area that you can jump down, and you'll find down there a couple of Gibdos guarding doors with bars over them. If you talk to them, they ask you (in riddle form) for a particular item. If you give them what they wanted, they will return to the grave and open the door for you. Behind which you will find more Gibdos looking for more stuff. And so on.

This is not a big deal except that there are tons of them, and one of the first ones asks for a blue potion, which means you have to leave the area, go back to the Swamp, find a mushroom in the woods using the Mask of Scents (God help you if you didn't pick it up before, because that means completing Woodfall Temple again,) give the mushroom to Koume the potion lady, and then go back to the Bottom of the Well and hand it over. That's the most annoying one, fortunately, and most of the items you need are conveniently found in the Bottom of the Well (including a cow for milk, which is a bit odd) but still. Come on, Nintendo, really? Why not another mini-dungeon or something? Item trading quests are just not that exciting.

Ikana's Got Talent!

Anyway, once you've made it through Gibdo hell, you receive the Mirror Shield! Hooray! Remember how cool the Mirror Shield looked in Ocarina of Time? Awesome, right? No. Even the Mirror Shield gets to have that disturbing Majora's Mask touch by having a traumatizing face on it.

You can now melt sun blocks using light, so Link goes up a ladder from the Bottom of the Well and into Ikana Castle, which was previously unreachable without the shield. This is a surprisingly cool mini-dungeon, and almost makes up for the crap we had to put up with at the Bottom of the Well. If you run around here with your Gibdo Mask on (or the Captain's Hat,) most of the enemies will not only leave you alone, but dance for you! Awesome!

There's a few short puzzles in here, one of which requires a Powder Keg to be solved, so enjoy running back to Clock Town for that. Thanks again, Nintendo. At the end of this dungeon is a boss fight that basically just requires a lot of fairies to beat, since the boss is cheap and will kill you a lot for no reason with his unblockable attack (which involves him detaching his head and then biting you. It's great.) The boss is Igos du Ikana, the totally dead former king of Ikana, and once you defeat him and his two lackies, he'll teach you the Elegy of Emptiness.

You shouldn't have done that.

Let me explain to you why the Elegy of Emptiness will haunt your nightmares. What it does is create a shell of whatever form you're currently in (Goron, Zora, Deku, Hylian,) which will allow you to hold down switches with that dummy form while you continue on. This is awesome and whatever except that the Hylian one is literally so creepy that it has spawned its own horror ARG.

Now you can officially make your way up Stone Tower to reach the Stone Tower Temple! Hooray! I know I'm excited. The entrance to Stone Tower is back out in the Ikana Canyon area, and can only be entered by using your Goron form to roll up into the door.

Stone Tower is really tall, and consists of a few layers of what is essentially the same puzzle. Each layer has three switches that you have to hold down in the right order (using the Elegy of Emptiness) so that a row of three blocks will span across the empty chasm in the middle of the tower so you can proceed. Once on the other side, you go up another layer using your hookshot and the convenient targets that are hanging around.

After a few rounds of this, you reach the entrance to the Stone Tower Temple, which is freaky-looking (just like everything else in Ikana Canyon.) One more round of the switches, and you can jump across some floating blocks to enter.

Next time - Stone Tower Temple and beating the crap out of Majora's Mask. Also, the end. Seriously. I promise.