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The New Nintendo 3DS XL’s new features hold up great over long-term play sessions. You’ll find this out, too, when you start digging into the latest Zelda.
On February 13, Nintendo will release two big new products in the US: the latest model of its portable Nintendo 3DS, the New Nintendo 3DS XL, and a 3DS revamp of its nearly 15-year-old game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask . Pairing them was a great decision.
Majora, originally released on Nintendo 64, was a sharp turn for the staid Zelda series. Instead of another rehash of the Link-saves-Princess-Zelda story, it went off on a bizarre tangent—Link found himself in a town that, in three days’ time, would be destroyed by a massive, leering moon colliding with Earth. Link can’t save the town in time, but he can turn back the clock just before annihilation, reliving the same three days over and over until he finds a way to stop the moon. Along the way, you got to play with the idea of time-travel in ways other games of the time never considered.
This isn’t a story about the long-awaited return of a classic. Actually, we’ve been able to download Majora’s Mask for 10 bucks on the Wii (or Wii U) since 2009. The benefit of Majora’s Mask 3D isn’t its existence so much as the fact it’s a refined version of a game that’s kind of hard to go back to these days. The system for saving your game is much kinder to the player now, as befits a portable experience that you want to start and stop frequently. And there are a variety of other tweaks that make the time-travel mechanic a little easier to handle.
Majora’s Mask 3D doesn’t require the New 3DS XL. You can play it on any 3DS or 2DS. But it’s an excellent test case for the upgraded hardware, since it makes use of the optional new features. I was quite impressed with how well the New 3DS XL held up during what turned out to be marathon Zelda sessions.
The right analog stick on the New 3DS, which controls the camera in Majora’s Mask, held up well over the long run. It’s the size and shape of the top of a pencil eraser, and, come to think of it, feels like one too. It’s nice to have full and easy control of the camera during a Zelda game, which hasn’t always been the case (and certainly wasn’t in the Nintendo 64 version of the game).
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The other big feature is what Nintendo calls the “super-stable” 3-D display, which uses an infrared front-facing camera to track the position of your eyeballs and point the 3DS’ glasses-free stereoscopic 3-D display right at them. With the regular 3DS, you had to hold it fairly steady in front of your face to avoid breaking the illusion. I got a Japanese model of the New 3DS XL last year, and it was pretty clear that the new 3-D display had solved this problem.
What I didn’t realize was how well it solved that problem. I had the New 3DS, but I didn’t have a massive new adventure to take it for a spin with. I played it for a little while to test it out, but not for extended play sessions—until now.
A couple hours into a session of Majora’s Mask, I realized something—I’d had the 3-D turned on the whole time and I didn’t even notice. When 3DS launched in 2011, we were all gaga over the 3-D display, because the idea of seeing stereoscopic images without having to wear glasses seemed magical. But one by one, we all turned the 3-D off.
For one thing, the magic had worn off, and the unique feeling of seeing 3-D images without glasses no longer impressed. Beyond that, I’d started to notice my eyes felt a fatigued after awhile. Not painfully so, but an irritating sensation that went away as soon as I clicked into 2-D. And, of course, the lack of stability of the effect meant that every now and again, no matter how stable your grip, you were going to break the illusion.
My first experience with New 3DS made it clear that it had at least solved the illusion-breaking issue, but I also found that the weird eye fatigue was gone. I could play and play and play in 3-D and totally forget I was doing it. And then, switching back to 2-D just felt like going back in time, and not in the fun Majora’s Mask way but in the “oh man, this looked so much nicer in 3-D” kind of way.
Does this herald a glorious return to 3-D for everybody else? Will I start seeing those 3-D sliders turned up to maximum, instead of clicked down in shame? I don’t know. But as for me, I think I might just have crossed back into the third dimension.
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