majora

The excitement around the recent release of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D is still burning bright. Falling right in with this, Nintendo Dream - a Japanese, Nintendo Power-like magazine - published an interview with Eiji Aonuma about Majora's Mask 3D in this month's issue.

They start off with a rather interesting question, asking Aonuma where the word “Majora" came from. His response was unexpected, to say the least:

Imamura, who made the design for Majora's Mask, invented the word by combining characters from the movie title Jumanji and from his name Imamura.

So there you have it; without Jumanji, we most likely would not have Majora's Mask as we know it today. Keeping the thread of name origins, the interviewer then asked Aonuma where Termina got its name. This had slightly more expected beginnings:

Termina is a terminal, right? As it means a place where people come and go, terminal became Termina.

So it seems Aonuma had the idea of Termina being a temporary place that one simply passes through, like a terminal; though considering the apocalyptic tone of the game as a whole, it probably isn't a coincidence that it's only a couple letters short of “Terminate".

Moving on, the interviewer brought up a mask owned by the Happy Mask Salesman that bears resemblance to the pattern on the mirror shield. Aonuma had this to say:

That's right. The mask came first. When the Mirror Shield was being designed, we wanted to have some kind of pattern for the reflection. Having said that, it was hard to come up with a pattern for the shield. We clearly couldn't make it like the shield from Ocarina of Time as the shape is too detailed and it wouldn't fit the image of this game. But the Happy Mask Salesman is carrying a mask which has a face of distress, so wouldn't it be interesting to use that one? Therefore, the Mirror Shield was born from what was previously a mask of Happy Mask Salesman.

What do you think of this? Are you surprised by anything Aonuma revealed? Sound off in the comments below.

[source nindori.com, via nintendoeverything.com]