The Legend of Zelda games, despite looking and feeling like they are designed for children, have rarely focused on being easy or simple. Occasionally puzzles require that bizarre type of logic that prevails in adventure games or enemies require esoteric attack combos to kill. This means that Link often faces a fiendish number of ways to die, and a slightly morbid YouTube fan, MasterofHyrule, has put 104 of them together in this brutal super cut.
Some of my favorites are the flower that makes you burst into flames (a little borrowing from the Mario franchise?), the venus fly Link and just plain drowning. At one point a hand simply reaches out of the darkness and carries Link to his doom. Somehow death by plant seems particularly without dignity, and drowning is one of the most frustrating ways to die in any video game. It usually means you’ve gotten lost and aren’t within range of one of the designated breathing holes the designers have given you. (I also have a certain fear of drowning after an incident with a rented paddle-boat on Lake Tahoe.)
All of these examples come from Majora’s Mask, one of the stranger and darker entries into the Legend of Zelda franchise. With time travel, parallel universes and many physical transformations thrown into the mix it was a strange and exciting addition to the series. You also got to sample a wide variety of gruesome deaths. Witness Link falling with a bomb, dying from the explosion mid-air and then dropping into a lava pool, “Cremation” indeed. And never forget that you might get crushed by the moon if your not careful. Enjoy!
