About Majora

Japan didn't give a shit about a Bill Murray movie.

Did you even finished middle school?

I really hate most of the discussion about videogames being art or not because it's often tards on one side saying videogames are above criticism and tards on the other side saying that "art = pretentious".

In truth, there's an art indeed when it comes to making videogames.
Playing them as well and if you don't think that perfecting rocketjumping\bunnyhoping for maximum speed, footsies in fighting games or micro in RTS isn't art, get the fuck out of here.

The problem is that it's often very easy to mix things and ending up judging another form of art, not the game itself.
One of the best examples I can give you is DMC4, where if you pay attention, the soundtrack syncs with your character's strikes creating an amazing feeling of sinestesia.
A lot of people will judge this on the merit of the music itself and they are evaluating art indeed, but it's music.
Others wil evaluate the coreography of the character and that's art, but it's actually coreography.

The real art here, the art of making vydia, is combining the audio cues with your character's moveset to give you feedback on your actions and get you pumped as you play.
What's more, the rhythm actually speeds up (and so do you) as your style meter increases, making the beginning of a fight somewhat calm but tense while the climax of it is fast, loud and intense.

This mixture of different forms of regular art to give you that amazing feeling of pulling an SSS in Dante Must Die is the actual art of making videogames.

Going back to storytelling, maybe you won't believe me and maybe these aren't as strong a case as MM, but both Deus Ex and Vampire the Maskerade Bloodlines do an amazing job with this.

Deus Ex has you starting fresh of the academy with a small amount of practical skills with an easy plot to follow about being a supercop and doing Unatco proud.
You also have a somewhat limited amount of options at that point but quite a lot already.
As the game progresses, the story unfolds before you and there's a lot in there that gets you thinking. The chalenges you face become harder not because your character's level increased but because you're tangling with very dangerous individuals now.
And even though you keep getting canisters and skill points, they never make things too easy, they just broaden your choice of options, much like the story.

VtMB does this a bit better since the growth of your character from a weak vampire to a murder machine makes sense considering how fresh you are but also the many different situations and people you end up finding.
This was not designed like that, but the fact that there's plenty of social options in the first half of the game but the later forces you into combat drives very well the idea the World of Darkness is indeed dangerous and you'll only be able to talk your way out of danger for a little while.

Your dialogue also changes quite a lot based on your own humanity, which depending on what type of character you're playing, directly reflects on your playstyle, meaning your dialogue never ends up feeling too jarring.

i think cliffy b is a handsome gay power bottom

gay men must find it fun to power pound his ass. i can see cliffy taking 12 inch dicks like a champ.
I can't see him being a male topping anyone though.

Reading on it, it's a visual novel and when it reached the PC, it was censored. Plus, there's the anime anyway so that's likely why it didn't held the same interest as a 3D game for a famous console.

You're being an idiot.
Link gets 3 days, not one.
Bill Murray relives them forcefully and wishes for it to stop. If he dies, he goes back.
Link relieves them on his own accord because it's the only way to save the world. If he doesn't go back, he dies.

Groundhog was about the futility in moralities or getting involved with other people and the metaphor with God.
Majora's Mask was about saving the world and helping people as a means to get there, but eventually it touches you in exactly the reverse of what Groundhog did. Instead of contemplating how absurd it is to care about everyone around you, you still go through with your mission to save everyone because it's not about you, whereas Groundhog was about Bill Murray hooking up with the girl.

It's better when you think you're doing it for the sake of everyone else too.
Maybe I was lucky in this because the very last "quest" I completed was that long one about reuniting the lovers, something that takes all 3 days in specific occasions to complete, I think.
The last night, when you can finnaly get them together, you get this amazing scene of them enjoying "their last minutes on earth" with the sound of the bells and the light of the moon outside.

So when you climb that tower to defeat Skull Kid and save the day, you're doing it for that couple as well since they are the only ones you managed to save in this time line. You're doing it to protect that pure innocent love. And it's the best feeling ever.

LIKINGAVIDEOGAME
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Absolute fucking bullshit, and I really liked Undertale. The gameplay had some interesting elements, but they didn't really interact with the story in any interesting way. It was essentially a three-way branch of "kill everything", "kill nothing", or "kill everything", with small variation based on who you killed and whether you had killed everything before. Other than that, sparing things and doing other ACT things got really samey really fast other than bosses. Most of the "story" is just dumped on you at the beginning and end of the game, and then again in the real end of the game in video tapes, which can hardly be called good synergy. That and the SAVE fuckery that should have been cool but then only is ever talked about, again, at the very beginning and end of the game.
Again, I liked the game a lot, but the incorporation of story into gameplay was one of the weakest parts of the whole game. Not even close to how well Majora's Mask did it.

Well, I've always been aware of Deus Ex's massive critical acclaim. Especially because this one youtuber I respect (Razorfist) seems to consider it as one of his all-time favs. Funnily enough, for VtMB, I only heard about it recently because that same youtuber did a livestream of it a while back.
I've yet to play these two myself, but I'll take your word on how good they are and go check em out.

Although, one thing that's been on my mind lately is Morality systems in video games. You know, games where you "do good things" and you'll be treated as a Good guy. Or "do bad things" and you'll be treated as a Bad guy. Do you think games such as those might be, well, *expected* to combine gameplay and story together?
Majora's Mask seemingly mixes the two without ever having to do the whole Good/Evil routes. And then there are games that have a Morality system (like Undertale) that are, well, Built to affect the story via gameplay. Undertale might have done Morality system the best (actually allowing you to go full pacifist), but then are also games like Infamous that do the same schtick to a lesser degree.

Tbh, the only VN I've ever played was Steins;Gate. Found it enjoyable, but I personally know I'm just not a VN type of guy.

Holy fuck speak for yourself. My response is ,"lol, the apocalypse can't happen because I literally have eternity to fix it."

Wew

Wait, there was time travel in that show?

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The combat shows off both a RPG's UI and a Touhou inspired dodging sequence. Rather than engaging the complexities of either in a serious way gameplay-wise, (with a few brief exceptions) the two are combined to give the game an outlet to define or flesh out ideas. Each dodging sequence tells you something, obvious or not, about the character, and each ACT gives you a window into their personality (however vapid).
Events are juxtaposed over your simple RPGmaker grid, and control is taken away or given to the player at will, allowing for more ways to integrate plot-points into the game.
It would be wrong to say that Undertale delivered an impressive or even vaguely innovative plot, but it isn't wrong to say that the way the game and story interact is interesting.
What you're referring to is emergent changes to the story based on gameplay, which Majora's Mask did very well. What that other user is referring to, albeit for bait purposes, is emergent changes in gameplay mechanics based on the story, which Undertale did reasonably well, and Majora's Mask didn't do much at all.
I think a game that integrates both to great effect would be Okami, and this may help explain some of its staying power.

One area where Majora's Mask runs into trouble is that it wasn't definitive enough. Players go in expecting to save the day, so even when presented with something as insurmountable as the goddamn moon falling from the sky, they're instantly like "ok where are the dungeons", rather than "I guess I better make the most of it", which is (generally) the desired emotional response.
That's okay because the game feels more fun if you get both a morbid atmosphere and hope to save the day, but it does limit how bad it can fuck with people's heads.

Windwakers lore and world building was especially disappointing after Majora's Mask

Groundhog day is the Dark Souls of movies

Unironically consider suicide.

What's wrong with Razorfist? He's occasionally a faggot like in his new vegas review but I don't see much wrong with him besides that tbh

This is actually indirectly explained in Breath of the Wild. Basically Fresh Water Zoras were forced to evolve in the floods while Salt Water Zoras remained. That's why you see both Ruto and Zora together in BotW

Pathologic? I mean, it's not like games that you don't know about automatically don't exist.

I thought Cucky B just liked to watch his wife get fucked.

He's an edgelord contrarian faggot.

Nigga what? Did you watch the same movie everyone else did? The whole reason Bill Murray was allowed to wake up the next day was because he learned to be unselfish and care about other people, thereby enabling him to also get the girl. It has exactly the same point as Majora's Mask

So much underage

I sense insecurities.

Repeating something 3 times in a sentence doesn't make your argument stronger. If anything it means you haven't played many other games. I recommend checking out the Ultimas and all the other RPGs not made for fucking children. But this topic is still interesting so I'll humor you
First we have to answer some questions: What exactly is it that combines both story and gameplay? Is it that the story is a part of the gameplay, or that the gameplay is part of the story? These are two very different things, and games that use story poorly (half life 2, most modern games and JRPGs made after FFVI) have neither, where the story is almost completely separate from the gameplay. A cutscene starts, it tells us something we don't care about, and then you're given an objective and you're on your way. You can effectively skip all cutscenes and you won't know the story, but you won't be missing out on anything that concerns the gameplay.
When the story is part of the gameplay, you have dialogue choices, sidequests, etc., that concern the story but aren't completely separate from the player's choice. Maybe in Deus Ex you'll have an objective, but multiple ways to do it. And the writing of the story will naturally explain these ways to do it through worldbuilding, as well as attention to detail. You might be able to get through the game without paying attention to the story, but paying attention would help you in the long run. A more obtuse implementation of this form of storytelling would be old point and click adventures: the entire game can be abstracted into a series of keys and locks, but each key and lock has story wrapped around it. The "puzzle" is solved easily (ideally) by knowing more about the story/world/logic, but it could still just be brute forced. It'll hurt you to not care, but it's possible since the story is still separate.
The gameplay being a part of the story is where real synergy occurs. Anything you do in the game has a direct and immediate effect on the story, and the progress you make correlates to the progress in the story. It would be impossible to separate the story from the gameplay, because they are so tightly woven together you can't find where one stops, and the other begins. If you're thinking that Majora's Mask applies here, you're wrong (mostly). Try to think about the story to any of the Total War games. It's hard to discern what part of those games are the "story" bits, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. Most of the time when people on Holla Forums decry the existence of story in games, we're requesting for it to be more like this. All games can have gameplay-story synergy like this, only developers decide they want to tell their own, shitty, linear story that doesn't concern the player.

Now, the one downside to gameplay being a part of story is that it hinders the ability to tell a narrative. That's probably a good thing, since most writers in the industry are fucking awful, but there exist some games that make a compromise between the two approaches to story. Ace Combat 0 is my go-to best example of this. There are cutscenes that expand on the story, but they're almost always directly concerned with something that you just did. There's character development and backstory and politics, but that's all explained in-game or during mission briefings. If you separate the flight combat gameplay from the narrative, you also remove things that supplement the gameplay, like radio chatter and backstory to mission briefings. Maybe the player is able to not care about the story, but Ace Combat 0 doesn't care either, since you'll experience the story regardless, without locking you into more than a handful of scripted story events.
Obviously there's a scale between the two, and most games have a little bit of both.