5 things we learnt about Majora's Mask in the new Iwata Asks

Iwata Asks - an interview series where the CEO of Nintendo grills his colleagues for development details on their new games - has returned after a year's hiatus, for a chat about Majora's Mask 3D.

You can read the entire interview here, but here are five interesting tidbits about the game's creation - both the N64 original, and the 3DS remake.

They're unofficial, according to the notes on the interview, but apparently it's popular in Japan to sing "Se-sa-me-sa~uce" whenever Link opens up a treasure chest.

Naturally, we will now do this from now on in every Zelda game.

When Shigeru Miyamoto told Eiji Aonuma that he could only have one year to make the next Zelda game, Aonuma turned to Yoshiaki Koizumi for help.

Koizumi was working on a different game "where you would play in a compact game world over and over again" (in an earlier interview, it's described as a cops and robbers-based board game). The pair turned this into Majora's Mask.

At first, Link had an entire week to save the world, but it was eventually shortened to just three days.

"In this game the townspeople do different things each day and many different things happen, but when the timespan becomes a week, that's just too much to remember," says Anouma. "You can't simply remember who's where doing what on which day.

"When you returned to the first day it was like 'Do I have to go through an entire week again…', so we thought three days would be just right."

When Aonuma went back to the N64 game, he realised that the boss battls were a bit weird. "When you first face a boss, it is natural to start looking for its weakness so you can figure out where to attack it. However, in the Nintendo 64 version of this game, you couldn't see the weaknesses at all."

The team at Grezzo remade every boss battles by focusing on making the objective easier to understand, and provide them with more obvious weak spots.

While the models are largely the same, "the bosses' movements and strategies to take them down have all changed, so it took about the same effort as creating the stages from scratch," says Tomohiro Yamamura.

During the manic one-year development of Majora's Mask, an exhausted Aonuma had a nightmare where he was being chased around by a Deku. "I woke up screaming!"

"I went to work the next day and that's when Takumi Kawagoe told me that he finished making a movie for the Dekus, so I had him show it to me. And that movie was exactly like my dream!"

Iwata laughs, and helpfully suggests: "Perhaps you were possessed by something."