This game was my other Christmas present, so again I'm only about halfway through it. Be that as it may, I feel I know enough about this game to make a fair assessment of its contents. What I've seen is absolutely incredible. Visually, the graphics are better than those in Ocarina, and have a slightly different style to them as well. Link looks better than ever this time around, and the falling moon in the sky looks appropriately freaky. The styling differences help set this game apart from its predecessor.
The concept is certainly interesting. Who would've thought to base an entire game around using masks? It's really a cool idea, and it gives this game bonus points in the innovation department. However, I thought the transformations got really annoying in dungeons when you have to switch from being human to Deku to Goron to Zora over and over again. It felt like that damned Kong-switching I so hated in DK64. The new forms Link takes on are cool, but it would be nice if you didn't have to keep switching so much. That Goron roll thing is cool at first, but quickly becomes tiresome when you realize how er...twitchy it is. The dungeons are harder (not that that's bad) and there are plenty of interesting and complicated sidequests to keep the adventurous types (like me) amused. Epona is back, thank God, since she was probably the coolest feature in Ocarina.
The 3-day time cycle adds a lot of pressure to your already difficult tasks. Some things reset when you warp, other things don't. This makes the game pretty hard and really, really frustrating at times. I hated getting midway through a dungeon, running out of time, warping back, and therefore having to start that same dungeon over from scratch. I think dungeon progress and defeating bosses should've been saved too. It's bad enough you have to restart all those sidequests at the beginning of each 3 days. Why should we have to do the dungeons over and over too?
Majora is certainly a worthy successor to an epic classic. It has a lot of good qualities that both resemble Ocarina and set it apart from Ocarina. But, truth be told, it still isn't as good as its predecessor. It would take an even better game than this to top Ocarina, and I'm not sure if anyone could make a game that incredible.