I’ve seen videos of Majora’s Mask speedruns that heavily relied on glitches. There’s also this guide about clearing 100% in 5 cycles.
And now I’m curious about the fewest number of cycles it takes to complete Majora’s Mask (not 100%), without using glitches or errors.
Detailed guides or videos will be appreciated. Any version of the game (N64/WiiVC/3DS) is okay.
Best Answer
Using the guide you linked to, it looks like the amount of time you need to the mandatory parts of the game is as follows. Note that this is all with time slowed by the Song of Inverted Time.
That's about 16.5h, or 10:30pm D1. At this point, you can now go to Medigoron and unlock Power Kegs by doing the test (as it requires either Fire Arrows or beating Goht), but it's too late to get Epona, which has to be done before 6:00pm D1. Without Epona, you can't get to Great Bay or Ikana. So basically, in the first cycle (not counting the first one when you're trapped as a Deku), you can't do any better than completing Woodfall and Snowhead.
Looking at the guide again, it takes an entire cycle to complete the second half of all the dungeons: day 1 for Woodfall and Snowhead, day 2 for Great Bay, and day 3 for Stone Tower. Since you had two days to complete all of Woodfall and Snowhead in the previous cycle, we can cross those off, and say that "cycle X" will involve completing the entirety of both Great Bay and Stone Tower. It then takes basically no time at all to enter the Clock Tower and go to the final boss.
Now the question is, can you open the path to both the last two temples in "cycle X"? If X is 3, you lose an hour or two to get Epona. The guide is less helpful here because it doesn't really measure the time needed to get the last two temple songs, but my instinct is "no". It just takes too long to collect the Zora Eggs and collect what's needed for the Gibdo well.
So, I'll say that, if you do count the first one, you need four cycles to finish the game.