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I think that's kind of true for a lot of the games of that era: you got a limited number per year so you'd spend as much time as possible to beat them that you just don't have the patience for now.

I just finished the 3DS remaster of Majora's Mask and only took me a few days to 100% it without using a single guide (and almost no wasted three days cycles but the ones that they changed in the remaster like Ikana graveyard's bottle). I took like a month of playing it constantly as a kid to find all the secrets and writing down the schedules of people.

Could you save scum in the N64 release? I thought once you loaded the owl save points, that save is deleted (just the start of the 3 day cycle is kept).