I don't consider it to be one unified story at all, I mean some of the series obviously are connected, but the rest are, as the name suggests, legends about Zelda. Unconnected unreliable narrations about some sort of heroic past events. Everybody agrees about the characters involved but as to what exactly happened, that is lost to time. So each culture is now telling the story a different way, emphasizing whatever is important to them.
I consider as a sort of modern equivalent to the coyote stories. or Paul Bunyan, Finn McCool, Gilgamesh, Or really, any legendary heroic epic passed along by oral storytelling.
So it is fun to try to fit it into some sort of unified timeline. But I don't think it is, that is not how they were actually written and we would loose most of the interesting storytelling flexibility if that is how they write them in the future.
While I agree in spirit and think that was true for most of the games when written, there has been an official timeline published by Nintendo[1,2] since 2011 (and the idea was apparently around internally since 2002).
I would be surprised if it did not have some impact on the writing of the games, though of course there is (as of yet) no explicit reference to the timeline in the games.
At this point you could just make up any reality you want and it would be equally as valid if we’re going to take the creators’ input as simple apocrypha.
I prefer this interpretation, but there is just so much textual content in the games which support a unified branching timeline for most of the games. You can start with the explicit chronologies you have and mostly put them together like a puzzle. Zelda games which don't explicitly position themselves in chronological relationship to another Zelda game are the exception (LA, OoS/OoA).
I think most Nintendo IPs are about playing around with the same motifs, ideas, narratives, and gameplay elements. Metroid is another series where this is very evident, with half of the games being spiritually a remake of a game which game before. A timeline doesn't preclude the Zelda series as a story about the cyclical nature of conflict, about archetypes reappearing throughout history, or as a legend passed over generations.
That's similar the way I think about James Bond. He's not one singular person, but a code name given to an agent in deep cover. The agent, the person changes through the decades, but the name lives on.
I don't think most Japanese media is as concerned with fitting things into a canon as much as American media is. Like, in Gundam, you have 0079, Thunderbolt, and Origin all allegedly in the UC canon, but there's pretty significant deviations in Thunderbolt and Origin from 0079 so they're not really the same timelines. American comics will also have multiple timelines or universes, but they'll make it clear which one each individual series goes with, and have crossover events explicitly acknowledging the existence of the different canons. Japanese media doesn't tend to do that, and I think trying to fit it into a coherent timeline is a fool's errand
Japan doesn't seem to take the hero fantasy thing as seriously. It seems to be more about escapism in general and what the show and characters are "about," even if that's not really very deep to begin with.
It's questionable that it's not literally just a fan theory. For years fans were trying to put the Zelda games on a single timeline, and Nintendo just didn't care. The split timeline was one of the top theories of how everything can be put together, based off of a single developer comment that implied a 2 way split instead of a 3 way split: https://zelda-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Split_Timeline
Then Hyrule Hostoria came out as a collectable. I would put good money on a conversation during its writing that went like this "What else can we put in here?" "Maybe a timeline of the games?" "Yeah, sure. What's the official one?" "There isn't one. The fans have a fun split timeline one." "Oh neat. Yeah work out the details. Now has anyone found that Wind Waker concept art yet?"
A common flaw I see in media literacy is operating like the author has pulled a completely coherent story from a different universe and simply written it down, as opposed to a creative process. Nintendo has never cared about the timeline, nor developing a single coherent story across all of the Zelda games. Some games are sequals, prequels, or have direct references. The timeline itself is purely from non-game sources, and is obviously not a factor when they design a new game.
The timeline was obviously not a planned aspect of the story originally and I personally don't find it particularly great storytelling but there is evidence in interviews of a timeline document existing internally since at least 2002[1] (where Shigeru Miyamoto explicitly said they do take it into consideration when writing the game's story but primarily focus on the games individually).
Maybe they did release the timeline because of fan pressure but some sort of timeline did exist for at least a decade before they released it which doesn't fit your theory they just came up with something and released it in secondary media because of fan pressure.
Yes, but published very much due to fan pressure, and clearly figured out to match the games rather than being designed up front. Nintendo perhaps more than other Japanese companies intentionally avoids letting existing lore constrain their creativity on new games. That apparently is changing however, as now that Nintendo has successfully launched a cinematic arm they have said they want the movies to be a source of canon that the games will reinforce, a markedly different strategy than they've used previously.
Yeah my point was to downplay how specific this is to Japan, and focus much more on it being a pretty Nintendo specific phenomenon, though you're also right that video games (and other media) as a whole tended toward this sort of thing at the time, whereas now the painful lessons of losing this stuff is more apparent to creators.
What fan pressure? No one forced them to do anything. If they were as averse to it as you say, because of their Japanese genetics, they would resist any pressure.
I do not want to rain on your parade, but I find attempts to impose a coherent timeline on Zelda miss the opportunity to engage with it as a legend, a story told over and over with certain essential parts but many changing interpretations. How our very familiarity with the story creates the opportunity for surprise. There are so many fictional worlds with sprawling lore, and so few that engage with the retelling of stories and myths like Zelda does.
Eh, even before 2011 with the official timeline and the Skyward Sword prequel-to-all-games, there was plenty of textual content to support a timeline.
AoL was a sequel to LoZ. ALttP was a prequel to LoZ. LA was a sequel to ALttP.
OoT is explicitly a prequel to ALttP.
OoT splits into at least two timelines. MM explicitly follows the child Link who preempted Ganon's ascension. WW explicitly has you fight the Ganon defeated by adult Link. TP explicitly places itself as a sequel to the "child timeline" and so also a sequel to MM.
The only games which lacked an explicit placement to the rest were the Four Swords series and the Oracle games. Not small exceptions, but exceptions none the less, and that's only if you ignore interviews. (And interviews would give you Minish Cap preceding Four Swords preceding Ocarina of Time.)
What’s the word for trying to do cluster analysis on what is actually randomly distributed data? The games do have obvious similarities and sometimes refer to each other, but they’re independent events.
I have been playing Zelda games since the late 80s. I have never felt the need to try to weave a cohesive timeline out of the entire series.
Instead, I view the games as a combination of re-imaginings and direct sequels. However, the games really are not story-driven enough to care which one is which. Any of the games can be played standalone or in any order, and it doesn't matter.
In my view, the story of these games is mostly a pretext and the real reason is the gameplay. Some of the games lean a bit harder into the story angles, and they really suffer for it (too many cutscenes make those games frustrating to play).
I feel this way too. A huge trend in general I have noticed with younger generations, as gaming has modernized and matured, is the overall importance of story and cohesion. Plumber fell in a pipe and discovered weirdness was all we needed. I don’t play a lot these days but when I do I still just tend to skip over the story part or get annoyed when it won’t let me.
I don't consider it canon when a different group of people decades later make a timeline, just because they happen to work for the same company. It might as well be fanfic.
There is a 2003 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that suggests an "enormous" timeline document existed since at least 2002 and they took it into account when writing Wind Waker if not earlier games[1]:
> Shigeru Miyamoto: For every Zelda game we tell a new story, but we actually have an enormous document that explains how the game relates to the others, and bind them together. But to be honest, they are not that important to us. We care more about developing the game system… give the player new challenges for every chapter that is born.
So I don't think this is as clear cut as "a different group of people decades later make a timeline". The least charitable view might be that they never intended the unified timeline thing to became public and didn't consider it "lore", but I'm not sure I buy that either (since they talked about some details in other interviews, including the Victorious/Fallen Hero split most people object to).
It's a fair point, but Nintendo is the only entity that can decide canonicity, and retconning continuity is far from uncommon especially when a franchise transitions from being a single entry to multiple installments.
Nintendo just never did that until the speculation about the topic became noticeable enough that they felt they had to address it (at which point everything was so inconsistent that only the timeline split could reconcile it). And even then, the unified timeline was published years before BoTW, and it adds the wrinkle that... (waves hands) all of the timelines sort of became the same thing.
That sort of hand waving is unavoidable as BoTW has elements from all three of the timelines, it literally cannot be on one of the three legs-- and if it's not, the only other logical place it would fit is before Skyward Sword (meaning an entirely separate ancient founding of Hyrule) or just after the Imprisoning War which would butt up against A Link To The Past. But those can't fit because the Zora evolved into the Rito and BoTW has both.
Never mind the strange notion that a fish people evolved into bird people under the pressure of a worldwide flood... you'd think that wouldn't be necessary or helpful, but hey, Zelda's weird.
Haha yes-- in this case for BoTW to be at the beginning of the timeline, the Rito wouldn't exist yet, as they are only present in Wind Waker and beyond, not that it's impossible for both to exist.
this is more so a corporate acquihire of fan fiction writers
Zelda canon was never that deep when each game was written
writers had no secret timeline or their own deep interest in the prior writers rendition
they have a loose setting and other people that chose the writer to have near complete license to do whatever they want with it
and even that’s a negotiation, writers often have their own backlogged story already that they adapt to existing IP retroactively
whatever it doesn’t matter, I’m just surprised people are actually spending energy on this for this franchise. If this is what “fun” looks like now, it’s fine
I'm pretty sure Nintendo itself said at one point that they don't have a clear chronological order and may not tie into each other properly, even though they later retconned an order.
Still, it's fun to try to figure out how the puzzle pieces might fit together even though they came out of different boxes.
I've only played a handful of these games .. but do they work together as a theme or story progression or are they, as I suspect, pretty much independent rehashes with no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans?
Which is the correct way to design a game, I am not going to go full Carmack and say the story does not matter at all, but at their heart a computer game is a simulation, a complex machine full of intricate moving parts. Getting thees parts to mesh well is the most critical part. and the story however well or poorly written sort of sits unconnected on top of it, for the most part ornithological to the machine underneath. The bit you actually interact with.
It is why I consider excessive use of cutscenes a tell of poor game design, They stop the machine and pull the player out of the environment. They have their place, but generally should be avoided.
book: tell a story
movie: show, don't tell (big sin opening lore dump)
To the exception of TOTK, I _never_ noticed any link (hehe) between different titles. I know there are some references, but I never catch them.
Even Majora's Mask, which is an official follow up occurring months after Ocarina of Time have a totally different story to tell that don't even try to continue the OoT story and is more just another completely independent story barely in the same universe.
I love the Zelda games, I consider myself a fan. But they are just that : good games. Each of those games do have interesting stories to tell, interesting universes to visit, but the overall "franchise" lore is totally uninteresting.
And honestly I don't think it's something bad, it means each game is free to go where it wants, and every game is free to have an universe as rich as it wants.
I see Zelda totally like I see mario : it's just universe codes, not a real lore. Nobody cares if Mario Galaxy happens before or after Mario 64 or Super Mario World. Zelda is the same for me. And that's cool.
Even TOTK which is meant to be a direct sequel to BotW is...only loosely connected. Like obviously the map is the same and characters kind of reference some of the events from BotW, but (frustratingly) it's like almost everyone underwent extensive lobotoby between the games and forgot 99% of what happened. The entire lore of the world gets rewritten too.
From what I understand - it's because Nintendo famously designs the game and gameplay systems first and then writes a story to match what they built. If the story doesn't work with the setting then...<shrug> - it's still a good game at the end of the day.
> no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans
That's a very cynical and dare I say Hackernews take. You could also, less cynically, see them as unique pieces of art that have managed to carve a space in a field where, by necessity, a lot of money is needed to create it (AAA games).
Tears of the Kingdom is art. It's a beautiful, simple fairytale told through the medium of a huge open world game and there's something unique in being able to embody that story for so many hours. I haven't played any other Zelda games from the past ~20 years but if they're similarly artful (and by all accounts they are) we don't need to be cynical towards their simplicity or the fact that they're variations on a theme. Pretty much all human art (and business) is, after all.
The second graph on the spurious correlations page bugs me, that has a plausible explanation! (cultural prestige / zeitgeist centralizing on the hard sciences)
This is like watching trailers about a movie before going to the movie. Letting it wreck your wonderment. If you've never played OOT I suggest you just take it in on its own merit. Then go back and look at this. Let it surprise you. We don't do this enough.
Also, it's almost an open secret that the the Nintendo development teams weren't really thinking in terms of a coherent timeline until later when they published some book mainly because they saw an opportunity to make money and sell merch to a bunch of nerds rather than to truly give a history to a bunch of somewhat related but fairly disjointed games all from the same franchise. They only pretend there's a timeline cause it sells games and books. Not cause there really is. What's worse is that the Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom games really throw a wrench in the works.
TLDR: enjoy these games on their own merit and know that only few titles are meant to be really connected in some way. Like Ocarina of Time <-> Majora's Mask and/or Breath of the Wild <-> Tears of the Kingdom . As for the rest there's slight references to each other but not really much linking them.
I just wanted to say thank you, you made my day brighter because you reminded me the remake comes out in 17 days and you got me to reconnect with one of my favourite games.
Seems like a lot of folks here are eager to discuss about interpretation and opinion, I take that as Nintendo did a great job providing enough to keep everyone engaged into the dream and fantasy behind it.
I played Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time to conclusion. I haven't really played any Zelda games since then, except maybe for a few minutes for a few of them.
I'm a little surprised to hear that Ocarina of Time is getting a remake. I take it it's going to be a Switch 2 exclusive?
It’s the second remake for OoT (it had a DS version as well). It holds similar status to FF7 in that it was the first 3D version of its franchise and brought a lot of new blood into the fanbase.
If you are still interested in the franchise and in video games, what I can tell you is that the Zelda franchise ages like good wine.
In other words : if you have good memories of your experiences with those games, do yourself the favor of playing the other titles, they are equally good.
I enjoyed it, but for things like this, I would actually like to know what your genuine contribution was and what Claude did for you. It just makes me appreciate it more when I know that a human made the effort of investing their own creativity and thought into the writing or design.
So you’re saying your appreciation of a thing can only be attributed in retrospect after learning about how it was created and what human labors went into it and will be subjectively assigned based on your own personal beliefs around that contribution.
Seems a bit weird. To me, it’s enough that someone has a thought of something they wish existed and now it does exist. How they bring it into existence isn’t of much importance to me. The AI didn’t dream this into existence, but it may very well have performed 99.9% of the creative work, but the human provided the spark in the form of that instruction to do so. With nearly all creative works, I can appreciate the craft but also I don’t have to; I can just appreciate the output.
I'm gonna be the annoying guy and ask... Why? There's an official timeline page and if you want more details there's a page on a community maintained wiki (even independent from the hell that is wikia/fandom/whatever their current name is). I understand there's sense of accomplishment in personal projects... But a lot of this seems to be done by AI anyway, and that's my main gripe. Why are we wasting computing like this? To me this feels on par to using AI for things that can otherwise be easily looked up on a search engine (as long as your SE lets you filter through the slop)
I'm sorry if this feels like a personal attack - it really isn't my intention, but why are we pretending that things like this have no impact?
And yes I know massive AI usage in corporate environments, slop image/video generation, etc have much more impact and that even that is still small compared to the amount of compute used from training (EDIT: and yes, what i'm mad about is specifically the environmental impact from this wasted compute). But that argument feels a lot like "my single vote doesn't count". Could we try to not make it worse?
Sorry for being a party pooper i guess.
This is a lovely website, but the premise is entirely incorrect (that there's anything you need to know going in), and also spoils details from the game which this is supposedly background for.
Nobody should be discussing the timeline before playing the games. And not from some kind of purity perspective, but just because it's nerd shit that you won't get anything out of until you do. I really enjoy thinking and talking about the timeline, but I'm under no illusion that it's anything more than after-the-fact fanfiction.
Links Awakening is its own world Link didn't do any of that other stuff he was just an adventurous dude who found himself on an island and that was the most remarkable thing about his life and he was still just a normal dude after.
I don't think you need to "catch up," every Zelda game is self-contained. Also, it's a remake of a game you already played, so you already know the story. If anything, coming in fresh would be a benefit.
Idk why we can't enjoy Zelda games for what they are - each game has recurring core cast, similar mythological archetypes & thematic motifs, and similar gameplay, but are all independent of each other. Even the games that are direct sequels to each other are still very independent.
In Ocarina of Time, Link has the ability to travel back and forth to the future, taking on an adult form. As an adult, he defeats Ganon and seals him away, with Ganon swearing to return one day.
But then Link returns to his childhood time. As a child, Link warns Zelda about Ganon, and preempts the future (where Ganon takes power and adult Link defeats him) from happening. So, there are at least two timelines.
Majora's Mask follows this child Link in one of the few explicit sequels in the series.
But then Wind Waker faces off against the Ganon defeated by adult Link. This is explicitly referenced in the text but it's not so clear-cut a sequel.
Meanwhile, Ocarina of Time was explicitly a prequel to A Link to the Past (depicting the events described in ALttP's backstory). But (1) some events don't quite line up and (2) the continuity of games established in the other timelines can't really neatly fit the ALttP-LA-OoS/OoA-LoZ-LA chronology. So a third timeline is just the neatest way to do it.
None of this really matters for playing or understanding the games, though. With the exception of Majora's Mask (and Phantom Hourglass / Spirit Tracks to a lesser extent), each Zelda game can be enjoyed as someones first Zelda.
Weird design choice by Nintendo. Imo, the whole timeline thing is a very clear afterthought for legend of zelda, most games have little to no relation to each other.
Well, I feel like Nintendo just makes games and they've never cared much about lore. I feel the weird choice is by gamers, for continuing to care about this "timeline" which is so clearly a post-hoc rationalization.
Sorry everyone here is dumping on you, I think kids these days say some like “go touch grass” when this kind of thing happens.
I think this is neat and honestly the perfect use of an LLM, just some for-fun project to visualize something completely inconsequential and nostalgic.
Somehow is devolved into dunking on the west and other unfortunate “better than thou” comments.
I don't consider it to be one unified story at all, I mean some of the series obviously are connected, but the rest are, as the name suggests, legends about Zelda. Unconnected unreliable narrations about some sort of heroic past events. Everybody agrees about the characters involved but as to what exactly happened, that is lost to time. So each culture is now telling the story a different way, emphasizing whatever is important to them.
I consider as a sort of modern equivalent to the coyote stories. or Paul Bunyan, Finn McCool, Gilgamesh, Or really, any legendary heroic epic passed along by oral storytelling.
So it is fun to try to fit it into some sort of unified timeline. But I don't think it is, that is not how they were actually written and we would loose most of the interesting storytelling flexibility if that is how they write them in the future.
Many of the games include histories within the current telling, histories which include past versions of Gannon, Link, and/or Zelda.
It's pretty clear that the cyclic nature is a part of the story.
While I agree in spirit and think that was true for most of the games when written, there has been an official timeline published by Nintendo[1,2] since 2011 (and the idea was apparently around internally since 2002).
I would be surprised if it did not have some impact on the writing of the games, though of course there is (as of yet) no explicit reference to the timeline in the games.
[1]: https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_timeline [2]: https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/
Sure but the Nintendo timeline is just another retelling of the legends of Zelda, an unreliable meta story of a past (or future) that is lost to time
At this point you could just make up any reality you want and it would be equally as valid if we’re going to take the creators’ input as simple apocrypha.
I prefer this interpretation, but there is just so much textual content in the games which support a unified branching timeline for most of the games. You can start with the explicit chronologies you have and mostly put them together like a puzzle. Zelda games which don't explicitly position themselves in chronological relationship to another Zelda game are the exception (LA, OoS/OoA).
I think most Nintendo IPs are about playing around with the same motifs, ideas, narratives, and gameplay elements. Metroid is another series where this is very evident, with half of the games being spiritually a remake of a game which game before. A timeline doesn't preclude the Zelda series as a story about the cyclical nature of conflict, about archetypes reappearing throughout history, or as a legend passed over generations.
That's similar the way I think about James Bond. He's not one singular person, but a code name given to an agent in deep cover. The agent, the person changes through the decades, but the name lives on.
I don't think most Japanese media is as concerned with fitting things into a canon as much as American media is. Like, in Gundam, you have 0079, Thunderbolt, and Origin all allegedly in the UC canon, but there's pretty significant deviations in Thunderbolt and Origin from 0079 so they're not really the same timelines. American comics will also have multiple timelines or universes, but they'll make it clear which one each individual series goes with, and have crossover events explicitly acknowledging the existence of the different canons. Japanese media doesn't tend to do that, and I think trying to fit it into a coherent timeline is a fool's errand
Japan doesn't seem to take the hero fantasy thing as seriously. It seems to be more about escapism in general and what the show and characters are "about," even if that's not really very deep to begin with.
What are you talking about? The timeline is official and published by Nintendo, a Japanese company. It's not some fan theory.
It's questionable that it's not literally just a fan theory. For years fans were trying to put the Zelda games on a single timeline, and Nintendo just didn't care. The split timeline was one of the top theories of how everything can be put together, based off of a single developer comment that implied a 2 way split instead of a 3 way split: https://zelda-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Split_Timeline
Then Hyrule Hostoria came out as a collectable. I would put good money on a conversation during its writing that went like this "What else can we put in here?" "Maybe a timeline of the games?" "Yeah, sure. What's the official one?" "There isn't one. The fans have a fun split timeline one." "Oh neat. Yeah work out the details. Now has anyone found that Wind Waker concept art yet?"
A common flaw I see in media literacy is operating like the author has pulled a completely coherent story from a different universe and simply written it down, as opposed to a creative process. Nintendo has never cared about the timeline, nor developing a single coherent story across all of the Zelda games. Some games are sequals, prequels, or have direct references. The timeline itself is purely from non-game sources, and is obviously not a factor when they design a new game.
The timeline was obviously not a planned aspect of the story originally and I personally don't find it particularly great storytelling but there is evidence in interviews of a timeline document existing internally since at least 2002[1] (where Shigeru Miyamoto explicitly said they do take it into consideration when writing the game's story but primarily focus on the games individually).
Maybe they did release the timeline because of fan pressure but some sort of timeline did exist for at least a decade before they released it which doesn't fit your theory they just came up with something and released it in secondary media because of fan pressure.
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
Yes, but published very much due to fan pressure, and clearly figured out to match the games rather than being designed up front. Nintendo perhaps more than other Japanese companies intentionally avoids letting existing lore constrain their creativity on new games. That apparently is changing however, as now that Nintendo has successfully launched a cinematic arm they have said they want the movies to be a source of canon that the games will reinforce, a markedly different strategy than they've used previously.
That has little to do with "Japan" and more to do with "that's how it went back then."
There's stories all over about Hollywood dumping physical copies of films, sets and props only to later regret it.
No one knew if a sequel or trilogy or decades of fan service would happen. They didn't care like our rose colored glasses of time make us see.
American comics and Star Wars has had their continuity reset.
This is just "grass is greener" type thinking. It's only ever been the US fan culture that cared; most creators just see it as a paycheck
Yeah my point was to downplay how specific this is to Japan, and focus much more on it being a pretty Nintendo specific phenomenon, though you're also right that video games (and other media) as a whole tended toward this sort of thing at the time, whereas now the painful lessons of losing this stuff is more apparent to creators.
What fan pressure? No one forced them to do anything. If they were as averse to it as you say, because of their Japanese genetics, they would resist any pressure.
Pressure doesn't mean forcing someone to do something. And I also never said anything about genetics.
I do not want to rain on your parade, but I find attempts to impose a coherent timeline on Zelda miss the opportunity to engage with it as a legend, a story told over and over with certain essential parts but many changing interpretations. How our very familiarity with the story creates the opportunity for surprise. There are so many fictional worlds with sprawling lore, and so few that engage with the retelling of stories and myths like Zelda does.
I agree, but Nintendo greatly damaged opposition efforts to timelining by... endorsing one. In an artbook, of all places.
Eh, even before 2011 with the official timeline and the Skyward Sword prequel-to-all-games, there was plenty of textual content to support a timeline.
AoL was a sequel to LoZ. ALttP was a prequel to LoZ. LA was a sequel to ALttP.
OoT is explicitly a prequel to ALttP.
OoT splits into at least two timelines. MM explicitly follows the child Link who preempted Ganon's ascension. WW explicitly has you fight the Ganon defeated by adult Link. TP explicitly places itself as a sequel to the "child timeline" and so also a sequel to MM.
The only games which lacked an explicit placement to the rest were the Four Swords series and the Oracle games. Not small exceptions, but exceptions none the less, and that's only if you ignore interviews. (And interviews would give you Minish Cap preceding Four Swords preceding Ocarina of Time.)
What’s the word for trying to do cluster analysis on what is actually randomly distributed data? The games do have obvious similarities and sometimes refer to each other, but they’re independent events.
Nintendo now maintains/updates an official timeline: https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/
Sure but that's a retcon. They didn't have this in mind when they made the games.
I have been playing Zelda games since the late 80s. I have never felt the need to try to weave a cohesive timeline out of the entire series.
Instead, I view the games as a combination of re-imaginings and direct sequels. However, the games really are not story-driven enough to care which one is which. Any of the games can be played standalone or in any order, and it doesn't matter.
In my view, the story of these games is mostly a pretext and the real reason is the gameplay. Some of the games lean a bit harder into the story angles, and they really suffer for it (too many cutscenes make those games frustrating to play).
I feel this way too. A huge trend in general I have noticed with younger generations, as gaming has modernized and matured, is the overall importance of story and cohesion. Plumber fell in a pipe and discovered weirdness was all we needed. I don’t play a lot these days but when I do I still just tend to skip over the story part or get annoyed when it won’t let me.
So? They have it now.
I don't consider it canon when a different group of people decades later make a timeline, just because they happen to work for the same company. It might as well be fanfic.
There is a 2003 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto that suggests an "enormous" timeline document existed since at least 2002 and they took it into account when writing Wind Waker if not earlier games[1]:
> Shigeru Miyamoto: For every Zelda game we tell a new story, but we actually have an enormous document that explains how the game relates to the others, and bind them together. But to be honest, they are not that important to us. We care more about developing the game system… give the player new challenges for every chapter that is born.
So I don't think this is as clear cut as "a different group of people decades later make a timeline". The least charitable view might be that they never intended the unified timeline thing to became public and didn't consider it "lore", but I'm not sure I buy that either (since they talked about some details in other interviews, including the Victorious/Fallen Hero split most people object to).
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
It's a fair point, but Nintendo is the only entity that can decide canonicity, and retconning continuity is far from uncommon especially when a franchise transitions from being a single entry to multiple installments.
Nintendo just never did that until the speculation about the topic became noticeable enough that they felt they had to address it (at which point everything was so inconsistent that only the timeline split could reconcile it). And even then, the unified timeline was published years before BoTW, and it adds the wrinkle that... (waves hands) all of the timelines sort of became the same thing.
That sort of hand waving is unavoidable as BoTW has elements from all three of the timelines, it literally cannot be on one of the three legs-- and if it's not, the only other logical place it would fit is before Skyward Sword (meaning an entirely separate ancient founding of Hyrule) or just after the Imprisoning War which would butt up against A Link To The Past. But those can't fit because the Zora evolved into the Rito and BoTW has both.
Never mind the strange notion that a fish people evolved into bird people under the pressure of a worldwide flood... you'd think that wouldn't be necessary or helpful, but hey, Zelda's weird.
> But those can't fit because the Zora evolved into the Rito and BoTW has both.
Mostly in jest, but isn't that a creationist argument we all usually dismiss? "Why are there still primates around if we evolved from them?"
Haha yes-- in this case for BoTW to be at the beginning of the timeline, the Rito wouldn't exist yet, as they are only present in Wind Waker and beyond, not that it's impossible for both to exist.
this is more so a corporate acquihire of fan fiction writers
Zelda canon was never that deep when each game was written
writers had no secret timeline or their own deep interest in the prior writers rendition
they have a loose setting and other people that chose the writer to have near complete license to do whatever they want with it
and even that’s a negotiation, writers often have their own backlogged story already that they adapt to existing IP retroactively
whatever it doesn’t matter, I’m just surprised people are actually spending energy on this for this franchise. If this is what “fun” looks like now, it’s fine
I'm pretty sure Nintendo itself said at one point that they don't have a clear chronological order and may not tie into each other properly, even though they later retconned an order.
Still, it's fun to try to figure out how the puzzle pieces might fit together even though they came out of different boxes.
I've only played a handful of these games .. but do they work together as a theme or story progression or are they, as I suspect, pretty much independent rehashes with no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans?
They say it’s because they create a game around good gameplay and write the story around it later.
Which is the correct way to design a game, I am not going to go full Carmack and say the story does not matter at all, but at their heart a computer game is a simulation, a complex machine full of intricate moving parts. Getting thees parts to mesh well is the most critical part. and the story however well or poorly written sort of sits unconnected on top of it, for the most part ornithological to the machine underneath. The bit you actually interact with.
It is why I consider excessive use of cutscenes a tell of poor game design, They stop the machine and pull the player out of the environment. They have their place, but generally should be avoided.
book: tell a story
movie: show, don't tell (big sin opening lore dump)
game: do, don't show (big sin cutscene)
I played most Zelda games of the last 30 years.
To the exception of TOTK, I _never_ noticed any link (hehe) between different titles. I know there are some references, but I never catch them.
Even Majora's Mask, which is an official follow up occurring months after Ocarina of Time have a totally different story to tell that don't even try to continue the OoT story and is more just another completely independent story barely in the same universe.
I love the Zelda games, I consider myself a fan. But they are just that : good games. Each of those games do have interesting stories to tell, interesting universes to visit, but the overall "franchise" lore is totally uninteresting.
And honestly I don't think it's something bad, it means each game is free to go where it wants, and every game is free to have an universe as rich as it wants.
I see Zelda totally like I see mario : it's just universe codes, not a real lore. Nobody cares if Mario Galaxy happens before or after Mario 64 or Super Mario World. Zelda is the same for me. And that's cool.
Even TOTK which is meant to be a direct sequel to BotW is...only loosely connected. Like obviously the map is the same and characters kind of reference some of the events from BotW, but (frustratingly) it's like almost everyone underwent extensive lobotoby between the games and forgot 99% of what happened. The entire lore of the world gets rewritten too.
From what I understand - it's because Nintendo famously designs the game and gameplay systems first and then writes a story to match what they built. If the story doesn't work with the setting then...<shrug> - it's still a good game at the end of the day.
> no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans
That's a very cynical and dare I say Hackernews take. You could also, less cynically, see them as unique pieces of art that have managed to carve a space in a field where, by necessity, a lot of money is needed to create it (AAA games).
Tears of the Kingdom is art. It's a beautiful, simple fairytale told through the medium of a huge open world game and there's something unique in being able to embody that story for so many hours. I haven't played any other Zelda games from the past ~20 years but if they're similarly artful (and by all accounts they are) we don't need to be cynical towards their simplicity or the fact that they're variations on a theme. Pretty much all human art (and business) is, after all.
I'm not cynical about the games, I'm cynical that the games have any relation to each other in their plots.
If they have obvious similarities, they aren't randomly distributed data
Correlation does not imply causation.
What point are you trying to make?
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
https://xkcd.com/111/
The second graph on the spurious correlations page bugs me, that has a plausible explanation! (cultural prestige / zeitgeist centralizing on the hard sciences)
I’m not a fan of the chronological approach, but I like this project. It’s beautifully done, I found it interesting to explore
Love the site, though I'll always prefer this attempt at explaining the Zelda timeline by Brian David Gilbert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw
Thanks! I’ll check it out
This is like watching trailers about a movie before going to the movie. Letting it wreck your wonderment. If you've never played OOT I suggest you just take it in on its own merit. Then go back and look at this. Let it surprise you. We don't do this enough.
Also, it's almost an open secret that the the Nintendo development teams weren't really thinking in terms of a coherent timeline until later when they published some book mainly because they saw an opportunity to make money and sell merch to a bunch of nerds rather than to truly give a history to a bunch of somewhat related but fairly disjointed games all from the same franchise. They only pretend there's a timeline cause it sells games and books. Not cause there really is. What's worse is that the Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom games really throw a wrench in the works.
TLDR: enjoy these games on their own merit and know that only few titles are meant to be really connected in some way. Like Ocarina of Time <-> Majora's Mask and/or Breath of the Wild <-> Tears of the Kingdom . As for the rest there's slight references to each other but not really much linking them.
I prefer to think of LoZ without a coherent timeline. Just 3 archetypal souls finding each other again and again and again...
I just wanted to say thank you, you made my day brighter because you reminded me the remake comes out in 17 days and you got me to reconnect with one of my favourite games.
Seems like a lot of folks here are eager to discuss about interpretation and opinion, I take that as Nintendo did a great job providing enough to keep everyone engaged into the dream and fantasy behind it.
Cheers To more Zelda!
I played Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time to conclusion. I haven't really played any Zelda games since then, except maybe for a few minutes for a few of them.
I'm a little surprised to hear that Ocarina of Time is getting a remake. I take it it's going to be a Switch 2 exclusive?
It’s the second remake for OoT (it had a DS version as well). It holds similar status to FF7 in that it was the first 3D version of its franchise and brought a lot of new blood into the fanbase.
If you are still interested in the franchise and in video games, what I can tell you is that the Zelda franchise ages like good wine.
In other words : if you have good memories of your experiences with those games, do yourself the favor of playing the other titles, they are equally good.
Yes
Don't forget to include:
- Link: The Faces of Evil
- Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon
- Link's Crossbow Training
- the various Hyrule Warriors games
Good luck! :)
Per a scholar in the field [0], clearly The Legend of Zelda Monopoly is the pin which holds the entire Zelda timeline together!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw
I thought the Hyrule Warriors games were not canon. Did I get that wrong?
i think the second one is canon but it has time travel and stuff so it's also basically not
(the second one wasn't very good..but the first is a great game and runs even better on Switch 2.)
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity gets a "Definitive Edition" Feb 25, 2027. Will be interesting to see if gameplay improves.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is canon.
Apocrypha!
Yeah I was surprised there was a timeline and all
Zelda is not a continuous story. It’s a retelling of the same stories over and over with new elements.
Western audiences just love literalism.
I enjoyed it, but for things like this, I would actually like to know what your genuine contribution was and what Claude did for you. It just makes me appreciate it more when I know that a human made the effort of investing their own creativity and thought into the writing or design.
So you’re saying your appreciation of a thing can only be attributed in retrospect after learning about how it was created and what human labors went into it and will be subjectively assigned based on your own personal beliefs around that contribution.
Seems a bit weird. To me, it’s enough that someone has a thought of something they wish existed and now it does exist. How they bring it into existence isn’t of much importance to me. The AI didn’t dream this into existence, but it may very well have performed 99.9% of the creative work, but the human provided the spark in the form of that instruction to do so. With nearly all creative works, I can appreciate the craft but also I don’t have to; I can just appreciate the output.
Why? What does it matter for a random video game visualization?
Isn't it just "Zelda runs off to be with Ganondorf, pretends she is happy when Link saves her", same schtick as Mario?
No, in many of the games it’s not like she’s a damsel in distress, and usually helps like to defeat ganon
This is really fun! Great design!
<rant>
I'm gonna be the annoying guy and ask... Why? There's an official timeline page and if you want more details there's a page on a community maintained wiki (even independent from the hell that is wikia/fandom/whatever their current name is). I understand there's sense of accomplishment in personal projects... But a lot of this seems to be done by AI anyway, and that's my main gripe. Why are we wasting computing like this? To me this feels on par to using AI for things that can otherwise be easily looked up on a search engine (as long as your SE lets you filter through the slop)
I'm sorry if this feels like a personal attack - it really isn't my intention, but why are we pretending that things like this have no impact? And yes I know massive AI usage in corporate environments, slop image/video generation, etc have much more impact and that even that is still small compared to the amount of compute used from training (EDIT: and yes, what i'm mad about is specifically the environmental impact from this wasted compute). But that argument feels a lot like "my single vote doesn't count". Could we try to not make it worse? Sorry for being a party pooper i guess.
</rant>
What a rollercoaster.
This is a lovely website, but the premise is entirely incorrect (that there's anything you need to know going in), and also spoils details from the game which this is supposedly background for.
Nobody should be discussing the timeline before playing the games. And not from some kind of purity perspective, but just because it's nerd shit that you won't get anything out of until you do. I really enjoy thinking and talking about the timeline, but I'm under no illusion that it's anything more than after-the-fact fanfiction.
Having trouble loading the link
No matter how much you load Link he is just as nimble and spry. Encumbrance isn't an issue in the Zelda games
Links Awakening is its own world Link didn't do any of that other stuff he was just an adventurous dude who found himself on an island and that was the most remarkable thing about his life and he was still just a normal dude after.
I don't think you need to "catch up," every Zelda game is self-contained. Also, it's a remake of a game you already played, so you already know the story. If anything, coming in fresh would be a benefit.
Idk why we can't enjoy Zelda games for what they are - each game has recurring core cast, similar mythological archetypes & thematic motifs, and similar gameplay, but are all independent of each other. Even the games that are direct sequels to each other are still very independent.
We can enjoy them for what they are. A bunch of fans arguing online doesn’t detract from the majority who will just play the game and enjoy it.
Why does the timeline split into 3 after OOT?
In Ocarina of Time, Link has the ability to travel back and forth to the future, taking on an adult form. As an adult, he defeats Ganon and seals him away, with Ganon swearing to return one day.
But then Link returns to his childhood time. As a child, Link warns Zelda about Ganon, and preempts the future (where Ganon takes power and adult Link defeats him) from happening. So, there are at least two timelines.
Majora's Mask follows this child Link in one of the few explicit sequels in the series.
But then Wind Waker faces off against the Ganon defeated by adult Link. This is explicitly referenced in the text but it's not so clear-cut a sequel.
Meanwhile, Ocarina of Time was explicitly a prequel to A Link to the Past (depicting the events described in ALttP's backstory). But (1) some events don't quite line up and (2) the continuity of games established in the other timelines can't really neatly fit the ALttP-LA-OoS/OoA-LoZ-LA chronology. So a third timeline is just the neatest way to do it.
None of this really matters for playing or understanding the games, though. With the exception of Majora's Mask (and Phantom Hourglass / Spirit Tracks to a lesser extent), each Zelda game can be enjoyed as someones first Zelda.
Weird design choice by Nintendo. Imo, the whole timeline thing is a very clear afterthought for legend of zelda, most games have little to no relation to each other.
Well, I feel like Nintendo just makes games and they've never cared much about lore. I feel the weird choice is by gamers, for continuing to care about this "timeline" which is so clearly a post-hoc rationalization.
There's a story?
Sorry everyone here is dumping on you, I think kids these days say some like “go touch grass” when this kind of thing happens.
I think this is neat and honestly the perfect use of an LLM, just some for-fun project to visualize something completely inconsequential and nostalgic.
Somehow is devolved into dunking on the west and other unfortunate “better than thou” comments.