Apparently there’s a noodle-nest of freakyness a-goin’-on, for Zelda now has an official timeline.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114940-Nintendos-New-Zelda-Book-Reveals-Official-Timeline
I, for one, think this is taking things way too far. I was perfectly content having a bunch of unrelated Zelda games. Poor Link! Guy never gets a break. He just keeps battling evil time after time again.
Bump because the English translation of the book is now in American stores.
About 1/3 of the book is just about Skyward Sword, and another 1/3 is art concepts, but the last 1/3 is a very detailed history of the storyline of the series.
It’s interesting how the timeline of the series has 3 different branches based on what happens at the end of Ocarina. If Ganondorf defeats Link, the next game will be Link to the Past. If Link wins and returns to the childhood era, the next game is Majora’s Mask, and if he returns to adult era, the next game is Wind Waker. It’s also interesting how the only Zelda games I’ve finished to this point are in the timeline where Link loses to Ganon in Ocarina (which causes Ganon to acquire the triforce, turn the golden world into the dark world, and lay the steps for Link to the Past).
I REALLLY need to hurry up and finish Ocarina…I’ve been putting that game off for 15 years, and got the 3DS version a couple months ago, but I’m still not out of the Tree Temple yet…
Well, the real problem is that when most of the games came out, the creators weren’t thinking in terms of an overwhelming mythos. They were just having fun. Previously, I’d always assumed they were all different Links and when Ganon returns in each game, the goddesses imbue him with the power to be the hero and not that it’s the same Link over and over again.
Yes, that is still the case. In the “era of decline” timeline, the Ocarina Link is a different Link than the LTTP+Oracles+Awakening Link, who is also a different Link than the NES Link. However, it’s the same Ganon across all of those games, and the book even addresses the fact that Princess Zelda I (the one who is asleep in Adventure of Link, who is also a different Zelda than the one you rescue in the original NES game) was not actually the FIRST Zelda, but was the first princess to begin the tradition of naming every princess Zelda.
And if you look at the “Child Era” timeline, the Ganon who is defeated at the end of Twilight Princess is dead for good, and there is a brand new Ganon who is born for Four Swords Adventures.
Considering that there WASN’T an official timeline connecting all of these games, and the creators had to develop something after the fact, I think they did a pretty good job getting everything to fit together.
It’s also amusing that the book specifically mentions that certain spinoff games such as Link’s Crossbow Training were left out of the chronicle…yeah, we all know what OTHER certain games they’re talking about…
Look I’m sorry but I’m just not going to accept this “official” timeline as canon. They are all individual games to me and always will be. I don’t derive any extra pleasure from the Zelda games by thinking they are a continuing saga. I don’t understand why they even want to try to do this. Nintendo has a perfectly good franchise in Metroid that has a coherent and complex timeline, but one that makes sense and was planned out.
Zelda always had a timeline, it just became a clusterfuck.
AOL was explicitly a direct sequel to TLOZ. ALTTP was explicitly a prequel to those. LA was explicitly a sequel to ALTTP. OOT was explicitly a prequel to everything. MM was explicitly a sequel to that.
It was only around Four Swords and Minish Cap* that things got really confusing. Even TWW and Twilight Princess were explicitly sequels to OOT, but it took a while for them to really mention the details of how they were sequels.
Okay, I had a pounding headache when I wrote my last post. Nothing was incorrect, but I didn’t really go into the detail I wanted to (because seriously, ow).
Zelda had numerous “self-contained” timelines. There were blocks of games that had absolutely clear relationships, but aside from obvious relationships such as the knowledge that OOT was before most of the games, it wasn’t clear where these blocks were in relation to each other (if they weren’t even interleaved).
The blocks were:
Other than that, the only known information was that OOT was before “everything” (except maybe TMC and FS because of the contradiction I mentioned in my last post and the fact that they’re somewhat of sidestories anyway). And of course that MM was a direct sequel to OOT. (I’m leaving out SS, because it was released so close to the Japanese Hyrule Historia and explicitly the first game in the series from the getgo)
None of this is wacky, this is all based on obvious things in the games themselves, statements in the manual, and/or explicit quotes from the developers.
Further, we got some hints eventually like that TP and WW weren’t in the same timeline for logical reasons.
The clusterfuck was centered around blocks 1, 2, and 3. For block 3, I already mentioned – they could go anywhere other than FSA almost certainly taking place after a game where Ganon had been killed. Most people kind of guessed from hints in the manual that the Oracle games took place near ALTTP/LA from the manual of those games, but they could easily go anywhere after Ganon was killed (like block 3). Either way, they weren’t a big problem and most people didn’t pay much attention to them.
Block 1 was the biggest problem. It was never clear whether the Sealing War mentioned in ALTTP’s manual referred literally to the events of OOT or something else (some people even guessed that it was retconned to refer to what led to Ganon’s imprisonment in the Twilight Realm as shown early on in TP). Either way, it never really made much sense anywhere. Ganon clearly died in TP, and he was turned into a statue and a new Hyrule was founded somewhere else in WW. The safest bet was TP, but it still didn’t make much sense.
This is why they made OOT have three splits, because the block of the classic games made no sense.
Still, the conjecture that every Zelda game was standalone was one I never understood, because every time a new game came out the developers would clearly mention which “block” it fit in, and for every game up to MM – where it fit compared to every other game in the series (and after that, they would almost always mention where it fit compared to OOT). I could accept that every “block” is standalone, but the developers never pretended for a minute that there wasn’t a timeline (though they did occasionally hint that they’d internally retcon it occasionally which is why they didn’t release it until now).
