Don't trust Nintendo, there is no timeline. This series is about recurring themes, not about one continuous nation and royal line.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I can see why a lot of people say that. It really does start to break apart under a not-so-fine microscope. I was kind of hoping there was something I was missing that would explain why it didn’t make sense but maybe not…
I wanted to love Totk but it just doesn't feel like Zelda.. I miss the days of the wind waker. Legend of Zelda the wind waker was my all time favorite Zelda game I'm really hoping they go back to those style of games but with newer shed graphics (obviously)
Honestly, I loved TotK. But it made me dislike BotW. I love BotW when it released, but TotK made it feel incomplete. So many people were worried about Totk being glorified DLC but what it ended up making was BotW into the early release beta.
But I do enjoy older games as well. I remember playing a link to the past growing up and getting lost in the puzzles. We actually broke the game in one of the dungeons by using a key on the wrong door and soft locking the game in an unbeatable state. Had to start everything over lol. That was the age when some of these games were actually difficult though. Playing oracle of ages on switch and I am flying through it. With about 30 minutes of play time I got the first dungeon completed pretty easily. I think Zelda has evolved quite a few times and each generation of players has their “golden years”
That's awesome! A link to the past was fun. I think the remake was really well done also in the new art style. I do like both Botw and Totk but it just doesn't feel like Zelda in my opinion. Idk something about waking up early before school and playing wind waker and begging my mom to skip school just to play it 😂 those years are behind me now but I guess it's just a nostalgia thing
Funny you say that because Wind Waker didn't feel like Zelda at all when it came out. It took me at least a decade to come around on that game.
Nobody understands the timeline. Not even Nintendo. If you want proof of that check out this video that goes over the history of Zelda timelines. That's right. Someone made a video not about the timeline itself, but about all the times Nintendo changed the timeline.
Personally, I just go with the stance that each game is a "Legend" of Zelda. Just like how real life has stories of the past that may or may not have happened either as written or even at all. Sometimes those stories even reference older stories and the legends continue on.
I feel like that should be the case, but Nintendo has put themselves in the corner by releasing an “official” timeline. But this would have been pretty easy to fix by simply not calling Rauru the first king of Hyrule. And not making him Zonai. If he’d been a Hylian king that wasn’t the first it would make perfect sense…
This really is how Nintendo should've done it, instead of releasing a timeline at all. We can still have the origin story of the Master Sword, and of Ganon, and of the cycle of reincarnation, and the Goddess Hylia, and they can all have elements that reference each other, but they don't have to be completely consistent.
Short easy answer, the “Timeline” has always been a bunch of bullshit and none of the games have ever existed in the same universe. Save for the games that are explicitly direct sequels (e.g., ToTK, Majora’s Mask, Phantom Hourglass, etc.) they are all stand-alone stories. I don’t understand why people can’t wrap their heads around the idea that stories can be retold with the same character archetypes without being directly related to each other.
IMO the best way to think of this is like the Wheel Of Time series. It's an eternal struggle between archetypes that keeps happening over many millenia.
"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again"
It's mildly infuriating how much BotW referenced back to previous games and fit itself into the existing timeline map, and TotK simply.... ignores all of that.
For what it's worth, in my head, I just consider this Hyrule, founded by Rauru, as a whole different kingdom from those that came before. If we get reincarnations of Link and Zelda and Ganondorf, why not the whole kingdom? That just puts BotW and TotK super far forward in time, so far that whatever preivous Hyrule(s) we've known are dead and gone.
BotW didn’t fit in any one timeline. It had components from all the timelines. However, they said it occurred at the end of all 3 timelines. So my headcannon was that there was a large merging event that combined the timelines back to 1. And I expected it to be a “reset” where games would only reference the story from that point forward to kind of “clean up” the past lore without dealing with it. That clearly didn’t happen since TotK was all about history
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Neither in Sync smh
What I want to know is, if the Rito were around for the founding of Hyrule, where were they in OoT and TP?
They were away looking for the missing third Oracle game
IIRC the "timeline" was originally just a fun little thought experiment by the playerbase a la "what if all of these stories exist in the same universe instead of being separate legends" and Nintendo just rolled with it eventually ... but the actual games have always had their own contained stories that aren't actually fully compatible with each other, retcon or change things that "happened in the past" and generally shouldn't be viewed as being in the same universe, otherwise things get VERY confusing (like for example why TH Majora's Mask is present in BotW and Link can just wear it without being taken over by the evil spirit sealed within, or why you can get multiple "Goddess Swords" in BotW despite it being the unique, Hylia-made proto version of the Master Sword).
Nintendo just likes to re-use known plot elements and characters, like that every wise (old) Sheikah woman close to Zelda is automatically Impa. "Rauru" is no exception to this - the Sage of Light in Ocarina of Time for example was also called Rauru, but he was definitely a Hylian back then and definitely also NOT the King of Hyrule.
What confuses my more TBH is that Zelda is somehow Rauru's and Sonia's descendant. If they had kids already before Zelda got sent back in time, why weren't they ever mentioned? And since they're both dead at the very beginning of the game, it isn't exactly likely that they managed to have kids after the events of TotK either, so ... how?! This can't be explained by plot dissonance between games as all of it happened within TotK.
But it also states that Skyward Sword Zelda’s descendants founded Hyrule shortly after the sealing of the sacred realm. Skyward Sword Zelda wasn’t a Zonai though.
There's no indication of how much time passed there. It just says that Skyloft came down, and then there was an entire era of chaos, ending by the sealing of the sacred realm, then the founding of Hyrule kingdom, and the beginning of the era of prosperity. The graph even has an extra empty slot between the sky era ending with the return to the surface, and the era of chaos with the sealing of the sacred realm.
Hyrule Historia p. 77 says that "the world became known as Hyrule" and "the Hyliaans, descendants of Hylia, lived in Hyrule" - but the descendants of Hylia are the descendants of Skyward Sword Zelda, who is Hylia incarnated. So we're already talking a few generations there.
Then the legend of the supreme power spreads, and Rauru, the sage of light that we see in OoT, builds the Temple of Time to seal the Triforce and the Sacred Realm.
And then the descendants of the goddess Hylia, reincarnated as princess Zelda (so that's the descendants of SSZelda), established the kingdom of Hyrule, to protect the Triforce. Then after some time, we get to OoT.
The only thing that's changing here with TotK is the imprisoning war. The one we see in TotK and the one we see in the LttP backstory (and also in Hyrule Historia) simply seems to be... not the same event at all. The TotK events are just a different war that is not the one we've known about so far. As for Rauru... the founding of the kingdom and the sealing of the sacred realm did happen in the same time period, and they have the same powers. And the Zonai could easily have had an entire civilization and left between the Skyward Sword ending and the sacred realm sealing.
I’ve been wondering this too and watching lots of YouTube videos of people explaining their take. Truth is nobody knows and everyone is head canoning how TOTK fits. But I particularly like this video that describes the idea of a dragonbreak having merged the timelines back into one.
This would explain why the Tri-Force is missing. I hope there’s a third game that explains why people seem to have forgotten it’s existence.
The story is a Legend with a lot of details embellished or forgotten over the course of history. It is possible to put together an overall idea of how the history went, but you can’t trust any single game as totally accurate.