Skip Navigation
95 comments

  • It might have worked around the era of Twilight Princess; there was enough continuity in the series that it had consistent lore, the games were trending toward cinematic, lots of cut scenes and character arcs and such. Not sure a movie is going to play well in the "We physically cannot care about this story" era represented by BotW and TotK.

    • Honestly, I don't think there was ever a time when Zelda had lore that spanned outside the borders of the individual games. Or at least, where lore like that was considered important or taken seriously. The whole timelines thing always seemed to me like a kind of after-thought.

      The Legend of Zelda has a lot more in common with Final Fantasy. There'll be a lot of similar things in between each game, but each game is self-contained.

      • There was a span between Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess where each game treated previous ones as established history. The handheld games have always done whatever; Link's Awakening is a direct sequel to Link to the Past which is all a dream, it's directly in the text of that game. The Oracle games take place outside Hyrule, Minish Cap takes place in Hyrule but the distant past, so we can largely ignore them as side stories.

        Ocarina of Time, especially given how tremendously popular it was, became an anchor point for the series. Majora's Mask is a direct 20 minutes later sequel which is almost like Link's Awakening. I subscribe to the fan theory that it's Link's dying fever nightmare. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess both treated Ocarina of Time as historical events that literally happened, even if they mutually ignored each other. I think that's why they did the multiple timelines thing, just to reconcile WW and TP.

        You can just feel them wanting to shrug off the timelines thing from there; Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks are direct sequels to Wind Waker, Link Between Worlds is a direct sequel to Link to the Past of all games, Skyward Sword is a far past prequel, and then Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are a reboot of the series.

        But from about '98 to '05 or so, it felt like a series and not a franchise.

        Wanna hear my juiciest Zelda conspiracy theory? There are several pages of lore at the beginning of the manual for A Link to the Past, I have the North American version of this, and I don't know how much of it was written by Nintendo themselves and translated or how much of it was written by Nintendo of America (I know Ganon's last name "Dragmire" was made up by NoA) but the whole thing retroactively reads like a design document for the rest of the series. Seriously go read it and try not to think "Holy shit this was written in 1990."

      • I agree, I think the whole "official timeline" thing was 100% a fan created mythos which Nintendo saw was gaining traction and played into to make more money. It's pretty clear that most of the games had very little connection to one another beyond the basic concept of the core theme (the hero saving the world from a great evil) repeating itself.

95 comments