It’s official: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom don’t fit on any previous Legend of Zelda timeline. As revealed by Nintendo this weekend, the two open-world games that bookended the Switch’s lifespan stand alone in their own version of reality. Which means all that time you spent trying to work out how they fit in with the previous games was futile.
The idea that the Legend of Zelda games exist in some sort of coherent timeline has always struck me as a path that leads to madness. Think too hard on something like that and you’re surely only moments away from drawing spirals all over your walls and ceiling. But it seems Nintendo themselves are determined to encourage such red-string-entangled complexity, grouping 19 Zelda games into an ever-more complicated branching history.
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Australian Nintendo site Vooks picked up on the information during Sydney’s Nintendo Live 2024 over the weekend, posting a photograph of a slide shown by the Japanese publisher that lays it all out. There are two previously established distinct timelines in official Zelda cannon, known as “Hero is Defeated” and “Hero is Triumphant,” which branch off after the events of Ocarina of Time. The latter branch immediately splits into “Child Era” and “Adult Era,” while Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom just sit awkwardly off to the side, not fitting in anywhere.
According to the slide, chronologically the first game is Skyward Sword, followed by The Minish Cap and Four Swords, before everything splits after Ocarina. This also means that the two most “recent” games end up being the very first ones, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, both set in the “Era of Decline.” But the Switch’s epic adventures just float loose, not even chronologically connected to one another.
It’s worth noting that this official timeline doesn’t mention The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom at all.
Surely it’s easier to refuse to even countenance any of this, and to think of Zelda as this big box of toys, and Nintendo gets them all out and plays with them differently every time? Sure, there’s the Link toy and the Zelda toy and the Gannon toy, and they play on the same cloth map, but there’s no reason to want or need them to overlap or interconnect at all. At least, that’s how I stay sane.
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