It’s official: Breath of the Wild And Tears of the Kingdom do not match previous Legend of Zelda Timeline. As Nintendo revealed this weekend, the two open-world games that spanned the Switch’s lifespan stand alone in their own version of reality. That means all that time you spent figuring out how they fit in with the previous games, pointless.
The idea that the Legend of Zelda Games exist in a kind of connected timeline, which always seemed like a road to madness to me. If you think about it for too long, you’re sure to be moments away from drawing spirals on the walls and ceiling. But it seems that Nintendo itself is determined to encourage such thread-laced complexity by making 19 Zelda Play in an increasingly complex, branching story.
Read more: 14 strange things that die-hard Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom fans have to explain
Australian Nintendo Site Vooks picked up the information during Nintendo Live 2024 in Sydney over the weekend, posting a photo of a slide the Japanese publisher showed that laid it all out. There are two previously established, different timelines in official Zelda Cannon, known as “The Hero is Defeated” and “The Hero is Triumphant”, which follows the events of Ocarina of Time. The latter branch immediately divides into “Child Era” and “Adult Era”, while Breath of the Wild And Tears of the Kingdom I just sit awkwardly off to the side and don’t fit anywhere.
According to the slide, the first game is chronologically Sky Swordfollowed by The Minish Cap And Four Swordsbefore everything falls apart ocarina. This also means that the two “newest” games are also the very first, The Legend of Zelda And Zelda II: The Adventure of Linkboth are set in the “Age of Decline.” But the Switch’s epic adventures just float around freely and aren’t even connected chronologically.
It is worth noting that this official schedule does not mention The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom at all.
Surely it is easier to refuse to accept all this and to think of Zelda like this big box of toys, and Nintendo pulls them all out and plays with them differently each time? Sure, there’s the Link toy and the Zelda toy and the Gannon toy, and they play on the same fabric map, but there’s no reason why they should overlap or be connected. At least that’s how I Stay healthy.
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