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.
Each game tells you where they are in the timeline in relation to the other games since the beginning (except the Capcom ones). If you think the fans made it up, you straight up did not read.
Each game tells you where they are in the timeline in relation to the other games
They setup the new world in preparation for the main theme, sure. At its deepest level that was always just (up until Skyward Sword when Nintendo began monetising fan-created lore) the echo of a myth throughout time and reality. The fans so desperate to make a direct linear connection between the conclusion of one game and the traditional introductory cut-scene of the next are so far down their rabbit hole they seem completely unable to accept the much more logical explanation that it’s just a convenient way for Nintendo to recycle the same basic narrative structure that has been used in almost every single game.
It is my understanding the whole three timelines splitting at Ocarina of Time was made up by Nintendo for Hyrule Historia. Fans wanted the series overall to make sense as one mythos, Nintendo is physically incapable of caring about this story. This came to a head with BotW being specifically designed to not fit in any of the three timelines; it’s in the far future, there are Rito and Zora around, etc. and then TotK directly contradicts Ocarina of Time.
Majora’s Mask picked up with the Hero of Time after he returned from the adult timeline, it clearly shows that it’s the same character. Then Wind Waker’s opening scene showed the same Hero of Time beat Ganon then disappear and then Ganon comes back ; the king of red lion also says he was hoping the Hero of Time would return, but that never happened, and instead he found the new hero of wind. And then Twilight Princess shows Ganondorf was arrested for trying to betray Hyrule before he could execute his plans, but then he still got the Triforce of Power ; and the Hero’s Shade is confirmed to be the Hero of Time whose achievements were not remembered (because he erased them by going back in time) and he couldn’t pass on his skills. It’s hard to pretend that those games are not connected when it’s right there in the opening and the cinematics and it even uses the same name (hero of time). WW and TP ignored each other, but that’s because they were the different timelines.
The timeline split wasn’t invented years later to fix that. The OoT timeline split was explained by Aonuma immediately between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, precisely because people were wondering if the two games contradicted each other - Aonuma is the one who pointed out that returning to the past created a second timeline, and he explained that right when they released Twilight Princess. It was all right there in the games as they were coming out, Hyrule Historia simply confirmed it years later for the release of Skyward Sword, that wasn’t made up by fans. The only thing that Hyrule Historia did that the fans didn’t expect was the third split, with the fallen timeline. That one still doesn’t have any coherent explanation, that’s the part that Nintendo is probably trying to ignore, that the fans don’t like, and that makes some people think it’s made up nonsense.
BotW was a breaking point where they decided to do something different and not use the timeline and put it in the far future, but the Rito and Zora are not a contradiction, all it needs is the confirmation that the Rito already existed before the Zora turned into them. And that happens in Twilight Princess HD, the remake where they added a texture for Hyrule Castle with a relief showing a Rito. So the Rito did exist even in the TP timeline. TotK doesn’t contradict Ocarina of Time, it’s not the same event, it’s a different Ganondorf - we already knew there was more than one guy called Ganondorf (it’s a different one in Four Swords Adventure). There’s a gap of about 300 years between the events of TotK’s past and OoT.
If you want a fan theory, I think TotK and the Ouroboros symbol it uses as its logo shows that this Zelda is the one who creates her own timeline by going back to the past. She creates the split 300 years before Ocarina of Time, and that leads to the fallen timeline, at the end of which BotW happens. Without her, things play out differently and result in other events that end up in a civil war and into OoT centuries later, but with her, Ganondorf is sealed and the events play out as described in Link to the Past, which are slightly different from OoT. It resolves the fallen timeline and the fact that OoT was intended to be the war described in LttP, but it ended up playing out differently, and they never explained that other than “uh, Link died in that version” in Hyrule Historia.
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.
Each game tells you where they are in the timeline in relation to the other games since the beginning (except the Capcom ones). If you think the fans made it up, you straight up did not read.
They setup the new world in preparation for the main theme, sure. At its deepest level that was always just (up until Skyward Sword when Nintendo began monetising fan-created lore) the echo of a myth throughout time and reality. The fans so desperate to make a direct linear connection between the conclusion of one game and the traditional introductory cut-scene of the next are so far down their rabbit hole they seem completely unable to accept the much more logical explanation that it’s just a convenient way for Nintendo to recycle the same basic narrative structure that has been used in almost every single game.
It is my understanding the whole three timelines splitting at Ocarina of Time was made up by Nintendo for Hyrule Historia. Fans wanted the series overall to make sense as one mythos, Nintendo is physically incapable of caring about this story. This came to a head with BotW being specifically designed to not fit in any of the three timelines; it’s in the far future, there are Rito and Zora around, etc. and then TotK directly contradicts Ocarina of Time.
Majora’s Mask picked up with the Hero of Time after he returned from the adult timeline, it clearly shows that it’s the same character. Then Wind Waker’s opening scene showed the same Hero of Time beat Ganon then disappear and then Ganon comes back ; the king of red lion also says he was hoping the Hero of Time would return, but that never happened, and instead he found the new hero of wind. And then Twilight Princess shows Ganondorf was arrested for trying to betray Hyrule before he could execute his plans, but then he still got the Triforce of Power ; and the Hero’s Shade is confirmed to be the Hero of Time whose achievements were not remembered (because he erased them by going back in time) and he couldn’t pass on his skills. It’s hard to pretend that those games are not connected when it’s right there in the opening and the cinematics and it even uses the same name (hero of time). WW and TP ignored each other, but that’s because they were the different timelines.
The timeline split wasn’t invented years later to fix that. The OoT timeline split was explained by Aonuma immediately between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, precisely because people were wondering if the two games contradicted each other - Aonuma is the one who pointed out that returning to the past created a second timeline, and he explained that right when they released Twilight Princess. It was all right there in the games as they were coming out, Hyrule Historia simply confirmed it years later for the release of Skyward Sword, that wasn’t made up by fans. The only thing that Hyrule Historia did that the fans didn’t expect was the third split, with the fallen timeline. That one still doesn’t have any coherent explanation, that’s the part that Nintendo is probably trying to ignore, that the fans don’t like, and that makes some people think it’s made up nonsense.
BotW was a breaking point where they decided to do something different and not use the timeline and put it in the far future, but the Rito and Zora are not a contradiction, all it needs is the confirmation that the Rito already existed before the Zora turned into them. And that happens in Twilight Princess HD, the remake where they added a texture for Hyrule Castle with a relief showing a Rito. So the Rito did exist even in the TP timeline. TotK doesn’t contradict Ocarina of Time, it’s not the same event, it’s a different Ganondorf - we already knew there was more than one guy called Ganondorf (it’s a different one in Four Swords Adventure). There’s a gap of about 300 years between the events of TotK’s past and OoT.
If you want a fan theory, I think TotK and the Ouroboros symbol it uses as its logo shows that this Zelda is the one who creates her own timeline by going back to the past. She creates the split 300 years before Ocarina of Time, and that leads to the fallen timeline, at the end of which BotW happens. Without her, things play out differently and result in other events that end up in a civil war and into OoT centuries later, but with her, Ganondorf is sealed and the events play out as described in Link to the Past, which are slightly different from OoT. It resolves the fallen timeline and the fact that OoT was intended to be the war described in LttP, but it ended up playing out differently, and they never explained that other than “uh, Link died in that version” in Hyrule Historia.