I don't consider it to be one unified story at all, I mean some of the series obviously are connected, but the rest are, as the name suggests, legends about Zelda. Unconnected unreliable narrations about some sort of heroic past events. Everybody agrees about the characters involved but as to what exactly happened, that is lost to time. So each culture is now telling the story a different way, emphasizing whatever is important to them.<p>I consider as a sort of modern equivalent to the coyote stories. or Paul Bunyan, Finn McCool, Gilgamesh, Or really, any legendary heroic epic passed along by oral storytelling.<p>So it is fun to try to fit it into some sort of unified timeline. But I don't think it is, that is not how they were actually written and we would loose most of the interesting storytelling flexibility if that is how they write them in the future.
While I agree in spirit and think that was true for most of the games when written, there has been an official timeline published by Nintendo[1,2] since 2011 (and the idea was apparently around internally since 2002).<p>I would be surprised if it did not have some impact on the writing of the games, though of course there is (as of yet) no explicit reference to the timeline in the games.<p>[1]: <a href="https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_timeline" rel="nofollow">https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_timeline</a>
[2]: <a href="https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/</a>
I don't think most Japanese media is as concerned with fitting things into a canon as much as American media is. Like, in Gundam, you have 0079, Thunderbolt, and Origin all allegedly in the UC canon, but there's pretty significant deviations in Thunderbolt and Origin from 0079 so they're not really the same timelines. American comics will also have multiple timelines or universes, but they'll make it clear which one each individual series goes with, and have crossover events explicitly acknowledging the existence of the different canons. Japanese media doesn't tend to do that, and I think trying to fit it into a coherent timeline is a fool's errand
What are you talking about? The timeline is official and published by Nintendo, a Japanese company. It's not some fan theory.
Yes, but published very much due to fan pressure, and clearly figured out to match the games rather than being designed up front. Nintendo perhaps more than other Japanese companies intentionally avoids letting existing lore constrain their creativity on new games. That apparently is changing however, as now that Nintendo has successfully launched a cinematic arm they have said they want the movies to be a source of canon that the games will reinforce, a markedly different strategy than they've used previously.
That has little to do with "Japan" and more to do with "that's how it went back then."<p>There's stories all over about Hollywood dumping physical copies of films, sets and props only to later regret it.<p>No one knew if a sequel or trilogy or decades of fan service would happen. They didn't care like our rose colored glasses of time make us see.<p>American comics and Star Wars has had their continuity reset.<p>This is just "grass is greener" type thinking. It's only ever been the US fan culture that cared; most creators just see it as a paycheck
Yeah my point was to downplay how specific this is to Japan, and focus much more on it being a pretty Nintendo specific phenomenon, though you're also right that video games (and other media) as a whole tended toward this sort of thing at the time, whereas now the painful lessons of losing this stuff is more apparent to creators.
It's questionable that it's not literally just a fan theory. For years fans were trying to put the Zelda games on a single timeline, and Nintendo just didn't care. The split timeline was one of the top theories of how everything can be put together, based off of a single developer comment that implied a 2 way split instead of a 3 way split: <a href="https://zelda-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Split_Timeline" rel="nofollow">https://zelda-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Split_Timeline</a><p>Then Hyrule Hostoria came out as a collectable. I would put good money on a conversation during its writing that went like this "What else can we put in here?" "Maybe a timeline of the games?" "Yeah, sure. What's the official one?" "There isn't one. The fans have a fun split timeline one." "Oh neat. Yeah work out the details. Now has anyone found that Wind Waker concept art yet?"<p>A common flaw I see in media literacy is operating like the author has pulled a completely coherent story from a different universe and simply written it down, as opposed to a creative process. Nintendo has never cared about the timeline, nor developing a single coherent story across all of the Zelda games. Some games are sequals, prequels, or have direct references. The timeline itself is purely from non-game sources, and is obviously not a factor when they design a new game.
Japan doesn't seem to take the hero fantasy thing as seriously. It seems to be more about escapism in general and what the show and characters are "about," even if that's not really very deep to begin with.
I do not want to rain on your parade, but I find attempts to impose a coherent timeline on Zelda miss the opportunity to engage with it as a <i>legend</i>, a story told over and over with certain essential parts but many changing interpretations. How our very familiarity with the story creates the opportunity for surprise. There are so many fictional worlds with sprawling lore, and so few that engage with the retelling of stories and myths like Zelda does.
What’s the word for trying to do cluster analysis on what is actually randomly distributed data? The games do have obvious similarities and sometimes refer to each other, but they’re independent events.
Nintendo now maintains/updates an official timeline: <a href="https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/</a>
I'm pretty sure Nintendo itself said at one point that they don't have a clear chronological order and may not tie into each other properly, even though they later retconned an order.<p>Still, it's fun to try to figure out how the puzzle pieces might fit together even though they came out of different boxes.
I've only played a handful of these games .. but do they work together as a theme or story progression or are they, as I suspect, pretty much independent rehashes with no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans?
They say it’s because they create a game around good gameplay and write the story around it later.
Which is the correct way to design a game, I am not going to go full Carmack and say the story does not matter at all, but at their heart a computer game is a simulation, a complex machine full of intricate moving parts. Getting thees parts to mesh well is the most critical part. and the story however well or poorly written sort of sits unconnected on top of it, for the most part ornithological to the machine underneath. The bit you actually interact with.<p>It is why I consider excessive use of cutscenes a tell of poor game design, They stop the machine and pull the player out of the environment. They have their place, but generally should be avoided.<p>book: tell a story<p>movie: show, don't tell (big sin opening lore dump)<p>game: do, don't show (big sin cutscene)
I played most Zelda games of the last 30 years.<p>To the exception of TOTK, I _never_ noticed any link (hehe) between different titles. I know there are some references, but I never catch them.<p>Even Majora's Mask, which is an official follow up occurring months after Ocarina of Time have a totally different story to tell that don't even try to continue the OoT story and is more just another completely independent story barely in the same universe.<p>I love the Zelda games, I consider myself a fan. But they are just that : good games. Each of those games do have interesting stories to tell, interesting universes to visit, but the overall "franchise" lore is totally uninteresting.<p>And honestly I don't think it's something bad, it means each game is free to go where it wants, and every game is free to have an universe as rich as it wants.<p>I see Zelda totally like I see mario : it's just universe codes, not a real lore. Nobody cares if Mario Galaxy happens before or after Mario 64 or Super Mario World. Zelda is the same for me. And that's cool.
Even TOTK which is meant to be a direct sequel to BotW is...only loosely connected. Like obviously the map is the same and characters kind of reference some of the events from BotW, but (frustratingly) it's like almost everyone underwent extensive lobotoby between the games and forgot 99% of what happened. The entire lore of the world gets rewritten too.<p>From what I understand - it's because Nintendo famously designs the game and gameplay systems first and then writes a story to match what they built. If the story doesn't work with the setting then...<shrug> - it's still a good game at the end of the day.
> no real relationship other than making money and appeasing fans<p>That's a very cynical and dare I say <i>Hackernews</i> take. You could also, less cynically, see them as unique pieces of art that have managed to carve a space in a field where, by necessity, a lot of money is needed to create it (AAA games).<p>Tears of the Kingdom is art. It's a beautiful, simple fairytale told through the medium of a huge open world game and there's something unique in being able to embody that story for so many hours. I haven't played any other Zelda games from the past ~20 years but if they're similarly artful (and by all accounts they are) we don't need to be cynical towards their simplicity or the fact that they're variations on a theme. Pretty much all human art (and business) is, after all.
If they have obvious similarities, they aren't randomly distributed data
<a href="https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations" rel="nofollow">https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations</a><p><a href="https://xkcd.com/111/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/111/</a>
I just wanted to say thank you, you made my day brighter because you reminded me the remake comes out in 17 days and you got me to reconnect with one of my favourite games.<p>Seems like a lot of folks here are eager to discuss about interpretation and opinion, I take that as Nintendo did a great job providing enough to keep everyone engaged into the dream and fantasy behind it.<p>Cheers To more Zelda!
Isn't it just "Zelda runs off to be with Ganondorf, pretends she is happy when Link saves her", same schtick as Mario?
I prefer to think of LoZ without a coherent timeline. Just 3 archetypal souls finding each other again and again and again...
I played Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time to conclusion. I haven't really played any Zelda games since then, except maybe for a few minutes for a few of them.<p>I'm a little surprised to hear that Ocarina of Time is getting a remake. I take it it's going to be a Switch 2 exclusive?
If you are still interested in the franchise and in video games, what I can tell you is that the Zelda franchise ages like good wine.<p>In other words : if you have good memories of your experiences with those games, do yourself the favor of playing the other titles, they are equally good.
It’s the second remake for OoT (it had a DS version as well). It holds similar status to FF7 in that it was the first 3D version of its franchise and brought a lot of new blood into the fanbase.
Yes
Don't forget to include:<p>- Link: The Faces of Evil<p>- Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon<p>- Link's Crossbow Training<p>- the various Hyrule Warriors games<p>Good luck! :)
Per a scholar in the field [0], clearly The Legend of Zelda Monopoly is the pin which holds the entire Zelda timeline together!<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw</a>
I thought the Hyrule Warriors games were not canon. Did I get that wrong?
i think the second one is canon but it has time travel and stuff so it's also basically not<p>(the second one wasn't very good..but the first is a great game and runs even better on Switch 2.)
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is canon.
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Apocrypha!
Zelda is not a continuous story. It’s a retelling of the same stories over and over with new elements.<p>Western audiences just love literalism.
This is really fun! Great design!
This is a lovely website, but the premise is entirely incorrect (that there's anything you need to know going in), and also spoils details from the game which this is supposedly background for.<p>Nobody should be discussing the timeline before playing the games. And not from some kind of purity perspective, but just because it's nerd shit that you won't get anything out of until you do. I really enjoy thinking and talking about the timeline, but I'm under no illusion that it's anything more than after-the-fact fanfiction.
I enjoyed it, but for things like this, I would actually like to know what your genuine contribution was and what Claude did for you. It just makes me appreciate it more when I know that a human made the effort of investing their own creativity and thought into the writing or design.
<rant><p>I'm gonna be the annoying guy and ask... Why? There's an official timeline page and if you want more details there's a page on a community maintained wiki (even independent from the hell that is wikia/fandom/whatever their current name is). I understand there's sense of accomplishment in personal projects... But a lot of this seems to be done by AI anyway, and that's my main gripe. Why are we wasting computing like this? To me this feels on par to using AI for things that can otherwise be easily looked up on a search engine (as long as your SE lets you filter through the slop)<p>I'm sorry if this feels like a personal attack - it really isn't my intention, but why are we pretending that things like this have no impact?
And yes I know massive AI usage in corporate environments, slop image/video generation, etc have much more impact and that even that is still small compared to the amount of compute used from training (EDIT: and yes, what i'm mad about is specifically the environmental impact from this wasted compute). But that argument feels a lot like "my single vote doesn't count". Could we try to not make it worse?
Sorry for being a party pooper i guess.<p></rant>
Links Awakening is its own world Link didn't do any of that other stuff he was just an adventurous dude who found himself on an island and that was the most remarkable thing about his life and he was still just a normal dude after.
Having trouble loading the link
I don't think you need to "catch up," every Zelda game is self-contained. Also, it's a remake of a game you already played, so you already know the story. If anything, coming in fresh would be a benefit.<p>Idk why we can't enjoy Zelda games for what they are - each game has recurring core cast, similar mythological archetypes & thematic motifs, and similar gameplay, but are all independent of each other. Even the games that are direct sequels to each other are still very independent.
There's a story?
Why does the timeline split into 3 after OOT?
Sorry everyone here is dumping on you, I think kids these days say some like “go touch grass” when this kind of thing happens.<p>I think this is neat and honestly the perfect use of an LLM, just some for-fun project to visualize something completely inconsequential and nostalgic.<p>Somehow is devolved into dunking on the west and other unfortunate “better than thou” comments.
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