The Best Thing about the Legend of Zelda Timeline Is How Flexible It Is

You might have recently seen features, tweets, video essays, Tiktoks—whatever form of media people voice complaints on these days—explaining that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has messed with, ruined, spat upon, or otherwise disrupted the established Zelda timeline through the introduction of some contradictory, confusing lore. Those reactions are a little more aggressive this time around than they were when its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, included conflicting hints as to which of the three branches of the timeline it took place in. 

We’ll come back to the complaints in a moment. But first, a little grounding on those three branches. If you don’t already know, the Zelda timeline is official, not only sanctioned by Nintendo themselves but included in the book Hyrule Historia. We don’t need to go into detail about where every mainline game in the series lives on the timeline, but you should know the thrust of it, at least: Skyward Sword is the beginning, the start of a single path, and then, that path eventually branches off in three directions with Ocarina of Time. Why then? Because the time traveling elements of Ocarina’s tale created multiple timelines, all of which had their own futures, and were impacted in different ways because of the mark Link, the Hero of Time, did or did not make on them. 

In one of these three timelines, the Hero is defeated by Ganon. This leads to the “Decline of Hyrule,” meaning, games in which Hyrule is in a bad way due to the continued presence of a great evil, and it’s lacking a whole lot of the kind of advanced technology seen in some of the other Zelda games. A Link to the Past is here, as is the original The Legend of Zelda: it’s kind of a neat touch to decide that the first Zelda game belongs on this path, with its sparser environments and relative simplicity explained away by it being part of the timeline where Hyrule isn’t thriving like it would have if Ganon had been defeated millenia before. 

In another branch, the Hero is triumphant, but there’s a catch: there’s just one Hero, but two active timelines. “Adult” Link goes back to his time of seven years prior by way of “adult” Princess Zelda, and shares his knowledge of the future with the younger version of her that already suspected Ganondorf was up to something. Ganondorf is seemingly executed by way of mystical banishment for the crimes he was expected to commit in Hyrule’s version of Minority Report, and Link rides off with Epona right into the story of Majora’s Mask, which eventually leads to Twilight Princess, aka the reaping to Ocarina’s sowing. In the other timeline and its seven-year head start, Ganon has been defeated by “adult” Link and sealed away, but the Hero is now absent due to the aforementioned being sent back in time thing: when Ganondorf eventually resurrects, as this eternal demon wearing a Gerudo suit tends to do, Hyrule is sealed away and flooded through the power of the Triforce with Ganondorf still in there, leading to the events of The Wind Waker. 

And then, Breath of the Wild is set at least 10,000 years after all of this, except what “this” is happens to be in question: as said, there are conflicting hints within the game as to which branch of the timeline it followed, to the point the most logical answer is “all of them.” Impossible? It sure isn’t! And that’s the beauty of the Zelda timeline, and why it can’t actually be ruined by a single game’s narrative decisions, no matter how many YouTube videos are published saying otherwise.

You see, Zelda’s timeline is not constructed so as to be deconstructed. It’s not written to fill out lengthy pages on Fandom. It’s not designed to be a Marvel Cinematic Universe-esque juggernaut that will probably have to be rebooted at some point lest it be crushed under its own weight, nor is it this rigid, difficult-to-maneuver-within thing that’s taken on a life of its own like the post-George Lucas Star Wars universe. (You don’t have to look for very long to find stories about Lucas not really caring about what went on in the expanded universe so long as it wasn’t using an idea he wanted to use in a film instead, like with what happened with the initial pitch for the game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, because Lucas wanted to save UFOs for a possible fourth movie.) No, the Zelda timeline exists not as a weight around the franchise’s neck, but is instead meant to loosely, casually tie the whole thing together. You, as a player, don’t need to know the timeline to enjoy each individual game, nor do you need to play a dozen Zelda games just to understand what’s happening in the 13th, but knowing all of that can mean some bits have a deeper meaning, and it can be fun for those who like to speculate on what it’s all about whenever there’s a new outing. Such as with Breath of the Wild’s mystery of the three timelines.

Nintendo kind of retroactively linked a bunch of things together with the timeline’s official unveiling in Hyrule Historia, giving us a glimpse of their own internal narrative logic when pitching and designing new Zelda games and their setting in the first place. And it showed us that they’re not overly concerned with huge gaps in the timeline—hence Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom taking place so very far ahead of the rest of the games. So far ahead, in fact, that it means literally anything could have happened to make those games “fit” within this universe! Future games could always “address” any “issues” contained within the timeline by being set in between the older Zelda titles and the newer ones. “Problem” solved.

This isn’t me projecting my own thoughts onto the rest of you, either. Hyrule Historia even hints at the fact that none of this is immutable nor complete in the timeline’s introduction: “This chronicle merely collects information that is believed to be true at this time, and there are many obscured and unanswered secrets that still lie within the tale. As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history. Hyrule’s history is a continuously woven tapestry of events. Changes that seem inconsequential, disregarded without even a shrug, could evolve at some point to hatch new legends and, perhaps, change this tapestry of history itself.” 

You can read that as “different people will someday be in charge of designing Zelda games than the people who are now, and those future designers are not beholden to anything, nor are they guaranteed to find the same things fascinating and worthy of attention. Preemptively get over believing otherwise.” 

In addition to that implied bit is the note about future works “perhaps, chang[ing] this tapestry of history itself.” The Zelda franchise is full of time travel, and the consequences of time travel, and massive gaps between settings that allow for Nintendo to get away with whatever they want to with it still being justifiable. In between the final game of each of the three branches of the timeline and Breath of the Wild, it’s entirely possible Nintendo could someday set a game where the three are somehow reunified, which would explain why the Rito and a village that seems an awful lot like the one The Wind Waker’s Link lived in exists within the same timeline as the Zora, even though the Rito are an evolution of the Zora in the same way the Koroks were an evolution of the children of the forest found in Ocarina of Time. Or maybe there won’t be a game set in between to do any of that, but here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter! There are huge gaps in the timeline that can be filled in someday, or they could not be. It’s the “legend” of Zelda, everyone, not The Complete, Verified Sourced History of Zelda. Maybe some Zora left Hyrule after the Great Flood and then came back to discover that those islands had a lot of Galapagos in them, you don’t know. And more importantly, you don’t have to.

Like with the book The Lord of the Rings being written as a modern “translation” of found texts left by chroniclers and those who lived through the War of the Ring and therefore not necessarily “fact,” like with Falcom’s Ys series presenting itself as stories told from its protagonist’s own journals and the works of storytellers who came after allowing for there to be remakes of classic games with updated stories, like with Greek myths that completely change certain backstories of gods, goddesses, and humans to fit whatever tale had to be told, Zelda’s timeline is just there as the basis for creating new stories and making existing ones easier to place into context. It is not the point unto itself. The Zelda timeline is good because Nintendo plays it real loose, basically, and people should probably just relax and enjoy that.

Here’s what is important to know: Hyrule is old. When the first tale of Link, Zelda, and the being that would become Ganondorf is told, Hyrule already is full of vast, ancient secrets, temples, dungeons, and creatures. How can one land fit so many different temples within it? How can the landscape change so much from game to game yet still have an air of familiarity to it? How can names stay the same, but the places they belong to do not? It all comes down to the age of Hyrule. The Temple of Time from Ocarina is a ruin when the Link of the Calamity era stumbles upon it in Breath of the Wild. The Forest Temple in Ocarina has clearly seen better days by the time that game’s Link gets to it. What you find in one game’s mountain range might not be there in another, though the general location of deserts, forests, and the mountain, Death Mountain, at least tend to stay somewhat static. The vagueness of how long there actually is in between games allows for this constant remaking of Hyrule’s face, whether we’re talking geologically or just in terms of which buildings have crumbled away and been replaced.

This kind of freedom to do whatever and not worry about how perfectly it aligns with what already exists is a strength of the Zelda timeline, not a weakness. Which is not to say Nintendo should never be more specific with things, because they’ve been successful in that regard in the past. Twilight Princess is a better game than it would have been in no small part because of its explicit connection to Ocarina of Time, and the now long-dead Hero of Time who failed to defeat Ganondorf and instead set him up to be banished by coming back to his own time. The skeletal warrior teaching Link battle techniques and hardening him for the difficult battles ahead? The one with the weight of Hyrule on his shoulders? Hey, guess who that’s supposed to be, and what their motivation is. The return to the Hyrule of A Link to the Past in A Link Between Worlds? Excellent stuff: it played on your knowledge of that specific version of Hyrule, but it also wasn’t that Hyrule but a newer one, similar to how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom share a map, but not exactly, just more extreme with the former pair given the longer time in between them.

These little things, though, when the idea is good, like it was with Twilight Princess and A Link Between Worlds? An excellent use of the timeline. Hoping to force Nintendo into a situation where we all know exactly what happened to everyone in the world in between Point A and Point B because of this weird desire to understand media through its wiki pages? Misguided. We have plenty of timelines where concerns about canon and contradictions rule the day, sometimes even over the quality of the media itself. Let Nintendo plot out Hyrule’s history the way they want to: it’s already worked for this long, and we’ve got the established timeline to prove it.

Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.