Zelda Timeline

[Kain]

cinemassacre.com/2008/01/08/chronologically-confused-about-the-legend-of-zelda-timeline/

Its a video trying to explain where all the Zelda games fit chronologically; it just gave me a massive headache.

[black heart]

it was a good effort on his part atleast.

[Reno]

If it helps, I found out about this today. It's a chart that explains it all:

[Reno]

It seems that Ocarina of Time is a branching point for the Zelda story. It doesn't really make any sense though, as this chart says that Link is defeated in order for the events of A Link to the Past to happen, which in turn enables all the other old-school classic Zelda games. But the whole idea is that Link and the sages seal Ganon away in Ocarina of Time, and then he gets freed again in A Link to the Past. So how does that constitute Link being defeated?

Anyway, the important part is this: the continuity branches at Ocarina, and that means all the Zelda games I don't like, such as Wind Waker and to a lesser extent Majora's Mask, are officially an alternate universe. It means that as far as I'm concerned, they never happened. Apparently Twilight Princess follows up Majora's Mask and therefore that's not part of the main continuity anymore either, but since I haven't seen enough of it to form an opinion, I don't know how to feel about that.

[Kain]

I really find it funny that the original NES games are at the end of the timeline.

[Reno]

Now that you mention it, it IS pretty d**n funny that in all this time, they've never once made a game that takes place after the NES games.

[Kain]

I think that was Angry Video Game Nerd's biggest complaint is that they kept making prequels or if they did make a sequel, it was to an alternate universe prequel.

[Reno]

The way I look at it, story is marginally more important to the Zelda franchise than it is to, say, Mega Man. It's not as if they do that much really revolutionary stuff with the plot in Legend of Zelda games anyway. They've broken away from the "Link needs to rescue Zelda from the clutches and stop Ganon(dorf)'s evil plan" formula a few times, but their approach to the games is still very much gameplay-trumps-story. And the connections between one game and another are generally very tenuous at best, and not at all important to the story of any individual Zelda game.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, it really doesn't matter that much anyway. Now if Squeenix suddenly tried to pop out a timeline linking all the various Final Fantasy games to each other in one continuous plot line, that would be a much bigger deal. Well except for the fact that I only ever liked two of the FF games that much to begin with, anyway.

[Kain]

Yeah it definitely seems like they care more about the gameplay in Zelda than the storyline, which is totally fine; I never had a big issue with the timeline anyway, and never really even started thinking much about it until recently.