Show HN: The Zelda timeline to catch up before the Ocarina of Time remake (legendofhyrule.com)
I made this ahead of the Ocarina of Time remake which comes out in 17 days. I remember the feeling of playing it as a kid but I hadn’t kept up with the story so I built a timeline to catch up before the Door of Time reopens.
Nintendo’s own timeline is the authority here (Hyrule Historia and their chronicle page). The fun part was rethinking how to visualize it. It branches at the end of Ocarina into three eras depending on whether Link wins or loses, so each era is its own thread on the cloth. The threads meet again much later with Breath of the Wild.
I had a lot of help from Claude. I’d often thought about building things like this but never found the time between the day job and the rest of life.
117 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 5.7 ms ] thread- Link: The Faces of Evil
- Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon
- Link's Crossbow Training
- the various Hyrule Warriors games
Good luck! :)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw
https://xkcd.com/111/
Nintendo just never did that until the speculation about the topic became noticeable enough that they felt they had to address it (at which point everything was so inconsistent that only the timeline split could reconcile it). And even then, the unified timeline was published years before BoTW, and it adds the wrinkle that... (waves hands) all of the timelines sort of became the same thing.
That sort of hand waving is unavoidable as BoTW has elements from all three of the timelines, it literally cannot be on one of the three legs-- and if it's not, the only other logical place it would fit is before Skyward Sword (meaning an entirely separate ancient founding of Hyrule) or just after the Imprisoning War which would butt up against A Link To The Past. But those can't fit because the Zora evolved into the Rito and BoTW has both.
Never mind the strange notion that a fish people evolved into bird people under the pressure of a worldwide flood... you'd think that wouldn't be necessary or helpful, but hey, Zelda's weird.
Mostly in jest, but isn't that a creationist argument we all usually dismiss? "Why are there still primates around if we evolved from them?"
> Shigeru Miyamoto: For every Zelda game we tell a new story, but we actually have an enormous document that explains how the game relates to the others, and bind them together. But to be honest, they are not that important to us. We care more about developing the game system… give the player new challenges for every chapter that is born.
So I don't think this is as clear cut as "a different group of people decades later make a timeline". The least charitable view might be that they never intended the unified timeline thing to became public and didn't consider it "lore", but I'm not sure I buy that either (since they talked about some details in other interviews, including the Victorious/Fallen Hero split most people object to).
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
So, while it's questionable how much involvement some of the team may have had with this timeline, it's entirely feasible they could have gotten input from the same people that wrote the games from the very beginning.
Instead, I view the games as a combination of re-imaginings and direct sequels. However, the games really are not story-driven enough to care which one is which. Any of the games can be played standalone or in any order, and it doesn't matter.
In my view, the story of these games is mostly a pretext and the real reason is the gameplay. Some of the games lean a bit harder into the story angles, and they really suffer for it (too many cutscenes make those games frustrating to play).
Zelda canon was never that deep when each game was written
writers had no secret timeline or their own deep interest in the prior writers rendition
they have a loose setting and other people that chose the writer to have near complete license to do whatever they want with it
and even that’s a negotiation, writers often have their own backlogged story already that they adapt to existing IP retroactively
whatever it doesn’t matter, I’m just surprised people are actually spending energy on this for this franchise. If this is what “fun” looks like now, it’s fine
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?
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.
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.
There's stories all over about Hollywood dumping physical copies of films, sets and props only to later regret it.
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.
American comics and Star Wars has had their continuity reset.
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
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?"
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.
Maybe they did release the timeline because of fan pressure but some sort of timeline did exist for at least a decade before they released it which doesn't fit your theory they just came up with something and released it in secondary media because of fan pressure.
[1]: https://www.nintendoforums.com/articles/40/super-play-magazi...
The only questions which the official timeline answers is how exactly to connect some otherwise-disparate sequences of games into a unified directed graph.
2002 was the first point in time where having a timeline document was useful, because it was the first game to make it clear there was at least a "child timeline" and an "adult timeline". Before then, there was a simple sequential chronology in the series.
Which was exactly the situation before they published the timeline!
Seems a bit weird. To me, it’s enough that someone has a thought of something they wish existed and now it does exist. How they bring it into existence isn’t of much importance to me. The AI didn’t dream this into existence, but it may very well have performed 99.9% of the creative work, but the human provided the spark in the form of that instruction to do so. With nearly all creative works, I can appreciate the craft but also I don’t have to; I can just appreciate the output.
Before generative AI, it would have been rare to see well designed things like this made by individuals and when I saw it, I would think that it is awesome that someone put so much effort and creativity into a hobby project. Even if it would not look professional I could have appreciated the expression of individuality.
Now when I see things that just look "too perfect" I cannot help but immediatly think "yeah whatever, it’s just AI" and if it happens to be real craftsmanship instead, I believe this would have been really sad, hence my comment. All I said was that I would like to know their contribution, not that this is all that matters to me.
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 largely independent of each other. Even the games that are direct sequels to each other are still very independent.
Western audiences just love literalism.
It's loose, but it's there. These are separate stories, retold many times or not, and the cyclic nature of the battle for the triforce is established game lore.
I believe it's also misleading to say Nintendo doesn't care about the timeline stuff. They care but also make a conscious decision to keep it light and not overly bound or caught up in it.
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)
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. 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.
</rant>
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.
Cheers To more Zelda!
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.
Somehow is devolved into dunking on the west and other unfortunate “better than thou” comments.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda_timeline [2]: https://zelda.nintendo.com/about/
And then something to question once again when Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom cannot make its mind up about such a timeline. somehow being so far in the future that all timelines converge and all history is lost. Basically disregarding the idea of a timeline altogether. ToTK can't even commit to really being a chronological sequel to BOTW if you break down details in the game.
History can be rewritten.
The history written today adds intrigue and lore.
The official timeline was already a botched version of the fandom’s timeline, and the fandom continues to come up with far more interesting variations of the timeline that answers far more than the official does.
I mean, the official doesn’t even interface with the split timeline created by Skyward Sword, or how both Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons can happen in either order. Also it’s just poorly designed; the “Hero Defeated” section is not a timeline but an alternative universe. There is no canonical ending to Ocarina of Time featuring Ganondorf’s victory in the game itself (unlike LoZ II’s ending card), meaning those games cannot be attributed to that scenario without changing it from a timeline to a separate universe entirely.
I think most Nintendo IPs are about playing around with the same motifs, ideas, narratives, and gameplay elements. Metroid is another series where this is very evident, with half of the games being spiritually a remake of a game which game before. A timeline doesn't preclude the Zelda series as a story about the cyclical nature of conflict, about archetypes reappearing throughout history, or as a legend passed over generations.
It's pretty clear that the cyclic nature is a part of the story.
As far as I consider, it's just a series of games with a loosely connected series of stories, with a few exceptions of direct sequels
Also, it's almost an open secret that the the Nintendo development teams weren't really thinking in terms of a coherent timeline until later when they published some book mainly because they saw an opportunity to make money and sell merch to a bunch of nerds rather than to truly give a history to a bunch of somewhat related but fairly disjointed games all from the same franchise. They only pretend there's a timeline cause it sells games and books. Not cause there really is. What's worse is that the Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom games really throw a wrench in the works.
TLDR: enjoy these games on their own merit and know that only few titles are meant to be really connected in some way. Like Ocarina of Time <-> Majora's Mask and/or Breath of the Wild <-> Tears of the Kingdom . As for the rest there's slight references to each other but not really much linking them.