The Zelda Timeline: A Primer

Throughout these Breath of the Wild recaps, I’m going to mention the “Zelda timeline” from time to time. It’ll probably help if you know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to lay it all out for you.

The first question I should answer is, how do we know there’s a timeline in the first place? After all, there are many people who believe that all the games are different retellings of the same story. Well, those people are wrong. Numerous games in the series are specifically sequels or prequels to other games in the series. For example, Majora’s Mask is a direct sequel to The Ocarina of Time, and The Minish Cap is a prequel to Four Swords. So what are all these sub-groupings?

• The Legend of Zelda is followed by Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. (Link kills Ganon in the first; the bad guys are trying to revive Ganon in the second.)

• A Link to the Past is followed by Link’s Awakening, which is followed somehow by A Link Between Worlds. (Link’s Awakening mentions the events of A Link to the Past, and A Link Between Worlds takes place in the same era of Hyrule. They also all have “Link” in the title, which is not a coincidence.)

• The Ocarina of Time leads into Majora’s Mask. (The events of Ocarina are mentioned as having happened recently.)

• Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons are sequels to each other. (This is their whole gimmick. You can play either game separately or link them in either order to get a more complete story.)

• Four Swords is followed by Four Swords Adventures, which are both preceded by The Minish Cap. (The Minish Cap tells the origins of characters and items in the Four Swords games.)

• The Wind Waker is directly followed by Phantom Hourglass, which is distantly continued in Spirit Tracks. (Events and characters from each game are strongly referenced in the games that follow.)

• Twilight Princess stands alone.

• Skyward Sword stands alone.

• Tri Force Heroes stands alone.

• Breath of the Wild stands alone.

So already you can see the beginnings of a timeline forming. If certain games form sequences, then it stands to reason that the sequences can be ordered into a larger sequence: the timeline. And this bears out. Certain games refer to events from other sequences, or their storylines otherwise give information about their place in the timeline.

• Skyward Sword is definitively the earliest game in the timeline, since it’s the story of how Hyrule was founded and the creation of the Master Sword.
• A Link to the Past was designed to be a prequel to the first two Zelda games, hence the title. So it stands to reason you can combine their sequences like this: LttP - LA - LBW - LoZ - AoL 
• The Ocarina of Time was designed to flesh out the backstory about the Great Seal War given in A Link to the Past, so you can add that sequence to the list: OoT - MM - LttP - LA - LBW - LoZ - AoL 
• The Wind Waker mentions the Hero of Time (The Ocarina of Time’s Link) in its backstory, so you can create a sequence like this: OoT - MM - WW - PH - ST
• Twilight Princess also mentions the Hero of Time in its backstory, so you can create a sequence like this: OoT - MM - TP
• The "Oracle" sequence (OoX), the Four Swords Trilogy (MC - FS - FSA), and Tri Force Heroes are harder to place.

So far, we’re at a point that everyone can agree on (except those nuts who think it’s all one story told over and over). Here’s where the disagreement begins. Well, people disagree about where to put those sequences I mentioned at the end, but that’s minor compared to the following rift:

ONE OR TWO TIMELINES?

Common wisdom would suggest a single timeline, but a growing number of the fandom embraced the “split timeline theory”, which took different forms but more or less looked like this:

MC - OoT (adult timeline) - TP - FS - FSA - ALttP - OoX - LA - LoZ - AoL 

MC - OoT (child timeline) - MM - WW - PH - ST

(Note: at the time this was popular, these were the only games out.)

The reason for this is that, in The Ocarina of Time, Link's consciousness can travel in time between his child self and adult self. His adult self defeats Ganon, but then he travels back to when he was a kid and the game ends there. So this theory posits that the traveling through time created two separate timelines and certain games happen in one timeline or the other. 

This never sat well with me. For one thing, the two timelines are very uneven. But more than that, it seemed like a cop-out. Imagine if historians said, “this document talks about the Great Fire of London, but this other document, which is from a different time, makes London seem completely ok. Must be two separate timelines!”

When a timeline doesn’t have firm dates attached to it (sometimes we get a rough passage of time, like around 100 years between Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, but never more concrete than that), you can have as much time between eras pass as you need to for the story to work. There’s no reason it can’t work as a single timeline.

...so imagine everyone’s surprise when Nintendo released the official timeline to coincide with Skyward Sword’s debut and Zelda’s 25th anniversary, and their stance was that there were THREE timelines!

This was, of course, met with controversy. Although the branches do have a more even number of games between them, the new branch “Fallen Hero” is based on something that doesn’t happen in the game: Link’s death. In Zelda II, if Link dies, you get “Game Over - Return of Ganon.” His death is a canonical outcome that has a consequence. That doesn’t happen in "Ocarina"; you can die, but the death is part of the gameplay, not part of the story. So it doesn’t make any sense for the Hero of Time’s death - and ONLY the Hero of Time’s death - to be responsible for a split timeline. If a Hero's death causes a new timeline, there are billions of split timelines out there, not just these three.

So it’s my personal belief that, regardless of what the creators say, especially since they also say it can change at any time based on the needs of the story (and they have; in The Zelda Encyclopedia, they updated the timeline so the "Oracle" games take place after Link’s Awakening), the timeline looks like this:

Skyward Sword

(unknown length of time)

The Minish Cap

(unknown length of time)

Ocarina of Time

Majora’s Mask

(100 years)

Twilight Princess 

(Several hundred years)

Wind Waker

Phantom Hourglass

(100 years)

Spirit Tracks

(unknown length of time)

Four Swords

(unknown length of time)

Four Swords Adventures

(unknown length of time)

A Link to the Past

Link’s Awakening

(unknown length of time)

A Link Between Worlds

Tri Force Heroes

(unknown length of time)

Oracle of Seasons

Oracle of Ages

(unknown length of time)

The Legend of Zelda

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link 

A couple notes about the harder-to-place games and my reasons for putting them where I did:

The Four Swords Trilogy (The Minish Cap, Four Swords, and Four Swords Adventures) are difficult to place on the timeline because their stories are almost completely divorced from the rest of the series. But since it does have ties to A Link to the Past, if nothing else (Four Swords was included with the Game Boy version of A Link to the Past, whose Hyrule has a special Palace of the Four Sword area, and Four Swords Adventures seems to be the origin of Ganon’s blue pig form), I’m comfortable deferring to the official timeline until new information comes along. But I wouldn’t be against moving The Minish Cap to after Spirit Tracks.

I’ve placed the "Oracle" games where they are because I don’t think he’s the same Link as in A Link to the Past; for one thing, everyone’s surprised to learn he has a Triforce symbol on his hand, and for another, he and Zelda don’t know each other. But it can really go anywhere the Triforce is intact and Ganon is dead. I have Oracle of Seasons before Oracle of Ages because of the pirate crew in each game. In "Seasons", they’ve been trapped underground for a long time, long enough that they get seasick when they get back in water. But they’re on the water in Oracle of Ages. We eventually learn that the Pirate Captain was Queen Ambi’s seafaring love who left her in the past, so it seems that the chronology is that he left her, never returned because he got caught in the desert, and then was able to come back to Labrynna once Link rescued him. (Other information supports this too, such as the backstory in the games' manuals and the serial numbers of the games.)

A Link Between Worlds is set in the same era as A Link to the Past (their map of Hyrule is the same and at least one supporting character appears in both), but uses a different Link (Link and Zelda haven’t met before). Tri Force Heroes is said by the director to be set shortly after A Link Between Worlds and uses the same Link; I prefer to only use in-game evidence, but since there isn’t any, I will defer to him for now.

So where does that put Breath of the Wild? Frankly, I don’t know yet. We know it features Koroks and Rito, both of which were introduced in The Wind Waker and evolved because of the Great Sea in that game. But the Rito were said to evolve from the Zora, which also exist in Breath of the Wild. Of course, they exist in Oracle of Ages as well, which I’ve also placed after The Wind Waker, so there's precedence. We also know it’s set 100 years after its backstory, but the backstory doesn’t match up to any previous game, so that doesn't help. And we know its backstory's backstory happens 10,000 years ago.

So we know that at the very least, the Zelda timeline covers 10,000 years, and probably a lot longer. But we don't know much more than that. What if that 10,000 year gap is in the MIDDLE of the timeline (say, between Spirit Tracks and Four Swords)? We could easily be talking a span of 15,000 years, possibly more, and Breath of the Wild could fall anywhere in the latter 2/3 of it.

Right now, I simply need more information.