Sorry for all bugs and I hope you enjoy even with them.
PLEASE READ THIS BEFOR PLAYING IF YOU DONT KNOW THE ZELDA TIME LINE!!! There’s nearly 40 years of Zelda history establishing that it’s not safe to assume anything about any given game’s timing — or the flow of time in general. Ignoring some spinoffs, there are officially 19 — soon to be 20 — games across 37 years that make up the Zelda series, from 1986’s The Legend of Zelda to 2023’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. A handful of them fit neatly together — there are a few direct prequels and sequels — but any chronology across the whole series quickly gets muddied by time travel, multiple timelines, and a 10,000-year time skip. Thankfully, in 2011, we got the first officially published timeline in The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia. (The creative team behind the Zelda series had an eyes-only, confidential version of the timeline sometime before 2003.) That official version rearranges the games into a cohesive-ish timeline that branches into three possible outcomes. But things get complicated when we get to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. This is made explicit in the book The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion: “Hyrule’s recurring periods of prosperity and decline have made it impossible to tell which legends are historical fact and which are mere fairy tale.” That doesn’t negate the previous timeline as established in Hyrule Historia, but it gives room to explain any inconsistencies with the wave of a hand. Myths and fairy tales don’t have to be perfectly consistent, after all. They’re just stories. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011) The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (2004) The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords (2002) The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) Chronologically speaking, the earliest game in the Zelda series is The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, where we learn that Zelda is a reincarnated goddess — the goddess Hylia, original protector of the Triforce. Demise was the big bad defeated by Link, but at the end, Demise kind of morphs into a proto-Ganon. An indeterminate amount of time later, we get The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. In it, an evil sorcerer named Vaati wants to use the Light Force inside Zelda (presumably her reincarnated divine blood) for evil reasons. Link is triumphant and locks Vaati away for a while. Many generations later, during Four Swords, Vaati escapes and kidnaps the current reincarnation of Princess Zelda, this time in an attempt to force her into marriage. A new reincarnation of Link — four of him, technically — beats Vaati again, leaving Hyrule safe for a while. Well, safe until a “countless eras”-long civil war broke out in Hyrule (according to Hyrule Historia). And then we come to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, in which we meet Ganondorf. Then there’s some time travel that, as it often does, causes some timeline confusion. At the end of Ocarina of Time, Link defeats Ganon(dorf). Per the official timeline in Hyrule Historia, the outcome of Ocarina of Time plays out in one of three possible ways: Link is defeated and Ganon wins; Link wins and goes back in time to his childhood to warn Zelda about Ganon(dorf); or Link wins and goes back in time to his childhood, only to vanish from history. These are officially called the Fallen Hero, Child, and Adult Timelines. FALLEN HERO TIMELINE The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991) The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993) The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages (2001) The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (2013) The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes (2015) The Legend of Zelda (1986) The Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link (1987) In this darkest timeline, Link lost to Ganon during Ocarina of Time, and Ganon claimed all three parts of the Triforce to become the Demon King.
