The Legend Of Zelda Has Too Many Split Timelines

Nintendo’s famed The Legend of Zelda series has had regular releases since 1986, and loosely connected narratives have resulted in a timeline with too many splits. With every Legend of Zelda timeline split there are three concurrent narratives that span different epochs of Hyrule. Ocarina of Time is the game that instigates the split, with all but three of the series’ other games taking place on a subsequent branch. With many of the Zelda games having only tenuous connections at best, the official timeline often feels unnecessary, and there will hopefully not be another split in the future.

For a very long time, there was no official Zelda timeline from Nintendo. It was only in 2011, with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, that a delineated timeline was revealed to the public. Hyrule Historia celebrated the series’ 25th anniversary as an encyclopedia for all things Zelda. It had long been rumored that Nintendo was holding onto an official timeline prior to its release, and with 2011’s Skyward Sword entering in the Zelda timeline’s beginning, Nintendo may have felt that then was a good time to lift the veil.

Many fan-made timelines before 2011 envisioned a timeline split, but with very little input from the developers themselves, that and other details were almost always contested. Especially since multiple games in the series involve time travel, creating a Zelda timeline was difficult, but the official one from Hyrule Historia surprised fans with the three different splits. While it’s nice to have an official chronology for the series, it’s also a bit convoluted.

A Legend Of Zelda Timeline Is Ultimately Unnecessary

The series has almost always operated on a game-to-game basis in terms of overarching narrative. Zelda II was a direct sequel to the original, but Nintendo’s gameplay-first approach to development made connecting every story a secondary concern. With Skyward Sword taking Ocarina of Time‘s timeline placement, it’s clear Nintendo has always had a faint idea of how the games fit together, but the series is ultimately more of an anthology. Each branch of the timeline fits together nicely, but on the whole, it very much seems like an afterthought.

It’s nice to have an official timeline for reference, but Nintendo still seems largely uninterested in building a connected narrative. Breath of the Wild takes place some time in the distant future of an unspecified timeline branch, where 10,000 years passed between the First and Second Great Calamities. It’s fairly easy to remember how the timeline splits based on the eventualities of Ocarina of Time, but the three splits themselves are too many to have any significant narrative importance. BOTW is perhaps the biggest indicator that the timelines aren’t really that necessary, and The Legend of Zelda games will just continue to focus on gameplay above all, as they should.

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