The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Breath Wilder

[Bongo]

I'm still a bit unclear on how TotK further messes with the already messy Zelda timeline.

Fortunately, there's an easy answer to this. When Breath of the Wild came out, it was explicitly and officially indicated as being in its own, separate continuity. Tears of the Kingdom, as a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, is also unconnected to the other games. So it doesn't mess with "the timeline" at all.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Fortunately, there's an easy answer to this. When Breath of the Wild came out, it was explicitly and officially indicated as being in its own, separate continuity. Tears of the Kingdom, as a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild, is also unconnected to the other games. So it doesn't mess with "the timeline" at all.

Huh. Hadn't heard that, but aight. I'll take your word for it.

I still think a lot of this game's story can fit-in, in the normal Zelda timeline. Either this is a Turn-A Gundam situation where history cyclically repeats itself after some kind of cataclysmic reset, and/or the past-segments of the game are set well before Skyward Sword, and the present-time events are set nebulously after it.

 

[Olli]

Trying to figure out a consistent timeline in Zelda games is like finding out the order in which the ingredients went into the kettle after the soup is done. There are the obvious sequels (LoZ->Adventure, Ocarina -> Majora, Wind Waker -> Phantom Hourglass -> Spirit Tracks, Breath -> Tears), but even then, it's not like they are super interested in consistency. What happened to the Sheikah tech? It just went away, nobody cares about it in-game anymore. Yeah, there are hints about events happening 1000s of years ago, but they are vague winks at best. Time travel only works within the "local" time bubble. Anything futuristic is ancient technology. Time is a flat circle. Or maybe a branching spiral.

 

[gogglebob]

I believe everyone has the right of it: the timeline is bunk, this is a fairytale or myth, it is not concerned with continuity in any way. Hercules died of poison last week, but he is back and completing labors this week. Keep the party rocking.

THAT SAID

If you are trying to wedge this into a timeline somewhere:
The presence of the Rito at the founding of Hyrule screws everything up. The Rito are confirmed to be descendants of the Zora in Wind Waker. This does not preclude the existence of "divergent" Zora, but Wind Waker has a scene where a Rito is gesturing to a ghost Zora, and is basically like "That's my grandma." Given this evolution happened after the flooding of Hyrule, Zora and Rito should not be in the same room before Hyrule gets flushed down the toilet, left alone at the founding. So, with this in mind, the "far past" of Tears of the Kingdom must exist after the founding of New Hyrule in Spirit Tracks. To my knowledge, merged timelines or no, the Rito do not exist in any non-flooded timelines, and very much do not exist at earlier epochs.

BUT! The kicker here is the Master Sword. There is a stable time loop that involves Ganondorf awakening in the present, recognizing Link as the man he heard would kill him, Zelda being sent back in time, and Zelda telling everyone Ganondorf will be defeated by Link in the future-present. So there is technically a "this already happened thing" going on before the game starts. But the Master Sword is absent from the founding of Hyrule. We've got our God Cat-Goat People, and we've got our heroes from the various tribes, but nobody wields the Master Sword. Head Goat-Cat even seems to acknowledge "Future" Link as the hero because he is assured he has a magic sword. Ganondorf sees the Sword of Evil's Bane for the first time when he groggily first encounters Link. And, while the Master Sword gets her own time loop to heal, we do not know where or when the "pre-Botw" Master Sword is forged/found in this timeline. After all, with Ganondorf sealed away and only occasionally leaking out for events like the Calamity, the Master Sword was distinctly not forged to directly address Ganondorf as Tears of the Kingdom presents him.

So if we want to tie it all together, you could claim that the Master Sword has its singular origin in Skyward Sword, and its "end" was being driven into OoT "I hate sand" Ganondorf at the finale of Wind Waker. Then, at some waaaaay the heck later event, someone fished the Master Sword out of a "statue" well after OG Ganondorf leaked out and reincarnated into Ganondorf TotK. Or maybe the sea rescinded? Whatever the case, it had to happen after the founding of Nu-Hyrule, as the Master Sword missed Ganondorf's original TotK arrival. And the Master Sword just kind of "surfacing" after the sinking of Old Hyrule would also be consistent with the fact that the Triforce in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom seems to only exist in a spiritual manner, not in a physical "touch this and wish for your own dark world" fashion. Our favorite triangle is still kinda sealed, just the sword wiggled free.

One way or another, it all leads up to a TotK "Hyrule Founding" that had to happen after a previous Hyrule got wrecked. Assuming we do not ever get an alternate origin for the Master Sword, the (or a) "previous" Hyrule must have been the one that started with Skyward Sword.

And we've got a R2-D2 situation where Fi remembers everything.


These are my beliefs. At least for now.

Oh, and I still 100% believe the mundane explanation that Sheikah tech was manually bulldozed immediately after the completion of Breath of the Wild. I think the Zora (with their long lifespans) are the only people living in Hyrule that remember anything before being terrorized by laser death machines their entire lives. The minute "Sheikah Tech" wasn't fighting back, I am pretty sure people were disassembling it all with gusto.

 

[Daikaiju]

Yeah, GoggleBob's take satisfies my itch.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Cat-Goat? They're llama people, I think.

 

[MetManMas]

I believe everyone has the right of it: the timeline is bunk, this is a fairytale or myth, it is not concerned with continuity in any way. Hercules died of poison last week, but he is back and completing labors this week. Keep the party rocking.

THAT SAID

If you are trying to wedge this into a timeline somewhere:
The presence of the Rito at the founding of Hyrule screws everything up. The Rito are confirmed to be descendants of the Zora in Wind Waker. This does not preclude the existence of "divergent" Zora, but Wind Waker has a scene where a Rito is gesturing to a ghost Zora, and is basically like "That's my grandma." Given this evolution happened after the flooding of Hyrule, Zora and Rito should not be in the same room before Hyrule gets flushed down the toilet, left alone at the founding. So, with this in mind, the "far past" of Tears of the Kingdom must exist after the founding of New Hyrule in Spirit Tracks. To my knowledge, merged timelines or no, the Rito do not exist in any non-flooded timelines, and very much do not exist at earlier epochs.

BUT! The kicker here is the Master Sword. There is a stable time loop that involves Ganondorf awakening in the present, recognizing Link as the man he heard would kill him, Zelda being sent back in time, and Zelda telling everyone Ganondorf will be defeated by Link in the future-present. So there is technically a "this already happened thing" going on before the game starts. But the Master Sword is absent from the founding of Hyrule. We've got our God Cat-Goat People, and we've got our heroes from the various tribes, but nobody wields the Master Sword. Head Goat-Cat even seems to acknowledge "Future" Link as the hero because he is assured he has a magic sword. Ganondorf sees the Sword of Evil's Bane for the first time when he groggily first encounters Link. And, while the Master Sword gets her own time loop to heal, we do not know where or when the "pre-Botw" Master Sword is forged/found in this timeline. After all, with Ganondorf sealed away and only occasionally leaking out for events like the Calamity, the Master Sword was distinctly not forged to directly address Ganondorf as Tears of the Kingdom presents him.

So if we want to tie it all together, you could claim that the Master Sword has its singular origin in Skyward Sword, and its "end" was being driven into OoT "I hate sand" Ganondorf at the finale of Wind Waker. Then, at some waaaaay the heck later event, someone fished the Master Sword out of a "statue" well after OG Ganondorf leaked out and reincarnated into Ganondorf TotK. Or maybe the sea rescinded? Whatever the case, it had to happen after the founding of Nu-Hyrule, as the Master Sword missed Ganondorf's original TotK arrival. And the Master Sword just kind of "surfacing" after the sinking of Old Hyrule would also be consistent with the fact that the Triforce in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom seems to only exist in a spiritual manner, not in a physical "touch this and wish for your own dark world" fashion. Our favorite triangle is still kinda sealed, just the sword wiggled free.

One way or another, it all leads up to a TotK "Hyrule Founding" that had to happen after a previous Hyrule got wrecked. Assuming we do not ever get an alternate origin for the Master Sword, the (or a) "previous" Hyrule must have been the one that started with Skyward Sword.

And we've got a R2-D2 situation where Fi remembers everything.


These are my beliefs. At least for now.

Oh, and I still 100% believe the mundane explanation that Sheikah tech was manually bulldozed immediately after the completion of Breath of the Wild. I think the Zora (with their long lifespans) are the only people living in Hyrule that remember anything before being terrorized by laser death machines their entire lives. The minute "Sheikah Tech" wasn't fighting back, I am pretty sure people were disassembling it all with gusto.

Or given how powerful the Triforce is and how the series branched in multiple paths depending on how OoT went down, someone could've just wished for a new timeline on the Triforce somewhere along the way.

Like, that magic golden Hojo emblem is powerful enough to raise the dead and fix an alternate dimension's own broken Triforce, what's stopping it from forging a timeline where the Zora and Rito can coexist?

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

I believe everyone has the right of it: the timeline is bunk, this is a fairytale or myth, it is not concerned with continuity in any way. Hercules died of poison last week, but he is back and completing labors this week. Keep the party rocking.

THAT SAID

If you are trying to wedge this into a timeline somewhere:
The presence of the Rito at the founding of Hyrule screws everything up. The Rito are confirmed to be descendants of the Zora in Wind Waker. This does not preclude the existence of "divergent" Zora, but Wind Waker has a scene where a Rito is gesturing to a ghost Zora, and is basically like "That's my grandma." Given this evolution happened after the flooding of Hyrule, Zora and Rito should not be in the same room before Hyrule gets flushed down the toilet, left alone at the founding. So, with this in mind, the "far past" of Tears of the Kingdom must exist after the founding of New Hyrule in Spirit Tracks. To my knowledge, merged timelines or no, the Rito do not exist in any non-flooded timelines, and very much do not exist at earlier epochs.

BUT! The kicker here is the Master Sword. There is a stable time loop that involves Ganondorf awakening in the present, recognizing Link as the man he heard would kill him, Zelda being sent back in time, and Zelda telling everyone Ganondorf will be defeated by Link in the future-present. So there is technically a "this already happened thing" going on before the game starts. But the Master Sword is absent from the founding of Hyrule. We've got our God Cat-Goat People, and we've got our heroes from the various tribes, but nobody wields the Master Sword. Head Goat-Cat even seems to acknowledge "Future" Link as the hero because he is assured he has a magic sword. Ganondorf sees the Sword of Evil's Bane for the first time when he groggily first encounters Link. And, while the Master Sword gets her own time loop to heal, we do not know where or when the "pre-Botw" Master Sword is forged/found in this timeline. After all, with Ganondorf sealed away and only occasionally leaking out for events like the Calamity, the Master Sword was distinctly not forged to directly address Ganondorf as Tears of the Kingdom presents him.

So if we want to tie it all together, you could claim that the Master Sword has its singular origin in Skyward Sword, and its "end" was being driven into OoT "I hate sand" Ganondorf at the finale of Wind Waker. Then, at some waaaaay the heck later event, someone fished the Master Sword out of a "statue" well after OG Ganondorf leaked out and reincarnated into Ganondorf TotK. Or maybe the sea rescinded? Whatever the case, it had to happen after the founding of Nu-Hyrule, as the Master Sword missed Ganondorf's original TotK arrival. And the Master Sword just kind of "surfacing" after the sinking of Old Hyrule would also be consistent with the fact that the Triforce in both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom seems to only exist in a spiritual manner, not in a physical "touch this and wish for your own dark world" fashion. Our favorite triangle is still kinda sealed, just the sword wiggled free.

One way or another, it all leads up to a TotK "Hyrule Founding" that had to happen after a previous Hyrule got wrecked. Assuming we do not ever get an alternate origin for the Master Sword, the (or a) "previous" Hyrule must have been the one that started with Skyward Sword.

And we've got a R2-D2 situation where Fi remembers everything.


These are my beliefs. At least for now.

Oh, and I still 100% believe the mundane explanation that Sheikah tech was manually bulldozed immediately after the completion of Breath of the Wild. I think the Zora (with their long lifespans) are the only people living in Hyrule that remember anything before being terrorized by laser death machines their entire lives. The minute "Sheikah Tech" wasn't fighting back, I am pretty sure people were disassembling it all with gusto.

The entirety of your supposition rests on the idea that the Rito evolved post-Great Flood, which is never directly stated IIRC. There's no reason why that branching point couldn't have happened waayyyyyy before that. Or that it couldn't have happened multiple times in a kind of convergent evolution. Or that there is magics involved in the "evolution" of creatures in this world that doesn't accurately reflect how we know evolution to actually work IRL. Or there coulda been once upon a time a fish and a bird got freaky and made a hybrid baby that stayed mostly with the Rito until most traces of its fishy-lineage had been bred out. (Kinda like how goat-cat-man genetics eventually aren't expressed phenotypes in Zelda's lineage.) Or maybe it was just a spiritual passing-of-the-torch. To me, there's so much reasonable doubt baked into the entirety of this that you can imagine whatever you want to be the case and it can be just as valid as someone else's ideas.

For me, I like the idea I placed before. Skyward Sword was the beginning of the Master Sword, but not the beginning of Hyrule. (After all, there's a bunch of lost architecture bellow on the surface and a past terrestrial kingdom that made up the ancestors of the exiles in Skyloft.) Rauru and his wife also wear Triforce iconography. Then there's the ancient tales of the three dragons, which have the same names as the goddesses that supposedly created Hyrule and the Triforce. This to me weaves a story of how the OoT and all the other classic Zeldas come much much later, where the mythos of the Creation Goddesses have been obscured through time. But reconciling all of them together is about as much of a fool's errand as trying to create a biblically accurate timeline of our world. I would just take each game as like, the story of how the people living in those eras saw and understood the vague history of their world that stretches back well beyond the total length of human civilization IRL. There's bound to be different cultures spring up here and there, changing or mutating the oral histories they pass down to each other.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Timeline of Courage
Timeline of Wisdom
Timeline of Power

 

[Bongo]

All right, try this spicy one on for size: the Skylofters were Zonai all along.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

All right, try this spicy one on for size: the Skylofters were Zonai all along.

Nah I don't think so. We know the Skylofters came from the surface. But they were clearly living on derelict Zonai floating islands.

 

[gogglebob]

If we are accepting every game where everything we can "see" or experience as fact (or at least the firsthand account NPCs involved are not all liars), Skyward Sword knocks a few "myths" off the list into something more concrete:

Skyward Sword / Tears Spoilers
1. Hylia created the Triforce
2. Hylia is straight up reincarnated within Zelda(s) (still supported with "Zelda's powers" in the Breath of the Wild timeline)
3. Hylia fought Demise. Like, they straight up were able to touch each other, not metaphorical. There was a big battle and everything.
4. Demise is "responsible for all monsters"
5. Demise is strongly implied to be reincarnated within Ganon(s). (Tears of the Kingdom Ganondorf getting Imprisoned-style-scaly and summoning monsters when grabbing a secret stone supports this)
6. Hylia directly created Fi/The Master Sword before her death/reincarnation.

And it would just be weird if all that happened while "another" Ganondorf was still sealed beneath Hyrule Castle.

Again, I prefer the "mythic" interpretation of the whole of the Zelda franchise. That said, if we are going to carve a timeline out of this nonsense, we cannot just call Groose a llama and be done with it. That would be absurd. And we all know what eventually happened to the Zonai.

Then there's the ancient tales of the three dragons, which have the same names as the goddesses that supposedly created Hyrule and the Triforce. This to me weaves a story of how the OoT and all the other classic Zeldas come much much later, where the mythos of the Creation Goddesses have been obscured through time.

The most fascinating piece of lore I found in Tears of the Kingdom was that everyone in the past from the Alpaca Folk to Ganondorf all knew exactly what would happen if you ate a Secret Stone. Like, "eat this and you turn into a mindless dragon" is not something you just guess at being correct. Clearly, something happened in the past of the past, and that is a more interesting story to me than anything that actually happened in the game.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

And it would just be weird if all that happened while "another" Ganondorf was still sealed beneath Hyrule Castle.

Why? It was already weird that Calamity Ganon happened with Ganondorf sealed below the castle. That can and did get hand waved away as Ganondorf’s disembodied, mindless spirit trying to get out without his body. Maybe that happened here too. Demise attempted to leave the body again, got slapped down and told no by Hylia/The First Link, and then again by Skyward Sword Link.

Clearly, something happened in the past of the past, and that is a more interesting story to me than anything that actually happened in the game.

This is kinda just the curse of the Switch games. Most of the best story bits revolve around finding out what Zelda was up to off-screen. And her story always feels way more interesting versus what Link does.

Part of that is just that the characters Zelda gets to interact with are more unknown quantities since we as players barely/never get to interact with them. The grass is always greener on the other side or whatever. And part of it is because Zelda is allowed a voice, personality, and agency in her stories in ways Link isn’t.

But part of it is just that these games lack strong narrative structures outside of all the flashback business. And the parts of the games with story always seems more interesting than the parts without story. At least, narratively speaking.

TotK seems very much aware of this since the main quest line this time around is much more linear, much more involved, much less skippable, and genuinely a better time. The game even goes to the length of keeping the Sages in the flashback faceless so players don’t grow more attached to them versus their modern day counterparts like with BotW. It’s still inescapable though, that the player would want to spend more time with the god damned title-character.

And that’s just honestly part of the Faustian bargain that these games made for becoming uber-popular again. The freedom of movement and player choice come at the expense of a tightly woven, carefully guided narrative that all of the games between OoT and Skyward Sword enjoyed. Which I think is a shame, but hey money speaks.

 

[RT-55J]

All I know about TotK lore is that, unlike BotW's corpus of decipherable Hylian text, all the Zonai text in this game is just random greeblings.

I feel like that says something.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

or, nothing

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom with my kids for a few months now, no idea what our playtime is but we’ve done three of the sages and have revealed about half of the map. Have had some conflicts between my usual methodically explore everywhere playstyle (which I will admit is a dumb way to play especially this sort of game) versus my older daughter wanting to fight every enemy we see versus my younger daughter wanting to put on the relevant enemy mask and make friends every time we see an enemy, plus both kids wanting me to drop whatever thing I’m trying to figure out and just move on.

Anyway, this afternoon my younger one started playing Zelda on cut up bits of post it note. We’ve been trying to get a dragon claw, so she made a toy snake into a sky dragon and then drew Link, his bow and an arrow and had me fly the dragon around while Link shot at it. She’s also drawn a horse, one of the three headed dragons, a chocolate cake for some reason and then a picture of Link with the remaining crumb of the cake after he ate it and the chocolate sword he found inside it (?). There’s Link gliding, and the little piece with a square on it is a sky island which she had me hold up as Link glided towards it and then passed just underneath as has happened so often in the game. The three pictures closest to gliding Link are a giant fossil and the two bones that had fallen off it that we reattached, making the woman who appears to be saying “yum” very happy (the yum is supposed to be with chocolate cake Link, obviously). The guy at the bottom centre left I thought was maybe a korok but I asked her and “he’s the guy with the whistle and the headphones”. I told her I don’t remember that character, and she told me “I made him up”. Above that guy is one of the “I need to find my friend” koroks. And, on the opposite corner of the table:

Its friend.

 

[gogglebob]

Yimothy, I am not going to tell you what to do, but I want you to know that if you do not make your daughter's adorable three headed dragon/Gleeok your new avatar, I will think less of you.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

that is so adorable

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Master-class parenting right there

 

[Paul le Fou]

That Gleeok is A++ 100%, no notes.