Earlier this year I made a post about the timeline placement of Breath of the Wild, where the game seemingly takes place in an era, where all past Zelda games are mere stories and legends passed down by people. Everything happened and everything also sort of didn't happen. And during E3 last year it occurred to me that Nintendo purposefully left clues for all three timeline branches to confuse the fans and have them speculate, which worked splendidly. At the time I even came up with the crazy Timeline Merge Theory, but in its essence is was supposed to achieve the same thing, really. Something, where the past of Zelda is united, because ultimately you don't want such an important game to be reduced to a single timeline branch.
In the new book, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Master Works all of this now got confirmed. You can find the quotes SourceGaming.info or on Reddit. The first one confirms the "all past Zelda stories are just legends" theory:
The kingdom of Hyrule has a long and storied past, where the events of one era may just be ancient myths in another. Since olden times, the land has repeatedly undergone periods of prosperity and decline, so much so that it is unknown whether the legends passed down are actually true, or simply fairy tales.
The second quote is from Eiji Aonuma himself, where he confirms that they wanted the fans to speculate:
The books that have been released so far, such as Hyrule Encyclopedia, have revealed the Zelda series timeline. However, we’ve decided not to make it so clear for Breath of the Wild, and there’s a reason why.
This time, we saw a lot of users playing the game in their own way, which is something we were anticipating. They’re also having fun coming up with their own ideas about the story, based on the fragments we put in place.
If Breath of the Wild was confined to a timeline, then that placement would be correct and there wouldn’t be room for coming up with your own impressions, which would be boring. That kind of speculation is something that we wanted to continue after playing the game, so we purposely decided not to make a statement about it. We’d like everyone to enjoy finding their own answers, in their own way.
That settles it. And I personally think that this was a smart move. The whole timeline discussions were a big part of the Zelda community, which sort of died with Hyrule Historia, unless you really didn't like the "official" timeline. Breath of the Wild ignited the flame again and there's no real truth. All the past Zelda games are now legends and not everything can be correct. But the Fans can keep speculating about which of the three timeline branches is the one, where Breath of the Wild takes place, without ever coming to an agreement, because there is no real solution...
It's genius, really. This way Breath of the Wild also offers a "soft reboot", where new games can take place in its age of technology, free from the limitations that the original timeline split brought with it, where they can build on the entire past of the Zelda series. At the same time they can still create new "legends" in the classic timelines and develop the tales and events there even further, if they want.
(I described this in my previous article, Modern vs. Classic Zelda, already.)
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