Tears of the Kingdom – Historic Battle on the Great Plateau?

In a recent video by Looygi Bros., they have made some very interesting observations about some of the cutscenes from the final trailer for Tears of the Kingdom, where they've successfully pinpointed a variety of locations. Well, already in earlier video, they've analyzed Ganondorf's location during the scene where he causes the giant Blood Moon eruption and goes into his Demise mode. It's actually a platform on the Great Plateau, right above the Shrine of Resurrection.

This seemed very poetic at first, because so far I thought that this is something that happens after Link and Zelda found him and his seal broke, so basically after his resurrection. But this doesn't seem to be the case, because in the background you can see that Hebra Peak doesn't have its iconic hole in it and Hyrule Castle is missing as well. So, this is a scene from the past, probably before Ganondorf got sealed, and certainly before the first battle against Calamity Ganon 10,000 years ago, because that's when Hebra Peak got pierced.

Now, they also confirmed the position of the Zelda-lookalike / Hylia character. She is on top of the Great Plateau as well, on a platform at the southern end of Mount Hylia. Well, that's certainly a fitting location, name-wise. From there she is firing her gigantic Kamehemaha made out of light at a group of Moldugas, which is approaching the Great Plateau from what later becomes the Taobab Grasslands. It's the place with the giant trees, where you can find the large Ganon horse in Breath of the Wild.

We could already see in the February trailer how there is a different platform on the southern edge of the Great Plateau and that the snow is all gone, with more trees around. At first, it looked like the game simply takes place in a warmer season, but this wouldn't have explained the new trees. It makes more sense that this was also from a flashback to the distant past. And that scene clearly connects it with Ganondorf's Malice explosion. This might even be the moment where he first unleashes monsters onto Hyrule and creates the Blood Moon to eternally revive them.

So, I think with these scenes we're being told what happened long before the Great Calamity and how Ganondorf got sealed, where he fought the Sages of that era. Everyone thought at first that Ganondorf somehow quickly got "rehydrated" from his mummified state, but we might not even have seen Ganondorf yet in the present, only in flashbacks from the distant past.

There possibly was no hero around at the time or Ganondorf killed him, so we're essentially having a second Imprisoning War at our hands, only that this probably isn't about sealing Ganondorf inside the Sacred Realm, but preventing him from entering it in the first place.

And our Zelda from the present seems to be caught up in the middle of all this. Remember that the platform, where she stands with the broken Master Sword and her tear, is also located at the Great Plateau, right where the Temple of Time sits. I still believe that the same temple structure on the golden sky islands is meant to be the actual Temple of Time with the entrance to the Sacred Realm, where we will learn how it ended up in the skies.

Maybe Zelda can communicate with us throughout time at this temple and will tell us the story of this war in the distant past, right after the tutorial. So, she would take King Rhoam's role in the early part of the game, only that you probably won't see her living like a hobo. And that she's not dead. But it would certainly be fitting and explain a lot of what we have seen so far.

I don't really expect that we will be able to visit this era ourselves, but I wouldn't mind to be wrong. It's just that after Breath of the Wild and its final trailer I want to be careful with such assumptions, because it made people believe that they may be able to go back in time 100 years ago and prevent the Calamity in the first place. It took an entire spin-off game for that to happen, but I'm sure we'll also get Hyrule Warriors: Age of the Zonai in 2026... (Which would be terrific, can't wait to play as Hylia.)