Echoes of Wisdom ~ Timeline Placement?

With every new Zelda game that gets announced, there are always two questions that immediately come to mind to every fan: "Will you be able to play as Zelda?" and "Where does it fall in the timeline?" The answer to both of these is "yes" with The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Well, we can get a little bit more specific in trying to answer the second question. While Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have done their own thing, far beyond anything that came before, there is still the old timeline and future Zelda games still might go somewhere in there, which is likely to be the case with Echoes of Wisdom.

As already mentioned in my post about the new old Hyrule, the upcoming Switch title takes place in the Hyrule that we know and love from A Link to the Past and A Link Between Worlds. So, it's safe to assume that it will fall somewhere in the Downfall Timeline as well, which starts with A Link to the Past after the original Imprisoning War and currently ends with Zelda II - The Adventure of Link. The fact that you fight the classic Ganon in the beginning, who has mainly appeared in the Downfall Timeline, also supports this theory.

And then there is the fact that this game uses the same engine and art style as the remake of Link's Awakening, where usually the games in the same style are also close together on the timeline. The only real exception to this is Four Swords Adventures, which visually resembles A Link to the Past and also features the classic Ganon, but takes place at the end of the Child Timeline. But as you may know, this game was at some point supposed to tell the original Imprisoning War and therefore a prequel to A Link to the Past, before it was decided to simplify the story.

In any case, the Downfall Timeline feels like a safe bet. But where exactly? Will this be a sequel to Link's Awakening? Or could this take place before or after Oracle of Ages & Seasons?

Well, what's interesting here is that Hyrule is a lot more developed when compared to the the SNES and 3DS versions. You can find tribes like the Gerudo, Deku, or the Sea Zora, for example, which wasn't the case before. There is a lot of stuff in the basement of Hyrule Castle, which used to be mostly empty, there is a Hyrule Castle Town now, and Kakariko Village has a windmill. What used to be Death Mountain has gone cold, and there is a new Death Mountain somewhere in the west. And so on and so on.

While there also were differences between A Link to the Past and Between Worlds, they weren't as drastic and the Hyrule on the 3DS felt mostly like a remake. In Echoes of Wisdom you can still recognize the basic layout, but a lot more has changed. This likely means that the game will take place long after A Link Between Worlds, maybe even at the end of the Downfall Timeline. Over time Hyrule has recovered from the destruction of the Imprisoning War and found back to its old glory.

You can already make some connections, even. In A Link Between Worlds Rosso started to mine Death Mountain. And now it looks like it was stripped on all ends, resembling the excavation sites in Breath of the Wild.

Speaking of, we do have more than just a single Sheikah in this game and their design resembles the ones from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom more closely. Even when it comes to their interiors, like the little lamp there in the above screenshot. That's like ripped right out of Impa's house. This could be another indication that this takes place later in the series, together with the Hylian Hood that Link and Zelda are wearing, which hasn't appeared in the old games before.

And placing the game there offers some interesting possibilities, because they could potentially hint at what has happened to the old Hyrule(s), before the Hyrule from the backstory from Tears of the Kingdom came to be. Fujibayashi explained once that there was potentially a collapse (source). And it is of note how the new games make no mention of the Triforce...

However, it's unlikely that the first game where you play as Zelda will lead to some kind of disaster. This would send the wrong message and Nintendo certainly wants to avoid that. It's for that reason why I also wouldn't place it at the beginning of the Downfall Timeline, somewhere before A Link to the Past.

It's technically possible that Ganon may have gotten out of the Sacred Realm somehow and now tries to suck in pieces of Hyrule to create his twisted version of it, which later then becomes the Dark World. But this would mean that our heroes can't really put an end to Ganon's threat, they will just imprison him again. And it would also mean that whatever happens in Echoes of Wisdom, it causes most of Hyrule's population to leave... Also, not exactly the best position to be in.

So, a placement at the end of the Downfall Timeline does seem to make the most sense. It explains how Hyrule has changed so much since the other games in this branch and it also makes the story more open ended, where we don't know what will happen next until Rauru comes and founds a new Hyrule. It may even act as a bridge between the old and the new.