The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma has announced in recently published The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion book that the placement of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the series overall timeline won’t be revealed simply because “it would eliminate the room for imagination.”
“The final thing I’d like to convey to all of our players is that video games, not just Zelda, can go much, much farther! We got a lot of responses from adult players who said they felt the same way playing this game as they did when they used to be hooked on video games when they were younger.”
“We made this game with the intention of returning to our roots, so the response from players about feeling the same as they had when they were young is promising. Since Nintendo Switch is portable, I hope that they will be able to engage deeply with the game in a fresh, new way too.”
“In books like the recently released The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia, we revealed where each Zelda game fell on a timeline and how their stories related, but we didn’t do that for Breath of the Wild. There is a reason for that. With this game, we saw just how many players were playing in their own way and had those reactions I just mentioned.
“We realised that people were enjoying imagining the story that emerged from the fragmental imagery we were providing. If we defined a restricted timeline, then there would be a definitive story, and it would eliminate the room for imagination, which wouldn’t be as fun.
“We want players to be able to continue having fun imagining this world even after they are finished with the game, so, this time, we decided that we would avoid making clarifications. I hope that everyone can find their own answer, in their own way.”
I agree with him that imagining your own timeline is more fun than having an official timeline, though I don’t think an official timeline is much of a problem. Even with an official timeline already existing, there’s a lot of things I don’t agree with this. I don’t agree with the timeline split, for example (and especially not the triple timeline split), and despite this being official, there’s still a lot of room for discussion on whether this official timeline actually makes sense or not. I don’t think the existence of an official timeline takes away too much from the fun of imagining your own timeline.
I wouldn’t even call the official timeline “official” since it only exists because the fanbase demanded it.
That’s why many zelda games intrigue me so much, there a lot of stuff we don’t know, like why the hero of time is in TW as a Stalfos, and how were that tribe that created majoras mask? Who is the fucking happy mask sales man?, etc People creates a lot of interesting theories too.
They love to play with this concept of imagination and hidden story parts, it makes the universe deeper for me, some stuff has to be hidden in order to continue the mistery, at least for me, just my opinion here. I can confess that I’m eager to know more, to know more about stuff like Majora’s mask, but i don’t know if the true indentity of it will be awesome.
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I want a sequel to BOTW kind of like Majora’s Mask, you know, about what happened afterwards but it still being a completely unique and different game. That would be cool.
Why bother mentioning an official timeline at all then if this was going to be their plan at some point to not include a later game into the timeline? Should have just kept quiet and let people continue making up their own timelines. Honestly, I think they can’t think of where to place it as they probably put themselves in a corner with how Breath of the Wild has mentions of each timeline in the game. If that’s the case, might as well just create a new official timeline so Breath of the Wild can fit.
Of course, there are some nice fan theories Nintendo could use to place Breath of the Wild into the timeline. The convergence theory & Game Theory’s theory seem to be pretty popular.
Agreed. It’s much more fun to imagine and makeup your own timeline. I was never really a fan of the whole TL concept anyway, I feel it has passive restrictions on the game/development and what they can specifically put in the game because it is bound by that particular point in time.
There is always another reason: BotW was never meant to be part of the official timeline and is secretly considered an unrelated spinoff by them just in case the game flopped hard because of the break from traditional Zelda. Now that it’s a success, they can’t figure out where to put the game in their timeline. xD
!!!? I thought it was The end!?lol
Tbh, I never really put much stock in the “official” timeline. The story of the games clearly weren’t thought of as directly related during their development (sequels excluded), so trying to form a cohesive link (pun intended) between them after the fact has always seemed pointless to me. Like people trying to connect Black Mirror episodes together; it’s fun, but there’s no real meaning behind it.
Suits me fine, I like being able to imagine my own timeline much more, and it’s not like the official timeline ever made sense outside of the “adult timeline”… the rest actually required developer interviews and books to understand and that is no way to tell a story.