There has been a lot of debate about Echoes of Wisdom timeline placement, before the game released as well as after. This week Nintendo put that debate to bed by officially placing the game on the timeline. Whenever the timeline gets brought up there’s a flurry of activity in the Zelda community, but today I want to look at whether the timeline really matters in the grand context of The Legend of Zelda series.

This week, Echoes of Wisdom was placed on the ‘Official Zelda timeline’ by Nintendo, confirming theories that it does sit on the ‘Hero is defeated’ timeline (the one where Link dies after events of Ocarina of time). Before, during and after release of Echoes of Wisdom there was much debate about where on the timeline Echoes of Wisdom sat, and it turned out we were all pretty close, as Nintendo placed it between Triforce Heroes and the decline of the Hyrule Kingdom, sometime before the start of The Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

We’ve had 21 mainline Zelda games since in nearly 40 years and it’s worth asking the question, does the Zelda timeline really matter?

First of all, let’s have a look at some background. Skyward Sword is at the very start of the timeline, however Hyrule’s creation was explained in Ocarina of Time. The Great Deku Tree explains this to us early in the game saying Din, Nayru and Farore came to the chaos of pre-creation and introduced some stability. Once they successfully created the world the Golden Godesses dissappeared, but left behind the Triforce. The Triforce of Power was made by Din, The Trifroce of Wisdom by Nayru and The Triforce of Courage by Farore. The Triforce was then protected by another being called Hylia, who ended up staying in the world.

Hylia was doing her job, keeping the Triforce safe when a Demon King named Demise arrived with an army looking to claim the Triforce for himself. With the help of Link, Hylia gathered her people and sent them to live on a floating island in the sky called Skyloft. Hylia and Link (not the Link from Skyward Sword, but an earlier Link in the manga) defeated Demise but Link died due to wounds from battle. Hylia knelt down to say

“I will ensure that your gentle, heroic spirit will live on eternally. I shall shed my divinity. The next time we meet, I wish to stand before you as a simple human. Whenever the land of Hylia is in danger… we shall be reborn.”

By leaving her divinity behind, this leads Hylia to be reborn as Skyward Sword’s Zelda years later. Then at the end of Skyward Sword Link defeats Demise, but before he dies he has these words for Link

“You stand as a paragon of your kind, human, though this is not the end. My hate never perishes. It is born anew in a cycle with no end. I will rise again! Those like you, those who share the blood of the goddess and the spirit of the hero, they are eternally bound to this curse. An incarnation of my hatred shall ever follow your kind, dooming them to wander a blood-soaked sea of darkness for all time!”

It’s all fairly chilling, but ultimately comes true. We have Princess Zelda with the blood of the Godess Hylia, a champion with the spirit of the original Link and an enemy motivated by evil, often Ganon and all 3 are entwined in battle for eternity. While small details of Link, Zelda and Ganon can change through the games on the timeline, ultimately their roles stay the same.

After the events of Skyward Sword, the people of Skyloft would go back to the surface where they established a royal family to reign over Hyrule. Every royal daughter would be named Zelda, and we have a couple of artifacts pointing to this. In Hyrule Historia it says “Princesses were repeatedly given the name Zelda, a name that came from the historical legends.” then in the Zelda 2 manual it says “One Prince ordered that every female child born into the royal household shall be given the name Zelda.” This ties all and future Zeldas back to the origin descended from Hylia herself.

Whenever there is a threat to Hyrule, Princess Zelda and her champion Link are there to deal with it. Every game has a version of Zelda and a champion Link who are reincarnations of the original goddess and her champion, and they rise up to take on the challenge of evil facing Hyrule at the time. This all takes place in a story from Creating a Champion “Era of Myth”.

Mythology, and creation myths, are a narrative way for people to assign meaning to the world around them, to provide simple answers to complex questions. This is true of Hylians in the Zelda series too. Creation myths can often be messy and contradictory. Characters in these stories have contradictory elements to their stories, much like the Zelda timeline.

Nintendo has separated out Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom onto their own timeline, essentially resetting the timeline into something neater than what we had before. We could look at everything before Breath of the Wild as “myth” and that could explain the messy nature of the story as a whole with it’s branching timelines and contradictory elements. It could explain the multiple branches. There’s no right and wrong answer, all timelines could be true, given myths require a partial truth, as long as they tell the story.

Most Zelda games tell stories of a great evil showing up, a princess with the blood of the goddess representing the Triforce of Wisdom, and her champion with the spirit of the original hero representing the Trifroce of Courage. Due to tradition the Princess will be named Zelda, and the hero will likely be called Link.

Having been through all this, let’s have a look at why the timeline doesn’t really matter. While the Zelda games have individual nuance, ultimately they are telling and re-telling the story of the eternal struggle between good and evil between Zelda, Link and their battle against evil forces. Over the years the timeline has expanded and evolved, starting off in fairly linear fashion with The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link and A Link To The Past, then expanding to all the complexities of the multiple branches of the timeline.

It appears Nintendo is trying to reset the timeline with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on their own separate branch, and I’m looking forward to what they are going to do with the next mainline Zelda game in a few years time.

While the Zelda timeline may not matter, one of the most fun things to do in the Zelda community is debate the timeline, so while I don’t really think it matters in the context of the games, given Nintendo’s prioritisation of gameplay over story, I do enjoy talking about the timeline and the discussion that arises from it. The comments I get every time I publish a timeline video are off the chart, and could be their own videos with the detail they contain, so if that’s you either on this video or a past video of mine, I appreciate your effort.

Let me know what you think in the comments. What do you think of the Zelda timeline now Echoes of Wisdom has been placed on it, and do you think the Zelda timeline matters?