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Nintendo Places The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild On Series Timeline
This past weekend, Nintendo updated their Japanese Zelda website, which contains an official timeline of the series so far. This update was the first placing of Breath of the Wild, the open-world Zelda game on the Wii U and Switch, on the official timeline.
While the last mainline console game in the series, Skyward Sword, is still at the very earliest point in the timeline, Breath of the Wild contrasts that by getting placed at the very end of the timeline. Maddeningly for some fans, the website does not indicate whether Breath of the Wild takes place after the Victory/Failure split of Ocarina of Time. It in fact completely dismisses the question entirely as not mattering.
When the director of the game Hidemaro Fujibayashi was asked in which timeline the game took place last year, he demurred and left it up to the interpretation of the player. So it seems Nintendo isn't concerned with the answer or doesn't think the player should be.
Another small change is that Link's Awakening has been moved to before the Oracle games, and directly after A Link to the Past, rather than after Oracle of Ages and Seasons. This change tends to make a bit more sense to connect A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening. That answer is definitely up to the player in the end.
Alternatively, the fact that this changes around and is so malleable might also mean that none of it has any real information and none of it is ever actually planned beyond obvious connections like A Link Between Worlds.
For more on where Breath of the Wild takes place in the Zelda timeline, you can watch a conversation about it with Kyle Hilliard and former video editor Wade Wojcik from shortly after the game released below.
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