The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom may present itself as the followup to Breath of the Wild, but it’s actually the start of a whole new Zelda timeline. First announced in a 2019 teaser as a direct sequel to BOTW, TOTK indeed lives up to that promise. Taking place a few years after its predecessor, and revisiting many of the same locations and characters, TOTK is everything a sequel should be. It expands on the story and systems introduced in BOTW, at times even surpassing the first game in its sheer creativity and ambition.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.]However, whether TOTK is a direct sequel in relation to the Zelda series timeline is a more difficult question. Crucially, the timeline forks in three after the events of Ocarina of Time. Two branches relate to the outcome of Link’s battle with Ganondorf: in the “Hero Is Defeated” branch, he loses, and in the “Child Era,” he wins and travels back to his childhood before continuing his adventures. The third branch, the “Adult Era,” takes place in a post-Link world, where the hero is absent from Hyrule after traveling back in time. BOTW and TOTK take place at the end of all three timelines. But instead of uniting the fractured continuity, TOTK creates a whole new branch because of the way it retcons Hyrule’s history.
The inciting incident of TOTK clearly establishes it as a totally separate timeline from BOTW. After Ganon returns at the beginning of TOTK, Zelda travels back in time to the distant past, where she meets up with Rauru and Sonia, the first king and queen of Hyrule. With their help, she sets a series of events in motion that will eventually nudge Link in the direction of saving Hyrule. In return, she helps them raise an army under the command of six Sages from each of Hyrule’s tribes.
The Hylian royal family presents each of the sages – Zelda included – with tear-shaped Secret Stones, which help them channel their strengths into superhuman abilities. Zelda uses hers to transform into the Light Dragon, impaling herself with the broken Master Sword in order to repair it with her regenerative properties. They go on to imprison Ganon with the help of Rauru’s self-sacrifice, and in turn, their successors lead Link to find Zelda and, at length, defeat the powered-up Demon King Ganondorf.
But if all that happened thousands of years before TOTK, and BOTW takes place just a few years before, where was all the evidence of Zelda’s time travel in the first game? Zelda doesn’t appear in her dragon form in BOTW; instead, she’s sealed away in Hyrule Castle, keeping Calamity Ganon at bay. For BOTW to be on the same timeline as TOTK, the Light Dragon, along with Zelda’s other changes from the past, would have to be present.
2023-06-09 14:00:04
Original from screenrant.com