Nintendo has updated The Legend Of Zelda timeline and it seems everything went to pot after Zelda’s first outing as the hero.
Any time a new Legend Of Zelda game comes out, there is one pressing question on diehard fans’ minds: where is it set in the timeline?
Yes, for any of you more casual Zelda fans, there is an official timeline for the entire series. It’s honestly not needed to understand any of the games’ individual stories, but that hasn’t stopped some from pondering when the newest entry, Echoes Of Wisdom, takes place.
Eagle-eyed fans noticed Nintendo has updated the timeline (which has its own dedicated section on the official Legend Of Zelda website) to include Echoes Of Wisdom, and its placement is unsurprising but unintentionally amusing.
Where is The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom set in the timeline?
According to Nintendo, The Legend Of Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom is set in-between 2015’s co-op title Tri-Force Heroes and the very first The Legend Of Zelda game from 1986.
This also puts it several games after Link’s Awakening. Considering the remake sported the same art style and both games were developed by Grezzo, you’d be forgiven for assuming Echoes Of Wisdom came directly after Link’s Awakening.
That’s not what’s funny about Echoes Of Wisdom’s placement, though. On the timeline, it’s mentioned that after this game, Hyrule Kingdom fell into decline, which is what leads into the first Legend Of Zelda game where Hyrule is overrun by monsters sent by Ganon.
In an obviously unintentional move, it kind of makes it sound like the Zelda in Echoes Of Wisdom did a bad job managing her kingdom after the events of the game, allowing it to descend into the ‘Age of Chaos’ described in the first game. Hardly a good look for the first properly playable Zelda in the series.
Fans in this ResetEra thread have jokingly shared their own theories for what could have happened. AuthenticM posits that Zelda getting her own game upset all the men, prompting them to vote in Ganon instead.
We personally like Mobius and Pet Octopus’s theory that Zelda’s ability to create copies of almost anything, including pots and beds, in Echoes Of Wisdom led to an economic crash.
A couple of users, like onpoint and RedDevil, have posited whether this could lead to another split in the timeline. Since the original split in Ocarina Of Time came as a result of either Link or Ganondorf failing their respective goals, it’d be appropriate for Zelda’s own failure to split the timeline further.
It’s not as if the timeline isn’t already rather convoluted. Aside from Ocarina Of Time leading into three separate timelines, Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom are set in their own timeline independent of the rest of the series.
It’s actually somewhat surprising that Nintendo is continuing to update the timeline, as it’s clear fans take it a lot more seriously than they do and none of it has ever seemed to influence any of the games – they’re all just placed on it retrospectively.
It will be interesting to see where the next mainline Zelda is placed though, in the sense that it’s unclear what Nintendo will do for the next big entry and whether it’ll continue to use the Breath Of The Wild versions of the characters or the more traditional incarnations from Echoes Of Wisdom.
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