Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaos Auteur
It's clearly within the Child Timeline -- at the moment, Hyrule-under-the-sea from The Wind Waker was pretty much laid waste at the end of that game, and King Daphnes' comments after Ganon's death suggest that it will never be resurrected.
|
Yes, that's one reason I think it's in the CT - Aonouma seems to be using TWW/PH as a way breaking away from the old Zeldas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaos Auteur
Some of the early backstory given to us in Zelda III can't really be taken at literal face-value anymore...the designers, including Miyamoto himself, have since fudged, tweaked, and retconned a great deal of it in later years to suit their own purposes, as far as new Zelda projects were concerned.
Nothing is ever going to match up 100 percent.
|
I agree with you to a certain degree - the NES games are certainly out-of-date, storyline-wise. Many aspects of those early stories were later blatantly retconned. However, I'm not entirely convinced that ALttP falls into that trap - although OoT was clearly meant to tell of ALttP's backstory, a particular quote from ALttP's manual keeps ringing in my mind:
After vanquishing his own followers, the leader stood triumphant over the Triforce and grasped it with his blood- stained hands. He heard a whispered voice:
"If thou has a strong desire or dream, wish for it..."
And in reply, the roaring laughter of the brigand leader echoed across time and space and even reached the far-off land of Hyrule.
In this sense, it's possible that Ganondorf grasping the Triforce in OoT had far-reaching effects in both timelines, and ALttP might simply be referencing this without necessarily being in the same timeline. And before you tell me that that's only the crappy NOA translation, I'll point out that the reference to his laugh echoing across time and space is in the original japanese manual for ALttP also.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaos Auteur
I think one can read far too much into certain maps -- we know that the producers have never abided by a consistent, agreed-upon map of Hyrule, ever; and the FSA map of Hyrule in particular totally contradicts what we know the kingdom looks like from the NES Zeldas, A Link to the Past, and Twilight Princess (landlocked, with mountains to the west, and even more territory north of the Death Mountain region).
One solution to this is to not interpret the Four Swords Adventures map literally -- that it's simply a hyperstylized depiction of that specific game's immediately-accessible territories, with the water representing "off-limits" lands that the player cannot get to. Indeed, other games in other franchises have done the same thing, either with clouds or water cordoning off inaccessible zones on related maps.
|
I agree that basing a timeline theory on a gameplay map is a little tenuous but I thought I'd include the argument for completeness' sake. And the maps of Hyrule HAVE been roughly consistent with each other - OoT's map and ALttP's map match up perfectly when rotated. Y'know on the OoT map, where the compass rose has an extra, black spoke, pointing off to the northeast? Rotate the map so that this points north and each part of Hyrule matches with its ALttP counterpart, except the forest, which in ALttP (coincidentally) matches up with Hyrule Castle Town in OoT (imagine that). Then you have ALttP and FSA's maps matching almost perfectly (aside from the sea, which I agree is merely to highlight the fact that it's off-limits), and TP's map being basically an expanded version of OoT's map
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaos Auteur
However, we still see the Sages in *both* the Child and Adult Timelines during Ocarina, past and future alike. The implication is that they were substantially omniscient, and were essentially "outside" of time itself...witness their ability to send Link into any era they wished, as the situation dictated.
Besides which, it then becomes a temporal paradox for the Sages to *not* have been awakened in the past -- else, how could they have affected changes in the future, and managed to overthrow Ganon?
It's quite simple and obvious that A Link to the Past is set in the Child Timeline...it's an essential building-block of the continuity between Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, and the NES Zeldas, and future games in the series will very likely follow this philosophy.
One doesn't really need to engage in convoluted mental gymnastics to rationalize its placement -- swinging "Occam's Razor" cuts right through virtually all of the speculative underbrush.
|
The Sages are present in most games since ALttP, but the OoT Sages appear only in OoT, with pictures of them appearing in stain-glass windows in TWW and their names appearing in AoL. Link awakened them all as an adult and so we can't know for sure whether he also needed to do so after the Child Ending. I presume their predecessors - bar Rauru - were killed by Ganon in the AT (he seems to have a thing for killing Sages - TWW and TP - and pursuing their descendants - FSA and ALttP), making it necessary for Link to awaken new ones, so whether the Sages in TP are actually the original Sages or different Sages entirely is also up for debate. In this case, a temporal paradox would not occur since after the timeline splits, what happens in one wouldn't affect the other.
__________________
My Timeline Theory
Zeldas completed:
LoZ, AoL, ALttP, LA(DX), KnS, OoT, MM, OoS, OoA, TWW, FS(only on Silver Keys), FSA, TMC, TP(Wii), PH.
MAN I love the Zelda series.
