I was playing PH last night (only my second time through, otherwise I probably would have noticed this sooner), and I found something rather interesting. In the North Western area of the sea, there is a boat that looks very much like the KoRL with a man on it in a green tunic and hat, that says he was once a hero. Now, this one is obviously a man, as he has a beard. He calls his ship the Prince of Red Lions and it is a good deal larger, so obviously not the same ship.

Now, normally, I would just write this off as a cameo, or say that this man heard of Link's adventures in WW and decided to emulate them and call himself a hero, but there is a rather interesting plot twist to this story. There is a man in the South Western sea on a boat who mentions this man, corroborating that he is a hero, and calls this hero "brother." Now, if we are to take this other hero as indeed another Link (it never names him), I highly doubt that this man is actually his brother, but rather just an endearing term. Especially since the Japanese word for big brother, oniisan, can be used as simply a term for someone that one looks up to, as this man does.

So, this leaves me with three possibilities. Ignore the evidence and just call it a cameo, but ignoring evidence is not something I am inclined to do, so there are really only two options. The first is to say that is indeed a hero from another game, or a game perhaps not made yet. The second is something far less appealing. The second option is to call the Realm of the Ocean King a parallel world to the Great Sea and call this man Link's counterpart.

I hate doing this, as there is much evidence that it is not a parallel world, as many of the characters from WW are present in PH, and some characters in WW describe places we see in PH. We know PH isn't a dream, because we see Linebeck sailing off, and Link still has the Phantom Hourglass, despite the crew saying they were only gone ten minutes. I am also somewhat convinced that the Realm of the Ocean King is actually a flooded Labrynna. Not firmly convinced, but there is some evidence for it, and since bitterlime has proven that Labrynna is not a parallel world, if the Realm of the Ocean King is indeed Labrynna, the parallel world explanation would not work.

So, unless someone can bring up some pretty convincing evidence for how the Realm of the Ocean King is a parallel world, I'm going to assume it's not, which leads us back to option one, that this is another Link. Now, the quote from Aonuma says that the WW takes place 100 years after OoT, but as Erimgard pointed out (and as I should have realized having taken three years of Japanese in high school, and two quarters in college), the Japanese have no plural, thus when they say hundred with no number before it, it could just as well mean hundreds. So, since Aonuma did NOT say thousand, we can assume that at the most, WW takes place 999 years after OoT. This is plenty of time to fit the flooding and another adventure in there.

Now, since we don't know how fast the flooding occurred, it would be very hard to select a game that fits in there that resembles either of the two worlds that WW and OoT show us. But I have come up with a theory that could circumvent that problem. It's possible that wherever this game takes place, it is in a part of Hyrule that is perhaps not Hyrule proper. In fact, the game that I have selected that could fit here is very probably not in Hyrule proper, as we will see in a moment.

There is only one game that I am currently really unsure of the placement in my timeline theory, and really only one that I can think of that fits there without destroying other timeline continuities, so that is the game I chose. So, here it is. The game that I have selected (and please, don't kill me until you read the rest of this), is Minish Cap.

Okay, now that we've got the hard part out of the way, allow me to elaborate. Minish Cap takes place on a map that appears to have an excessive amount of water. This combined with the fact that it references Triumph Forks has led many to place it post-WW. However, I think it could work just as well pre-WW. One of the reasons that many people place it before OoT is because it seems that the MC Hyrule is not unified, as we know it is in OoT. However, this is the very reason that I place it post-OoT.

Warning: much of what is to follow is little more than speculation, but I will include evidence and references wherever possible.

See, the goddesses flooded Hyrule, but where MC takes place is not Hyrule proper, so not all of it was flooded. This is why it is un-unified. The rest of Hyrule has been flooded, but they have not, thus detaching them from the rest of it. Now, perhaps hundreds of years have passed since the initial flooding, and so the people have either forgotten it, or just learned to live with it, hence why no one mentions it. Also, depending on when the Triumph Forks were made, this placement could still satisfy the in-game reference to them. So, MC happens and the hero leaves to travel the sea on his own.

This could be the new land that Link and Tetra will eventually find (assuming that they do in fact find land). Whether it is or not, it's not really all that important to my theory. So, the hero is now out on the sea. He ages to become the man with a beard that we see in PH. Why he has a ship similar to the KoRL, I can't really say, but maybe he saw the KoRL floating along one day and thought it looked neat and built one for himself. Perhaps he met the KoRL, which would also explain the name of the boat being the Prince of Red Lions. I can't really explain the similarities in ships. But again, not all that important. What IS important is that it hints to us that a game goes in between OoT and WW. And I believe MC is a rather compelling candidate.