Breath of the Wild is officially the last game in the canonical Zelda timeline, Nintendo has revealed. While its connections to the rest of the games in The Legend of Zelda series is still up for debate, we now know that it is set after the events of all the other Zelda games, even if this revelation didn’t feature any direct links to the series’ previous releases.
The updated Zelda timeline was posted on the Japanese version of the official Nintendo website, with Breath of the Wild appearing at the bottom of the ‘History’ section. This section features all three of the game’s confirmed timelines, though Breath of the Wild isn’t connected to any of them.
In an interview with Famitsu (via SiliconEra), the series’ producer Eiji Aonuma was asked where it fit into the series’ timeline: “Well of course it’s at the very end,” Fujibayashi replied. “But, I get what you’re asking, it’s which timeline is it the end of?”
Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi added: “That’s… up to the player’s imagination, isn’t it?”
“Hyrule’s history changes with time,” Aonuma explained. “When we think of the next game and what we want to do with it, we might think, “Oh, this’ll fit well,” and place it neatly into the timeline, but sometimes we think, “Oh crap”, and have to change the placement. Actually, the decided history has been tweaked many times.”
Along with Breath of the Wild‘s positioning at the end of the Zelda timeline, Nintendo has also made some other changes to the canonical order of events in the RPG franchise’s ongoing story. The 1993 Game Boy release Link’s Awakening has now been confirmed to take place before the Oracle games and their timeline, with its position in the timeline having been updated accordingly.
Breath of the Wild features many throwbacks to older Zelda games, so fans of the series will no doubt be falling over themselves to work out where the Nintendo Switch game is located in the timeline. We’re sure more fan theories will pop up as a result of these
