even suring 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.
Zelda's Time Travel Splits The Timeline From BOTW In Tears Of The Kingdom
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.
While Zelda being in two places at once during the events of BOTW would be a paradox, and wouldn't exactly mesh with the laws of physics, the same can be said for a lot of Zelda lore. Instead, it makes more sense to think of TOTK as the start of a whole new alternate timeline, one in which Zelda plays an integral role in the founding of Hyrule, pulling the strings from past and present at once. In this alternate timeline, the events of BOTW would be greatly altered, if they could even have occurred in the first place.
TOTK's Master Sword s The Theory Of An Alternate Zelda Timeline
Another thing that would be different if BOTW took place in the same timeline as TOTK is the appearance of the Master Sword. Throughout BOTW, the Master Sword lies stuck in a pedestal (and a familiar fantasy convention) beneath the treetops of the Great Hyrule Forest, waiting for Link to come by with the appropriate number of Heart Containers to retrieve it. However, according to TOTK lore, the Master Sword should, at that point, still be stuck in the Zelda-Dragon's head with similar aspirations. Since this other change affected by Zelda traveling back in time is also absent from BOTW, it looks even more likely that TOTK will kick off its own timeline.
What Tears Of The Kingdom's Timeline Means For Zelda's Past & Future
If TOTK exists at the end of all possible Zelda timelines, and has Zelda traveling back to the furthest point in her kingdom's history, that has major implications for the remainder of the Zelda series as it exists today, as well as for future entries. If Zelda's actions in the past influenced Link's journey in BOTW, she could've had an impact on Link's prior adventures in other Zelda games, too. She may have even been able to foresee how the timelines would split, and prepare for every eventuality. How much of the future she was able to see and prepare for remains a mystery, however - although there could be potential to explore that in future entries.
It's also worth wondering whether future Zelda games will attempt to continue the TOTK timeline or establish something completely different. Nintendo has already made it clear that BOTW will be the blueprint for the Zelda series going forward. While the most likely meaning was that Zelda games will follow in the open-ended, sandbox footsteps of BOTW and TOTK's gameplay, it wouldn't be surprising to see these games borrow story elements, too. Future sequels could answer questions that TOTK's new timeline leaves open-ended, like what other events Zelda was able to influence from the past. Dealing with the paradoxes Zelda's time travel created would also be a great subject for Tears of the Kingdom DLC.
Of course, it's entirely possible that future Zelda entries will go off in their own direction. The Zelda timeline was never supposed to make sense as a realistic, chronological series of events. Instead, it builds Link and Zelda up as mythical figures, recurring personas whose incredible deeds could never fit in a single human lifespan. Much like archaic s of many real-world ancient heroes, the timeline of their lives is jumbled, farfetched, exaggerated, self-contradictory, and potentially about multiple people who happened to share the same names. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom only expands on the myth, adding another chapter to the heroes' larger-than-life life stories.
