I learned last week that there was a sequel in 2010 to Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland entitled Color-Changing Tingle’s Balloon Trip of Love.  Unfortunately, so far it has only been released in Japan, whereas the first game came out in both Japan and the UK (meaning, at least in English).  I would love for Nintendo to bring these to the U.S., but Americans tend to be stupidly repulsed by Tingle, so I won’t hold my breath.  Still, I want to get my hands on English versions of these games (if there ever is one for CCTBTOL) in some fashion.

I’m finally playing Oracle of Ages again, after an I-don’t-know-how-many year hiatus.  I’m making progress in Jabu Jabu’s Belly (the 7th dungeon),  so hopefully soon I can beat the game and gain a bit of insight into the storyline.  I do think it’s interesting how many aesthetic connections to OOT the Oracle games have, but maybe that’s to be expected since they were made right after OOT and Majora’s Mask.  At the very least, I’m wondering if Jabu Jabu is the same fish (and then how he shows up in Labrynna and Hyrule) or if it’s a Yoshi-type thing where they call every Jabu Jabu fish the same name.  Probably reading too far into that one, but that’s my job.

This is such a nice nugget of information that this entry could have counted as part vii of the ‘blog, but I’ll wait until next year and we have the actual game to work with.

The only other thing to mention is that I totally called the next Wii Zelda game not being released until 2011.  And I’m glad about it.  I seriously doubt everyone who may whine about the “delay” has played through all 15 of the other games, so go back and play them while you’re waiting.  I talked in one of the entries about how I like a bit of breathing room between Zelda games, so I’m glad to see that we will have another Zelda-less year this year.  It makes the years with a new Zelda that much more special.  Plus, there seem to be year+ gaps right before some of the best Zelda games, so patience is a virtue.

On a similar note, Nintendo also showed us the Nintendo 3DS handheld (which will supposedly be released everywhere by the end of March 2011).  By almost all accounts it looks amazing and the 3D actually works wonderfully.  After their conference, Nintendo also announced Ocarina of Time 3D.  You’d think I’d be absolutely drooling for a remake of my favorite game, and I do sort of look forward to playing it in 3D with slicker graphics.  The fact is, though, that I never needed a remake of that game (or most games).  I still enjoy playing the original version a lot.  It will be cool to see how they revamp the cutscenes and if they add any new content though.

I thought I’d leave you this time with a quick poll.

There are some other connections, though.  In Twilight Princess, there are three main regions of Hyrule: Eldin, Lanayru, and Faron.  Obviously, each of these are linguistic allusions to the names of the three goddesses.  Presumably, this is another instance of the Hyrulians naming portions of their country after figures from their legends (similar to the names of the towns from The Adventure of Link being named after the sages from OOT).

Furthermore, the names of the three goddesses are used in Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons as names for the three Oracles.  Keep in mind that there were originally meant to be three Oracle games, entitled Mystical Seed of… Power, Wisdom, and Courage. In the final games, the dancer Din is the Oracle of Seasons and Nayru is the Oracle of Ages.  They each have their own game, but you can find Farore, the Oracle of Secrets, in both games.

In Phantom Hourglass there are three fairies, which are referred to as Spirits during the course of the game.  The fairy that accompanies Link throughout is named Ciela, and she is revealed to be the Spirit of Courage.  This is after you discover Leaf, Spirit of Power and Neri, Spirit of Wisdom.  I don’t notice any correlation with the names, but this Triforce parallel is noteworthy since there is otherwise very little significance to the Triforce in this game.

One thing I’ve noticed along the way–and this may just be coincidence–is that at times one of the three elements of the Triforce (or its parallels) may be the odd one out.  In every case I can think of, the odd one out is Courage.  The original game did not mention Courage.  Link’s goal was to collect the shattered pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom.  The Oracle games ended up centering around Seasons and Ages, with Secrets (Courage) getting a supporting role.  On the flood timeline, Link’s absence is the reason Ganon is able to come to power.  Again, this is more an interesting side note than evidence for anything, but I like to keep relationships like this in mind as I’m mulling over the series’ history.

Let me know in the Comments what topics you might be interested in hearing about in the future.  Someone should comment on this thing.  I don’t want to have to do it myself.

In 2002, just one year after the release of the Oracle games, came the Game Boy Advance re-release (including subtle enhancements) of A Link to the Past.  Also included on the cartridge was a seemingly little multiplayer game called The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords.  Aside from being the first entry in the Zelda series to have a true multiplayer feature, it was also missing an overworld of any kind, towns, characters to talk to, an inventory screen…the list keeps going.  It tends to get shoved into the back of the Zelda fan’s consciousness due to its nature as a side-game, along with its short and linear format.  Fair enough, but I do count it as the ninth installment in the series for two key reasons.  (1) The full title is The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords, signifying that it’s not just a little side-game like Link’s Crossbow Training.  (2) It has its own storyline.  Though short and sweet it does have a unique story that belongs somewhere on the timeline, whether or not certain fans care about it.

The next year, The Wind Waker was released, and the year following that (2004) came Four Swords Adventures.  This game also gets left by the wayside at times in the minds of Zelda fans because, let’s face it: it’s a Gamecube game that looks like a Super NES game.  Add that to the fact that it was again multiplayer-based and linear in nature, and you can see why it doesn’t tend to top the charts of best Zelda games.  Regardless, though, it has a story and it is another “Legend” of Zelda, so it belongs on the timeline.

I think for a while this Four Swords sub-series threatened to weaken the Zelda series in a significant way.  In the early days there tended to be larger gaps between Zelda games (4 years prior to ALTTP, 5 years prior to OOT), but from 2000 to 2007 there was at least one released every year.  In fact, more were planned: a spin-off called Tetra’s Trackers, and I believe another game that ultimately became the “Shadow Battle” mode in FSA.  Phantom Hourglass was also originally intended as a Four Swords-related game.  I mention this only because I think this sub-series essentially consists of the three worst Zelda games.  They certainly weren’t short on innovation.  The cooperative dungeon designs worked great, and FSA used the oft-ignored GBA-GCN connectivity very well (though it was a clumsy setup).  But with less focus on story, less characters and towns, a less-varied inventory, and less exploration, they bordered on not quite being Zelda adventures.  Had there been a few more non-adventure spin-offs, we might have seen the series become too casual friendly and weighed down by a more lighthearted style of play and design (Twilight Princess really saved the day in that regard, despite its being too easy).

The next game Nintendo made (in 2005) was a good move.  The GBA had been out for a while with no proper Zelda game of its own (in fact, the DS had been released by this time), and they finally decided it was time for The Minish Cap, which is the final game in the  Four Swords sub-series to date and the first to adopt the good ol’ Zelda format.  And yes, it is part of Four Swords.  The sword you power up, which lets you ultimately split into four Links, is called the Picori Sword to begin with, but it is the Four Sword from the previous games.

In fact, that’s one of the pieces of evidence for why TMC takes place before the other Four Swords games: the sword is not yet at its full power.  In addition, Vaati is in his human form and no one seems to have any knowledge of him as an evil force.  Both these things come directly from the game itself.  Another important point is that TMC contains a sort of origin story for Link’s classic green cap.  He meets the wizard Ezlo who was turned into a weird bird/hat, and through most of the game he rides around on Link’s head.  At the end, Ezlo is restored to his original form, and he gives Link a green cap.  It’s important to note that Link had no green cap at the beginning of the game, but even more important to remember the prologue to the TMC, which talks about a green-clad hero (no cap) who was the “Hero of Men.”  The prologue even gives him a name, but it’s not Link, it’s Gustav.  None of this is totally conclusive by itself since another game could take place between Gustav’s adventure and the events of TMC.

However, the above information regarding Vaati and the Four Sword are solid evidence that TMC takes place at least before FS and FSA.  And here’s the real tamale: in an interview with Game Informer in (I think) 2004, Eiji Aonuma said this when asked how FSA relates to the other games: “The GBA Four Swords Zelda is what we’re thinking as the oldest tale in the Zelda timeline.  With this one on the GameCube being a sequel to that, and taking place sometime after that.”  That pretty much wraps that up as far as those two games.  Remember that TMC wasn’t released until 2005, so it could not have been part of the context of that interview.  If you don’t buy the Vaati/Picori Sword reasoning, which seems totally sound to me, then take a look at the manual for FSA, which recalls two times prior where Vaati appeared and kidnapped some maidens, and was then defeated.  Granted, I don’t remember him kidnapping maidens in TMC, so it may not refer to that specifically.  Regardless, it looks like we’ve got a pretty solid position for this trilogy on our overall timeline:

The Minish Cap
Four Swords
Four Swords Adventures
Ocarina of Time
Majora’s Mask          The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess          Phantom Hourglass
A Link to the Past          Spirit Tracks
Link’s Awakening                                      -
The Legend of Zelda                                         -
The Adventure of Link                                          -

This is the point at which I become unable to add much to the timeline.  You may notice that there are two games missing: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons.  I have yet to beat them, and I don’t know of any sources or information that can help me connect them with the others.  I have a bunch of other topics I can cover, but I feel like an entry devoted to the Oracle games at this point won’t be worth it.  If you have anything to contribute, preferably cited, I’d appreciate it, but for right now I’m going to take a break, do some research, maybe finish OOA in the near future.  Like I said, there’s a lot more to talk about, so maybe I’ll come back with something else interesting before it’s time to talk about where the Oracle games belong.  Let me know what you’d like discussed.

A Link to the Past
Link’s Awakening
The Legend of Zelda
The Adventure of Link

…and the split timeline:

Ocarina of Time
Majora’s Mask          The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess          Phantom Hourglass
-                                  Spirit Tracks

I mentioned in the last entry that though there is the possibility that some games may take place after ST, due to the establishment of a new land-based Hyrule on the Flood Timeline, I think it’s unlikely.  That doesn’t leave a lot of room for us to fit the the first four games anywhere on the Flood Timeline.  To put them in the 100 years between OOT and TWW wouldn’t make sense because for the events of TWW to happen, there would have to be a lack of Links during that time.  Since we already know that ALTTP must take place after OOT because Miyamoto told us that OOT was the earliest Zelda story when it was released, that leaves the Execution Timeline.

MM is a direct sequel to OOT, so there’s no room between them.  The question really comes down to before TP or after TP.  According to Aonuma, TP takes place about 100 years after OOT/MM, and the attempted execution of Ganondorf was a few years after those games.  In general, based on what we know, if a game is not a direct sequel to another, there are usually multiple generations between them.  The idea of shoving ALTTP, LA, TLOZ, and TAOL (in that order of course) between MM and TP just doesn’t jive with the patterns we tend to see with the series.  Granted, those first four games presumably only tell the stories of two different Links, but that would still be a pretty tightly packed set of adventures.  Consider that in PH we meet Linebeck and in ST (100 year gap) we meet Linebeck III.  I’m assuming the races of people in the Zelda series tend to live longer than us humans (after all, Niko from PH is still alive, though very old, in ST).  Also, consider the fact that TP’s storyline refers to events that directly follow OOT and are a result of its ending.  If Ganondorf is imprisoned in the Twilight Realm a few years after MM, then placing any of the four games in question between MM and TP would mean he has escaped the Realm and that what happens in TP would be null and void.  Furthermore, TP is the only other instance of us seeing Ganondorf (his human form) and not just Ganon in his beast form, so presumably he’s still inhabiting the same body we remember from OOT.

No, it’s much more likely that ALTTP follows a generation (or few) after TP.  Aside from the process of elimination we just went through, there are some notable similarities between ALTTP and TP.  The Twilight Realm in TP and the Dark World in ALTTP ring a lot of bells with each other.  For one, they are reflections of Hyrule in one way or another.  In ALTTP, there is a Pyramid replacing Hyrule Castle in the Dark World, and in TP, Hyrule Castle is encased in a very similar pyramid-like force-field while Hyrule is under the sway of Twilight.  How do you transport between the normal realm and the Twilight Realm?  The Mirror of Twilight.  How does Link transport himself to the Dark World?  The Magic Mirror.  What happens to Link when he goes to the Dark World unprepared?  He turns into an animal (in this case a rabbit).  And when Link enters a Twilit portion of Hyrule unprepared?  He turns into an animal as well (in that case a wolf).  The details are a bit hazy on the nature, creation, and rules of transportation with these two dark versions of Hyrule, but the common ground can’t be ignored.  It’s even possible that they aren’t the same thing exactly, but related.  Perhaps the Dark World was a side-effect of Midna shattering the Mirror of Twilight and cutting the worlds off from each other.  Ganon is also imprisoned in each of them at some point.  The official entry for ALTTP on the Zelda web site says this: “An evil sorcerer named Agahnim gains control of Hyrule and uses his power to free Ganon from his prison in the Dark World. After rescuing Princess Zelda from Agahnim’s grasp, Link frees the descendants of the Seven Sages and strengthens the magical seals designed to keep Ganon safely locked away.”  It’s not clear what happens to Ganondorf at the end of TP.  It appears that at least his body dies, but Ganon is never really dead, so they may have done something like imprison his soul in the Dark World, whether or not it has anything to do with the Twilight Realm.

If this all seems overwhelming, I’m sorry.  Just know that most of what I’ve found points to ALTTP following TP, not the other way around.  So the two timelines I’ve been waving around are finally united, and here’s what the beauty looks like:

Ocarina of Time
Majora’s Mask            The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess             Phantom Hourglass
A Link to the Past                    Spirit Tracks
Link’s Awakening                                      -
The Legend of Zelda                                      -
The Adventure of Link                                    -

We’re still missing five games….

The official Nintendo site has descriptions for most (maybe all) games available for Wii and Nintendo DS.  The page for PH has a description that states “Many months have passed since the events of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and Link, Tetra and Tetra’s band of pirates have set sail in search of new lands.”  It goes on to set up the story of PH, including Tetra’s plight and Link’s new quest.  The same Tetra (Zelda) and Link we know and love from TWW.  We’re looking at a direct sequel, and they even gave us a more specific reference point than usual: “many months” after TWW.

There is a video on GameTrailers.com taken from the floor of E3 2009 that says ST takes place 100 years after PH.  They don’t mention how they got this information, but the game itself ultimately backs this up in a few ways.  There’s a woman in Hyrule Castle Town that says that their “kingdom is about 100 years old,” but that the Spirit Tracks themselves are even older.  Remember that the tracks act as shackles to hold the demon Malladus underground.  Niko, who’s a young whipper-snapper in PH, is now extremely old, Linebeck is dead and his descendant Linebeck III is appears the same age in ST as Linebeck was in PH.  There’s a stained-glass window in Hyrule Castle depicting Tetra.  I could go on, but I think you get the picture I’m trying to paint.  ST takes place about a century after PH with the descendants of TWW/PH Link and Tetra as our heroes.

It really is as simple as all that for these two games, but there are a few other things we need to talk about.  First, a quick note on the art and presentation of Zelda games in general.  Does “Linebeck III” look exactly like Linebeck from PH (except for his hat)?  Yes.  There are a few recurring character models in ST, even though these are of course descendants (with the exception of Niko).  Call it laziness, but Nintendo gets to reuse a few things from the last game to save themselves trouble.  They did the same thing from Ocarina of Time to Majora’s Mask.   I’ve always thought of the graphic quality and style of the games as being similar to the words someone uses to tell a story.  They can change with each telling or teller, and every little visual detail, such as the size of Link’s head in the ‘toon games vs. the realistic games, isn’t meant to be scrutinized.  They’re simply telling different games in different ways.  These are “legends”, after all.

Now we have to talk about what it means for a chunk of land to be called Hyrule.  If you know the storyline of TWW, you’ll know that the Hyrule we know and love from OOT is deep under the ocean on this side of the timeline, and nothing in any of the games changes that fact.  Link and Tetra set sail at the end of TWW, and again at the end of PH, in search of new land.  Presumably, about 100 years prior to ST, they find it and name it Hyrule once more.  ST actually opens up the possibility that some of the earlier games could take place after it since we again have a Hyrule on land and with a castle and whatnot.  For reasons I’ll explain next time, I don’t quite think this is the case.  After all, we don’t see any old train tracks lying around in A Link to the Past.  Still, it’s worth acknowledging.

Once again, here are the timelines as they currently stand:

Old Games Timeline
A Link to the Past
Link’s Awakening
The Legend of Zelda
The Adventure of Link

Split Timeline
Ocarina of Time
Majora’s Mask          The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess          Phantom Hourglass
-                               Spirit Tracks

The prologue in TWW essentially tells us that Ganon came back, but was unchallenged because the “Hero of Time” (Link) was not there to defend against him.  This is what happens after Zelda sends Link back to his childhood with the Ocarina and she is left as an adult by herself.  Ganon says he’s going to escape his prison and come back to mess with everybody again, and according to the opening of TWW, he keeps his promise, and wins for once.  Sort of.  If you’ve played through TWW, you know that as a last resort, the higher-ups in Hyrule decided to flood the whole country and save some key citizens to have them live above the newly created sea.  The summits of the mountains in Hyrule become the islands of the Great Sea, and Hyrule Castle is sealed below the waves.  Talk about depressing.  In this 2003 interview with Aonuma and Miyamoto, Aonuma mentions that TWW takes place 100 years after the OOT ending in which Link was an adult.  This may very well have been the first time the whole split thing was discussed in a public forum.  So we know what happened in the Flood Timeline up through TWW, and we know when it happened (approximately).  If you’re interested in Zelda storylines and lore, TWW is one of the best game to play.  In addition to having one of the more revealing prologues, and one of the more surprising and well-thought-out storylines, it also has a lot of detail put into it.  For example, if you play the second quest, all the previously-unintelligible ancient Hylian text will be translated. (Wondering if that’s a nod to Ico.)

TP has a deceptively simple storyline if you aren’t paying close attention to the connections made to a couple of the other games.  In future entries, I’ll discuss the connections to A Link to the Past and Four Swords Adventures, but what we’re concerned with now is those to OOT.  Partway through TP, a cut-scene plays that shows the attempt to have Ganondorf executed.  The game is less explicit about how this connects to OOT than TWW was, but we can see how it ties in nonetheless.  Also in this interview regarding TP, Aonuma says flat out that the game takes place 100 years after OOT, which is the exact same thing he said about TWW.  If that doesn’t provide solid evidence for the split timeline, I don’t know what does.  To review, kid Link and Zelda, after the adventure in OOT, decide not to open the Door of Time and to just try to reveal Ganondorf’s plot the good old fashioned way, which leads to his attempted execution.  The execution (by the sages) fails when they discover Ganondorf possesses the Triforce of Power, so they seal him in The Twilight Realm instead, which leads to TP.  It’s important to note that these sages are not the sages we meet in OOT, but whatever sages already existed during OOT’s kid time.

TP’s and TWW’s positions on my timeline are pretty well backed up with those interviews and, more importantly, with the storylines of the games themselves.  There isn’t a whole lot else to say.   There will be plenty of confusion and uncertainty to go around when we start connecting TP to the other games.

Inevitably I’ve neglected to make some connections so far.  With a timeline like this one, it had to happen unless I wanted to discuss everything in one entry.  I’ll leave you this time with two separate timelines that relate to the games I’ve covered so far, and in a future entry, we’ll connect them.  A quick note: none of the timelines I will display will indicate the amount of time between the games in any way.  I’m just concerned with order right now.

Split Timeline
Ocarina of Time
Majora’s Mask          The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess                                  -

Old Games Timeline
A Link to the Past
Link’s Awakening
The Legend of Zelda
The Adventure of Link

Again the pattern seems to hold up: when OOT was released, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto said that it was the earliest Zelda story and predated the four previous games.   He said this in a 1998 interview with Nintendo Power.  This is the same interview I discussed last post in which he seemingly mixes up the order of the other games (saying that the original NES games take place before ALTTP).  I think you could easily criticize me for picking and choosing what I want to believe from his statements, but again, all other evidence for the positions of OOT and ALTTP point to them being prequels to the games that precede them.

Even if you want to argue about the order of the first four games, it’s pretty well understood that OOT was the earliest game upon its release.  Another solid bit of evidence is as follows: In vol. 236 of Nintendo Power, Eiji Aonuma said that they named the sages in OOT after the towns in The Adventure of Link so that it would seem like the towns had been named after the sages (and then NP goes on to remind us that TAOL takes place after OOT on the timeline).  It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

In addition to being a landmark of gameplay, OOT happens to be perhaps the single most crucial element of the timeline.  Besides the fact that it tells the story of the Triforce and introduces Ganon’s human form: Ganondorf, it also happens to be the point at which the continuity for the whole series splits in two.

OK, make sure you keep up if you don’t already know how the OOT split works.  In the game, Link frequently time travels using the Master Sword between his childhood and his adulthood, a seven year difference.  Remember that Ganondorf tricked young Link and Zelda into opening the Door of Time and granting him access to the Sacred Realm.  That’s the reason he gets so powerful and has screwed up so much of Hyrule seven years later.  What matters is OOT’s ending.  After they defeat Ganondorf, Zelda decides that she wants Link to reclaim his lost childhood, so she uses the Ocarina to send Link back to the moment before they met (in the Hyrule Castle courtyard).  This very act (Zelda transporting Link through time) is what causes the split.  Up until this point, all the time travel was done by and for Link, and he always had the Ocarina with him.  Furthermore, when he time traveled back and forth, he always picked up where he left off in either his childhood or adulthood.    But when Zelda transports him back, it’s different because she chooses a specific moment in time to send him back to and she enacts the time travel on Link and remains herself seven years in the future.

Here’s an explanation of what happens on the kid side of things, straight from Aonuma himself in an interview regarding Twilight Princess: “In the last scene of Ocarina of Time, kids Link and Zelda have a little talk, and as a consequence of that talk, their relationship with Ganon takes a whole new direction. In the middle of this game [TP], there’s a scene showing Ganon’s execution. It was decided that Ganon be executed because he’d do something outrageous if they left him be.”  So sometime after young Link and Zelda chat in that courtyard (Link still has the memory of everything that happened throughout OOT), they decide to try and convince the King to have Ganondorf executed (as seen in TP) rather than open the door to the Sacred Realm and make the same mistake again.  The other side of the coin is that adult Zelda is still back there seven years later in a parallel timeline, after Ganondorf is defeated, but there’s no Link of any kind (because she sent him back to his childhood).  TWW explains what happens on this “adult” timeline, but I’d rather wait and get to all that next post.

MM is a direct sequel to OOT.  It just is.  Nintendo said something to this effect when the game was released, and there are plenty of in-game references.  Termina is a parallel land of Hyrule, specifically the Hyrule we were used to from OOT.  Link has the Ocarina of Time, which doesn’t show up in the other games at all.  The instruction booklet for The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition says that Link departs after defeating Ganon and traveling in time…get the picture?  MM stars the same Link months later on the kid timeline.

Again, sorry if this is confusing, but I didn’t come up with it.

There’s a video on GameTrailers.com (part 6  of a pre-TP retrospective they did) that has a good solid explanation of how the timeline split occurs if you don’t understand what I was talking about earlier.  (A note: I really recommend taking the rest of their timeline, post MM, with a grain of salt.  I don’t get  a sense they did a ton of research.  Plus, they didn’t have the insight that TP, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Track have given us.)

Now, I’ve explained that the timeline branches off after OOT, but I have yet to explain which side(s) the original games belong on.  I’ll save that for next time.  For now, check out the chronology of the first six games in the series:

Ocarina of Time
[timeline split]
Majora’s Mask
A Link to the Past
Link’s Awakening
The Legend of Zelda
The Adventure of Link

Stay tuned…

The Legend of Zelda was released (in the U.S.) in July of 1987, and in that original game there wasn’t a whole lot to go on in terms of storyline.  If you let the title screen linger before going ahead to the file screen, you get treated to a little scroll that gives you a general idea of why Link is standing in the middle of a field when you start playing.  In this game, Ganon (“Gannon” at the time) has captured Zelda, but she was able to shatter and scatter the Triforce of Wisdom, so your goal is to find and reassemble the pieces in order to defeat Ganon and save Zelda and the land of Hyrule.  Classic.  This game has no towns and the only characters are the old people in the caves, the fairies, and the occasional talking Moblin.  Nintendo is generally all about the gameplay, and the original Zelda game is a perfect example of that philosophy.

The Adventure of Link was released the next year and they decided to make it a completely different type of game: a side-scrolling action RPG complete with a world map and experience points.  This game sticks out like a sore thumb in the Zelda series in terms of genre, but luckily it’s pretty easy to tell where it belongs chronologically…at least in relation to TLOZ.  We really only need one piece of evidence for this one, and it comes directly from TAOL’s instruction booklet, which says that “several seasons” have passed since the events of the first game.  If you’re unable to find this on the internet, Nintendo still sells photocopies of this instruction booklets for $1.25 from their online store.

This is a good time to bring something up regarding the reliability of various types of sources.  I think we can all agree that the single best way to nail down the timeline would be to use only evidence taken directly from the games themselves.  However, when that’s not available, opinions differ about where to look next.  My general rule is to look at official Zelda-related literature, such as interviews with the main designers, instruction booklets, and such.  Consider the fact that most older games had little storytelling, and would often rely on their booklets to fill things in.  This is why I think it’s worthwhile to include them, though it’s good to be cautious.

There’s something else very important I need to mention.  The plot of TAOL is that Zelda has fallen under a sleeping spell, and so your quest is to wake her up.  The thing is, the Zelda you’re trying to wake up is not the one you saved from Ganon in the previous game.  The instruction booklet explains all of this: long ago there was a princess named Zelda and her father told her a secret regarding the Triforce before he died.  Her brother wanted the secret (under the influence of a “magician”), and she got the sleeping spell put on her when she wouldn’t tell. Her brother then, out of guilt, declared that all princesses born into the royal family from that point on would be called Zelda.  There ya go.  In 1988 Nintendo gave us the explanation for why there are so many princesses named Zelda, and we didn’t even need it yet.  Anyway, this legend happened a while before TLOZ took place (we are talking about the original Princess Zelda here), so there are two coexisting Zeldas in these games, and the Zelda from TLOZ is not the one you’re saving in TOAL.  You’re saving one who is much older (though still youthful, presumably due to the spell).  To my knowledge, the game never attempts to fill you in on this little detail, but it’s right there in the booklet.

Okay, A Link to the Past (1992).  Let me start by admitting that I’m only about halfway through this game and I don’t know many details about the game’s individual storyline.  Again, though, there are one or two very clear things that place this game where it belongs.  The back of the original box for the Super NES game states “The predecessors of Link and Zelda face monsters on the march when a menacing magician takes over the kingdom.”  Pretty clear.  Also consider that the title of this game is A Link to the Past.   I should note that Miyamoto did an interview with Nintendo Power in 1998 (release year of OOT) in which he stated that the order of the games was OOT → TLOZ → TAOL → ALTTP (He didn’t commit to a position for LA except that it was after OOT.), but since Nintendo has contradicted it officially and since Miyamoto has never seemed too concerned with video game storylines (just read some interviews), I think it’s relatively safe to chalk it up to mistake or perhaps the possibility that they had yet to determine/standardize the timeline at that point.

Finally, the shakiest element of my original timeline: Link’s Awakening for Game Boy, released in 1993.  The problem with this one is that the story starts with Link randomly getting shipwrecked at the beginning, so we lose the context of Hyrule.  It takes place on Koholint Island or a dream of Koholint island, depending on your interpretation.  Most sources or suggestions place it as a direct sequel to ALTTP, and this does make the most sense when you consider Nintendo’s general practice of releasing Zelda games.  According to the booklet, Link sets off from Hyrule after defeating Ganon.  Though this could technically place it after any of the games, ALTTP is the most likely since Link fights the shadow of Agahnim in LA, who is a main antagonist of ALTTP.  I completely acknowledge the possibility that LA could fall elsewhere, but all blurry signs point to it being a direct sequel to ALTTP.

There you have it, a wordy, shaky explanation of the chronology of the original four games.  There’s little doubt that TAOL is the direct sequel to TLOZ, and ALTTP is generally understood as a prequel to both.  LA is likely the third game’s direct sequel, but I have no definitive statement to prove it.  The timeline so far:

A Link to the Past
Link’s Awakening
The Legend of Zelda
The Adventure of Link

Until we meet again…