The conclusion of this Zelda timeline discussion.
When Nintendo announced A Link Between Worlds I really thought it was going to fit into their existing Hyrule Historia Timeline and everything would be airtight. Instead, the placement ended up causing many more problems on their official timeline.
I played through A Link Between Worlds with the Hyrule Historia Timeline in mind, but was constantly confused and left scratching my head. This is even after consulting the big book many times to make sense of it all. As you can probably see, after some research, I found that Nintendo’s placement of A Link Between Worlds just doesn’t make sense.
The strange news is that after placing A Link Between Worlds on my own timeline, it magically fills in some of the only gaps I had and somehow manages to make the plot flow better. This came as big shock to me as I thought the release of a new game on this branch of the Zelda story would have destroyed everything I tried to fix with my own version of the timeline.
In fact, with how many problems the placement of A Link Between Worlds created on Nintendo’s own timeline, it’s crazy to think about how they haven’t completely destroyed the ability to piece together a working story by now. My guess is that Aonuma probably isn’t the guy who is worried, or cares, much about the timeline. There are probably a few Zelda lore masters in house at Nintendo that have come up with a timeline similar to my own. I feel that fans may be taking Aonuma’s word on a lot of timeline related things when they shouldn’t be because he consistently appears to not know what he’s talking about.
Overall, I’m still hopeful that Nintendo will someday release a revised version of their timeline. In the meantime, I just hope no future game will throw a wrench into the whole thing and unravel the entire plot.
May the way of the hero lead to the true timeline.