Thursday, July 22, 2010

Skyward Sword's Timeline Placement

Aonuma confirmed in the latest issue of the Official Nintendo magazine, that there's indeed an official timeline document and that Skyward Sword will take place before Ocarina of Time.

"Yes, there is a master timeline but it is a confidential document! The only people to have access to that document are myself, Mr. Miyamoto and the director of the title. We cant share it with anyone else!"

"I have already talked to Mr. Miyamoto about this so I am comfortable in releasing this information, this title [Skyward Sword] takes place before Ocarina of Time."

"If I said that a certain title was 'the first Zelda game', then that means that we cant ever make a title that takes place before that! So for us to add titles to the series, we have to have a way of putting the titles before or after each other."


Both news aren't very surprising. We knew about the timeline document for a long time now. I guess, it's very simplistic and just shows the basic relationships between the games. Because that's the only way it could work fine. Zelda fans tend to get too much into details, when it comes to the timeline. Like which side character appeared in which game or what's up with the Master Sword in the Oracle games and so on. As a Zelda fan, who likes to write about Zelda, I surprisingly talk very rarely about the timeline. Maybe it's time for an article about that. :D However, even if the official timeline might be simple compared to most fan timelines, it's still very confusing and complicated. Which is why Nintendo will probably never show this to the public. With all the different eras, the different Links and Zeldas it's probably quite a mess and not as clear as the Metroid timeline for example.

About Skyward Sword's timeline placement, we could have guessed this pretty much since the artwork from last year's E3:



At E3 2010 they even confirmed, that the "Skyward Sword" is the girl and that it will become the legendary Master Sword at one point in the game. So, if the story deals with the origins of the Master Sword, the game pretty has to be placed before Ocarina of Time. This should be logical. But what's interesting is that in Ocarina we were told the origins of Ganondorf. Which could mean, that there's no "Gannon" involved in the new game.

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