If we're talking alternate timeline models, I'll toss my hat into the ring! Behold, the Cluster Timeline Model
Looking at the development of the games, it's clear that there are little chunks the games are developed in. You
could choose to put them all in a single line, or make branching lines, but I think this isn't the best way to interpret them. Instead, it's better to take them as groups which have interior linearity, but may or may not have linearity across groups. The reason why I think this model is more useful than either a single- or multi-branch one is that it takes thematic similarity as the primary point of continuity. It gets around a lot of the discussion about how the time travel in the series affects timeline placement by situating time travel within specific narrative contexts as a narrative device. As well, it makes for a more enjoyable experience when actually playing the games; not only are there thematic through lines within the narratives of games in a cluster, but there's also through lines with the evolution of gameplay. The major limitation I have with proposing this model is that I haven't played every major game in the series. But I still think it's worth adding to the discussion.
My clusters, named as they are because I think it's fun, would be roughly like this:
The Legends of Ruin: The War
The first four games in the series fit into this cluster, as well as the
Oracle games(though not in the way they typically are grouped with these games) and
A Link Between Worlds. While the actual in-game narrative of the first two games is rather light, the instruction manuals do give them some more weight. The Imprisoning War is set as a cataclysm which Hyrule never truly recovers from; Ganon is always there in the background, waiting to break free. And even though he's defeated in the Sacred Realm, the delayed end of the kingdom of Hyrule still plays out. Hyrule becomes a title for a wider region, and the kingdom itself becomes an obscure relic of a bygone age. Zelda is just from an obscure kingdom in Hyrule. When Ganon returns, there's not even really much of a way to resist him; Link is just some kid Impa finds to help her who then decides to go on a very dangerous quest alone. After the Triforces of Power and Wisdom are recovered, there does seem to be an effort to look back into the history of Hyrule, as well as the seemingly forgotten Triforce of Courage. But this cluster ends with that kind of backward-looking feel. Hyrule's best days are behind it, but there's not nothing left to take out of the ashes.
Link's Awakening is kind of a microcosm of the cluster; a peaceful land steadily can't maintain the problems it suppresses until they break out and bring about the end of that land, but its legacy still survives in part(Marin, the Wind Fish). The
Oracle games, then, serve as an epilogue; the Triforce was able to be kept together, there's lots of places where people live good lives, and Ganon
can be effectively defeated to prevent another cataclysm like the Imprisoning War. It's a a post- and post-post-apocalypse kind of thing. When it gets to
A Link Between Worlds, Lorule acts as a kind of testing ground; Lorule is similar to the Hyrule which failed, and the experience of recovering has created a Link who can help prevent history from repeating itself somewhere else.
The Legends of Understanding
This cluster contains
Ocarina of Time and
Majora's Mask. Since time travel is the aspect that usually causes problems, I think it's important to look at why time travel is used at all in the story as opposed to finding a very literal way to understand its mechanics. Both of these games are focused on understanding people better. In
Ocarina of Time, time travel is a way to convey the different kinds of access to problems and their solutions children and adults have. While seven years have passed, Hyrule is still Hyrule; Ganondorf taking over can't be the only thing that brought everything to ruin in such a short time. As a child, Link handles smaller problems that adults should probably be able to take care of, but don't because they're too mired in the flaws of their institutions. As an adult, Link has to help people recover from the failures of those institutions to protect against Ganondorf because he's come to be experienced enough to do so. But Link, even if it wasn't in his control, still left a lot of people he'd made connections with alone for almost a decade. It's possible to reconnect to a point, but things have changed, and it can't be the same as it was. That itself is a problem of growing up that can be hard to deal with.
Majora's Mask's time travel is much more straightforward as a narrative device: it serves to contain the scope of the game. It creates a framework for the stories of the characters to play out on while also limiting progression in such a way that the story doesn't get lost in its own details. But putting time travel aside, both games are very focused on seeing how people's relationships develop given different circumstances, I just think people don't realize it as much with
Ocarina since it's the major driving force of
Majora.
The Legends of Cooperation
Minish Cap and the
Four Swords games are in this cluster. Admittedly, I've only played one game(the first
Four Swords) from this cluster extensively. But the idea is that even in
Minish Cap, cooperation between Link and someone else is required to progress the story. Ezlo is important both in the narrative and gameplay in a way that characters like Navi and Tatl aren't. And of course, in the
Four Swords games, Link has to cooperate with himself and the player has to potentially cooperate with other players. I could probably come up with more for this if I knew more, but the Four Sword itself is at least a through line.
The Legends of Ruin: The Flood
Broadly speaking, this cluster is really similar thematically to the other Legends of Ruin(hence the name). The three games in it(
Wind Waker,
Phantom Hourglass, and
Spirit Tracks) cover a generally similar progression as
The War, except without an analog to
A Link to the Past which gives an idea of what Hyrule used to be like. Yes, I know that game is
Ocarina of Time, I'll get to fitting clusters together more later. It suffices to say for now that
Ocarina doesn't really fit in as an intentional prequel in the same way that
A Link to the Past does. Regardless, these three games are kind of a more developed version of the story from
The War; Hyrule is destroyed and lost to time, uncovered in a quest to reunite the Triforce, there's a meditation on the end and survival past it, and then a resurgence. There may be other important through lines, but I haven't played any of
Wind Waker, and haven't played the DS games recently enough to remember well.
That leaves a few clusterless games. I could probably put
Twilight Princess in somewhere, the problem is that I haven't played it enough to know where
Skyward Sword doesn't lend itself well to the cluster structure intentionally; it's the earliest point and predates everything else in the series. Breath of the Wild is also unclear. However, it seems like a
Legends of Ruin-type story we've yet to see the result of.
When it comes to aligning the clusters into something more unified, I think that sort of misses the point. It doesn't really matter which cluster comes before or after which; knowing
Ocarina of Time's Hyrule is the one in
Wind Waker doesn't really add much to that game. It's nice as a callback, perhaps, but seeing the party at the end of
Ocarina and saying "Oh, this will all be underwater in a century" doesn't really mean much within the context of that game. You could try to place the clusters together, which is what I think the official timeline attempts to do, but they ultimately work better as co-existing clusters rather than a unified progression. At least, I think they do.
