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Which games would you drop from the Zelda canon?

Joined
Oct 6, 2016
Gender
Manly man
Let's say that you were in charge of cleaning up the Zelda canon.

Aonuma has let you keep and drop games throughout the timeline, whichever game you drop from the timeline will no longer be canon...

Which games would you drop from the canon?
TFH. It doesn't contradict anything being in the timeline, but it feels like a spinoff.

Aside from that, nothing.
 

Dio

~ It's me, Dio!~
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Jul 6, 2011
Location
England
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Absolute unit
Any game that isn't OOT, MM, WW, PH, ST and TP. They are the only ones that have connections that work. ALTTP's backstory doesn't really describe what happened in OoT accurately at all and therefore any sequels wouldn't fit in the canon and as for FSA. It sucks and is not a fitting sequel to TP at all.

I'd also make HW a canon entry. It's better than most actual Zelda games nor does it affect the main timeline as every character is returned to their original universe and time at the end.
 
Joined
Oct 30, 2018
I would drop Triforce Heroes, Minish Cap, Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, and Breath of the Wild. The story would still be the same without them. By the way does the Tingle games count as Canon, if so drop them too. They're still great games on their own, I just don't believe they should stay in the timeline.
 
Skewered Sword, The Minish Cap, Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, Tri Force Heroes, A Link Between Worlds, and maybe Breath of the Wild, too. The games are fine as standalone games, but they just muck up too much in the grand scheme of things to really deserve a place in the timeline? BotW can kiiind of get away with it because it's so isolated from the rest of the games in the first place, but, yeah, no, still not gonna buy that whole 10000 year civilization thing. Mucky.
 
Skyward Sword, Minish Cap, Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, Tri Force Heroes, A Link Between Worlds, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks.

Maybe Breath of the Wild but it is too far removed from anything to matter.
 

Cfrock

Keep it strong
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Mar 17, 2012
Location
Liverpool, England
All of them.

Not a joke, I'd remove each and every one of them from canon and then declare, officially, that each game is simply the telling of individual legends, sometimes even the same legend, shaped by time and oral tradition and lost lore and what not. My favourite piece of Zelda lore/narrative/story/whatever is the opening line to The Wind Waker:

"This is but one of the legends of which the people speak..."

I'd have every game framed in that manner, that this is you being told a legend. It instantly resolves any and all contradictions, it leaves an infinite amount of space for the franchise to branch out narratively, you can still have specific games as direct sequels, and you can still have a thriving theory scene as people can try to piece together the meta history of the true history these legends are based on, the real events they are a corruption of.

Zelda was never designed with coherent continuity as a priority. The best thing to do would be to not pretend it was.
 

DarkestLink

Darkest of all Dark Links
Joined
Oct 28, 2012
Everything in the Downfall Timelime. Also FS, FSA (which adds little), and BOTW (which is a mess). HW could potentially be canon...maybe normal HW before tWW and DLC is added on.

Might also remove SS. Maybe. I feel that while some parts of the backstory were good or acceptable, some parts were just awful, and I really hate the sci-fi background it gives Hyrule.

All of them.

Not a joke, I'd remove each and every one of them from canon and then declare, officially, that each game is simply the telling of individual legends, sometimes even the same legend, shaped by time and oral tradition and lost lore and what not. My favourite piece of Zelda lore/narrative/story/whatever is the opening line to The Wind Waker:

"This is but one of the legends of which the people speak..."

I'd have every game framed in that manner, that this is you being told a legend. It instantly resolves any and all contradictions, it leaves an infinite amount of space for the franchise to branch out narratively, you can still have specific games as direct sequels, and you can still have a thriving theory scene as people can try to piece together the meta history of the true history these legends are based on, the real events they are a corruption of.

Zelda was never designed with coherent continuity as a priority. The best thing to do would be to not pretend it was.

I would also except this.
 

thePlinko

What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
ZD Legend
Only TFH, though I would also move FSA to the downfall timeline.

I would hate to see HW be canon, people already think the timeline is a jumbled mess, HW would just make things far worse because the of the fact that you are not only time traveling to other games, but as of the dlc you are also dimension hopping. That and I also really disliked HW, but that doesn’t mater.

I never understood why people didn’t think SS fit in with the timeline well, sure there are a few minor plot-holes, but it’s like that in every game.


All of them.

Not a joke, I'd remove each and every one of them from canon and then declare, officially, that each game is simply the telling of individual legends, sometimes even the same legend, shaped by time and oral tradition and lost lore and what not. My favourite piece of Zelda lore/narrative/story/whatever is the opening line to The Wind Waker:

"This is but one of the legends of which the people speak..."

I'd have every game framed in that manner, that this is you being told a legend. It instantly resolves any and all contradictions, it leaves an infinite amount of space for the franchise to branch out narratively, you can still have specific games as direct sequels, and you can still have a thriving theory scene as people can try to piece together the meta history of the true history these legends are based on, the real events they are a corruption of.

Zelda was never designed with coherent continuity as a priority. The best thing to do would be to not pretend it was.

I hate it when a series does this. Games are supposed to build a world, and it can’t when you can never see the outcome of a game or how it affects the world in the future. Sure zelda doesn’t do this all of the time, but part of the reason I love WW so much is because it’s a continuation of OoT. Also saying that the series has never been designed to be coherent is outright wrong, as AoL was clearly a direct sequel to LoZ, LttP was stated in the manual as a prequel to LoZ, and LA was clearly a sequel to LttP. Also that beginning line of WW is only there to reference OoT as told by the people in WW, so you just invalidated your own argument.
 
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DarkestLink

Darkest of all Dark Links
Joined
Oct 28, 2012
I hate it when a series does this. Games are supposed to build a world, and it can’t when you can never see the outcome of a game or how it affects the world in the future. Sure zelda doesn’t do this all of the time, but part of the reason I love WW so much is because it’s a continuation of OoT. Also saying that the series has never been designed to be coherent is outright wrong, as AoL was clearly a direct sequel to LoZ, LttP was stated in the manual as a prequel to LoZ, and LA was clearly a sequel to LttP. Also that beginning line of WW is only there to reference OoT as told by the people in WW, so you just invalidated your own argument.

Yeah, it would be nice for some continuity...but Nintendo seems to really suck at this. Even during tWW.
 

Castle

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It's as if @Spirit wants me to make her cry again...

Yeah, Zelda canon is all messed up. It's a shame too because up until Wind Waker it was all pretty neat and tidy. Then ninty got distracted and wandered off out of the home confused.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Wind Waker is a good enough game in its own right but it has no business being a Zelda game. It has every business being its own unique adventure and it would be better served if it was. Disruptive art style and gimmicky overworlds and forms of travel notwithstanding, I've already ranted at length at the betrayal to players and previous games that Wind Waker has to conspire to just to make the premise of the game's sailboat work. The writers had to nuke Hyrule for it to make any shred of sense. SO MUCH FOR SAVING IT! And they didn't even have to do that. It has already been established that Hyrule has an ocean! Or at least access to one. The premise of an entire game is predicated on this knowledge! Link set SAIL in Links Awakening. Dude was on a boat, lost at sea and everything!

Despite all the talk of old Hyrule beneath the waves and Ganon(dorf?)'s presence and the King of Hyrule being a major character there is no real connection to previous games or the rest of the series in Wind Waker. Heck, this isn't even really Link and ZeldaTetra's fight because Hyrule has nothing to do with them. Sure that's a major thematic aspect of the story that an age old war being fought by a couple of old fogies over a long dead kingdom nobody else knows of or cares about is posing an unfortunate inconvenience to a bunch of kids but it still stands that the story and premise of Wind Waker is so far removed from the series that its relevance on it is lost. Tetra even has to physically and even mentally literally magically turn into standard series Zelda just so the title character can be in the game.

While Suckward's story is - after all - lore relevant, its explanation of needless details is beside the point. Nobody f-king cares how the bird emblem motif got on the Hylian Shield! We don't need a 80hr+ major main series console installment to explain that, thank you! This could be explained in a few lines of NPC dialog in any given Zelda title past, present or future. This would be like having an entire game devoted to explaining the lore behind the man whose eye could see the truth that some random dude sums up in a few lines of dialog in Ocarina of Time.

And the details that are relevant to the lore are insipid and ruin so many things it's appalling. Ganon and Zelda's origin story completely wrecks an entire series worth of building Ganondorf and Zelda's characters. To this day I will simply hear no talk of Demise or Hylia as if it never happened. Because it didn't. Because Suckward reads like one of those inane fables about how the Zebra got its stripes or some such bull$#!% that only stupid parents tell to gullible babies. And getting all specific about the whole reincarnation thing opens up major inconsistencies that contradict with what is already understood about the lore. Instead of offering greater understanding it actually makes things more confusing.

And it is obvious that Breath of the Wild is deliberately trying to distance itself so much from the rest of the series in a desperate attempt to excuse itself. Nevermind in terms of gameplay, Ninty played it safe by having it so far removed from any established series lore it couldn't possibly interfere. I'll leave it up to philosophers to decide whether or not that can actually qualify it as part of the Zelda series.

I can't be too hard on obvious side projects like FSA or TFH or Minish Cap or the DS Wind Waker sequels and such. They speak for themselves. It's pretty obvious that these entries are just there to tide players over until the next main console installment and aren't going to try too hard to fit in - not that ninty bothers to make sense of what can no longer properly be considered a series anymore with their main line titles anyway.

The last Zelda game that made any shred of sense in regards to the lore or just the basic logical progression of a series was Twilight Princess.
 
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thePlinko

What’s the character limit on this? Aksnfiskwjfjsk
ZD Legend
It's as if @Spirit wants me to make her cry again...

Yeah, Zelda canon is all messed up. It's a shame too because up until Wind Waker it was all pretty neat and tidy. Then ninty got distracted and wandered off out of the home confused.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Wind Waker is a good enough game in its own right but it has no business being a Zelda game. It has every business being its own unique adventure and it would be better served if it was. Disruptive art style and gimmicky overworlds and forms of travel notwithstanding, I've already ranted at length at the betrayal to players and previous games that Wind Waker has to conspire to just to make the premise of the game's sailboat work. The writers had to nuke Hyrule for it to make any shred of sense. SO MUCH FOR SAVING IT!

Despite all the talk of old Hyrule beneath the waves and Ganon(dorf?)'s presence and the King of Hyrule being a major character there is no real connection to previous games or the rest of the series in Wind Waker. Heck, this isn't even really Link and ZeldaTetra's fight because Hyrule has nothing to do with them. Sure that's a major thematic aspect of the story that an age old war being fought by a couple of old fogies over a long dead kingdom nobody else knows of or cares about is posing an unfortunate inconvenience to a bunch of kids but it still stands that the story and premise of Wind Waker is so far removed from the series that its relevance on it is lost. Tetra even has to physically and even mentally literally magically turn into standard series Zelda just so the title character can be in the game.

The last Zelda game that made any shred of sense in regards to the lore or just the basic logical progression of a series was Twilight Princess.


You think TPs story made sense in the continuity, yet as soon as you introduce a boat it sucks...

I honestly don’t see your point in why destroying hyrule is the worst plot point since the faked moon landings. It makes sense to me, Ganondorf escaped, link didn’t show up, they had to do something or else Ganondorf won.
Saying that is a bad plot point is like saying that they needed a reason to have link start in the forest in OoT so they pulled a war out of thin air and made Link a refugee, which is a bad thing.

WW references the events of OoT all the time! In fact I would say that it has the most connection to another game out of any other game in the series, even ST and MM. The mere fact that the beginning is literally a scroll telling the player about OoT, and the fact that tetra is obsessed with finding hyrule is evidence enough of this being the case. At least WW didn’t introduce new major deities and dimensions and then act like they have always existed throughout the entire series like TP did.
 

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