I've never seen that as an excuse. Zelda has taken place in pretty diverse settings: underground, shadow dimensions, the freakin' moon! It's not like Nintendo couldn't strip the characters out of their setting and put them in the world of Fallout thereby making the characters nothing more than faceless pawns who merely identify as Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf. Is the point you're making that the series has been based on an excuse against itself from the very beginning since we saw the label on that gold cartridge before we even turned the game on? I'm not saying that using the same map again doesn't fit the setting or story, it does make sense, I'm just wondering if it makes sense from a marketing standpoint to give us the same seeing yet again. I feel like Nintendo will change it up to some degree but it still have me pause when I saw that it was the same world in design.