Everything You Know About Zelda: Breath Of The Wild & Tears Of The Kingdom Just Changed

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The placement of and have been contentious topics since the release of both games, but a new official timeline from Nintendo provides an unexpected answer. With their open-world, nonlinear approach to gameplay and exploration, and were massive departures from the games that preceded them, giving them a unique position in the series — and even outside of gameplay, parts of the games' lore have made them hard for fans to fit into a continuous timeline.

While most games are implicitly designed as standalone games first and foremost, they can also generally fit together in a general timeline of events, with fans having pieced together an unofficial sequence well before Nintendo officially established a timeline for the series in 2011's. However, both and its direct sequel, have been troublesome to fit into a timeline, owing to details like referencing events in different split timelines and the introduction of the ancient civilization of the Zonai.

The Legend of Zelda timeline is already convoluted, but the release of Tears of the Kingdom proves that it’s actually meaningless in the end.

However, the Nintendo Live 2024 event held in Sydney, as shown by @Wario64 on X, has unveiled a new official timeline for the franchise, showing both and as separate from the rest of the timeline. While this is consistent with the games themselves, as neither nor fit neatly into what was established beforehand, it does directly contradict the previous most popular way of reconciling them with the timeline, which placed them an extremely long amount of time after the previous games.

Previously, any discussions of a unified timeline would try to place all the games in a single timeline, piecing together small details and references across the games to place them in sequence with each other. In some cases, this did lead to splits in the timeline, such as the «Adult» and «Child» timelines after, which were first pieced together by fans and then later confirmed by Nintendo, but there was