Posted by jsomau 10 hours ago
Nintendo’s own timeline is the authority here (Hyrule Historia and their chronicle page). The fun part was rethinking how to visualize it. It branches at the end of Ocarina into three eras depending on whether Link wins or loses, so each era is its own thread on the cloth. The threads meet again much later with Breath of the Wild.
I had a lot of help from Claude. I’d often thought about building things like this but never found the time between the day job and the rest of life.
Idk why we can't enjoy Zelda games for what they are - each game has recurring core cast, similar mythological archetypes & thematic motifs, and similar gameplay, but are all independent of each other. Even the games that are direct sequels to each other are still very independent.
But then Link returns to his childhood time. As a child, Link warns Zelda about Ganon, and preempts the future (where Ganon takes power and adult Link defeats him) from happening. So, there are at least two timelines.
Majora's Mask follows this child Link in one of the few explicit sequels in the series.
But then Wind Waker faces off against the Ganon defeated by adult Link. This is explicitly referenced in the text but it's not so clear-cut a sequel.
Meanwhile, Ocarina of Time was explicitly a prequel to A Link to the Past (depicting the events described in ALttP's backstory). But (1) some events don't quite line up and (2) the continuity of games established in the other timelines can't really neatly fit the ALttP-LA-OoS/OoA-LoZ-LA chronology. So a third timeline is just the neatest way to do it.
None of this really matters for playing or understanding the games, though. With the exception of Majora's Mask (and Phantom Hourglass / Spirit Tracks to a lesser extent), each Zelda game can be enjoyed as someones first Zelda.
I think this is neat and honestly the perfect use of an LLM, just some for-fun project to visualize something completely inconsequential and nostalgic.
Somehow is devolved into dunking on the west and other unfortunate “better than thou” comments.
I'm gonna be the annoying guy and ask... Why? There's an official timeline page and if you want more details there's a page on a community maintained wiki (even independent from the hell that is wikia/fandom/whatever their current name is). I understand there's sense of accomplishment in personal projects... But a lot of this seems to be done by AI anyway, and that's my main gripe. Why are we wasting computing like this? To me this feels on par to using AI for things that can otherwise be easily looked up on a search engine (as long as your SE lets you filter through the slop)
I'm sorry if this feels like a personal attack - it really isn't my intention, but why are we pretending that things like this have no impact? And yes I know massive AI usage in corporate environments, slop image/video generation, etc have much more impact and that even that is still small compared to the amount of compute used from training (EDIT: and yes, what i'm mad about is specifically the environmental impact from this wasted compute). But that argument feels a lot like "my single vote doesn't count". Could we try to not make it worse? Sorry for being a party pooper i guess.
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