Video: Another Famous Zelda Location Returns In Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity

How does this work in canon? Or is Awakening not a dream in the BOTW timeline? I just have a lot of questions right now.

@alexybubble BOTW is more or less a "restart" on the Zelda timeline. The devs said it takes place at the end of every timeline...But it's pretty more of a "Everything else in the past doesn't really matter canon wise"

So glad Nintendo was able to work these fun little details in with Koei Tecmo, it just brings back a lot of fun memories!

@alexybubble It's also just a nice throwback, it doesn't have to inherently fit into the timeline. You can easily sidetrack canon arguments by saying 'oh it's just a place that looks similar to this other location'.

Developers put easter eggs into games all the time as a way to reward long time players or people who play other franchises. God forbid this meaning all easter eggs are canon, because that would mean Bayonetta is set in the same universe as The Legend of Zelda, Mario and Metroid and is actually an alter ego of Sonic the Hedgehog.

@QueenKittenWrite @Varkster I get that, and it's more of a thing that I'm surprised that they did it this close after the remake, which firmly established that Awakening was still a dream. If anything, I hope that this means that we get more of these. I'd love to see Clock town show up here as well.

@alexybubble I have two theories when it comes to the Zelda series and BOTW. The first is that the games are exactly what the series calls them, legends. There's an element of truth to a lot of legends, but not everything is true. It's a lot easier for me to sidestep the split timelines by having them be the results of repeated oral retellings over hundreds of thousands of years. The only constant truths you really need are Zelda, Link, and Ganon.

The other is that because BOTW is so far into the future there's a good chance that there are now towns that were made based on the legends of old. They're not the actual locations, but they were built by people who loved the stories of those places. That also works in reverse too. The locations in the old legends could have been based on real more ancient locations. That's why you always have locations like the Lost Woods, but where they are isn't always consistent between games.

@DonSerrot Brilliant. Good analysis. I think this is my new head-canon.

@DonSerrot this explanation is also the canonical reason why the sages from ocarina of time have the same names as the cities in adventure of link: the cities are named after them (obviously in real life it's the opposite since ocarina came after).
So, there's precedence for your theory!

@DonSerrot Great way to put it. My theory pre-Hyrule Historia so far as explaining why the landscape of Hyrule always seems to change from legend to legend was that earthquakes may have shifted landmarks around. Twilight Princess is a good example, as it has so many cliffs that drop down into the abyss (such as in Hyrule Field, Gerudo Desert, etc.). Hyrule Historia seemed to put that into perspective, but its reliability as an authoritative timeline record has seemed to wane somewhat over the years, especially with Breath Of The Wild in the mix.

@alexybubble This is actually easy to explain, if you recall dreams are made of parts of reality. It seems the village existed and was then dreamed into Awakening.

@alexybubble if you need it to fit a time line, then we can assume the other Link either dreamed about an existing town, or created a real Mabe village after dreaming about it.

@status-204 First thing in noticed in the demo in portable mode.
Gonna see how it is docked today.
I suspect the old Hyrule Warriors were more polished on Wii U.

I will probably buy it this year anyway as i'm a big fan of the previous, and it's not a Wii U port i already own.

@DonSerrot My theory has always been that the timeline somehow merged back together 10,000 years before the events of BOTW to create a reunified timeline with elements from each separate timeline appearing in the reunified one.

Maybe Ganondorf found a way to cross timelines and merged with his counterparts from the other timelines, thus becoming Calamity Ganon.

The reunification of the timeline was necessary to prevent the complete and utter destruction of Hyrule (as in, it would have disappeared, because it would have never existed in the first place) due to the temporal incursions that Ganon had made.

@status-204 Thats not good. So it feels worse than the first one on Wii U/Switch?

@alexybubble Well, maybe the dream Mabe Village was based on the real Mabe village? Their are some things that crossed over to the dream after all.

Or we're just overthinking Nintendo's cameos.

@DonSerrot @QueenKittenWrite I think it would be cool if Nintendo had a Zelda game that actually ends the timeline split.

Like, the 3 timelines (or realities) are actually draining power from the 3 individual pieces of the Triforce. So Link in one of the timelines has to travel through all three timelines using a special trinket in order to strengthen the individual pieces of the Triforce and then travel back in time to the very moment that the timeline splits - so basically Link travels to the Temple of Time to defeat Ganondorf before he has a chance to get to Link as he is pulling the Master Sword.

Once done, the three timelines kind of merge and create the Hyrule we see in BotW. This also justifies the "swearing in" ceremony in Breath of the Wild when Zelda references the heroes of the individual timelines to Link.

Boom, no more 3 timelines moving forward.

@AstroTheGamosian @GamingFan4Lyf Eh. I've long felt that them trying to make all the games into one timeline instead of just letting it be like Mario where each story is it's own thing unless it is specifically made as a sequel was a HUGE mistake. It wasn't really meant to be a coherent timeline, and I feel they only tried to make it one because that's what was popular with the fans at the time. Rather than make things even more convoluted just to try and "fix" the timeline I say let legends be legends. It's the simplest solution and it lets them do whatever works best for each new game going forward just like the old days instead of having to deal with slotting it into the split timeline. I feel like BOTW did exactly that in ignoring the split timeline and it turned out amazing.

@ToadBrigade That doesn't work because Zelda specifically mentions games in each of the different split timelines all within the same cutscene. It'd be one thing if they were just casual references out in the world, but these were part of a full on ceremony. There's no real way around bringing those timelines back together somehow if you want to keep the timelines split. There really isn't a clean way to deal with the timeline anymore.

The demo is fun

@DonSerrot Zelda herself only mentions games from one timeline in her speech.

The references to other lines are elsewhere.

I feel like some of the DLC fighters are coming back..

@alexybubble you never have dreams based on real locations?

@Ventilator I tried it on TV now, and the performance is so bad that i will wait and see if it improves before i buy it.
It seem to be 20 fps at best.

They should degrade all the shadows to increase frame rate.