For almost as long as The Legend of Zelda as a franchise has existed, Nintendo players the world over have been trying to make sense of the timeline.
After all, other than 1987’s Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link for the NES, no other mainline instalment has included a number at the end of its title. The Legend of Zelda is an action-adventure series that’s a lot more freeform when compared to a lot of other long-running franchises, choosing to remix and rework certain themes and elements for every new release, rather than setting each one immediately after the last in sequential order.
Not helping matters is the fact that the very first The Legend of Zelda doesn’t even come first in the timeline. Then, complicating matters once again, is in how there’s not just one, but three separate timelines that sees the events of certain titles in the series run parallel to one another. However, thanks to the book Hyrule Historia published by Nintendo in 2011 and authored by key creatives like Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma, we have a better sense of where all 19 The Legend of Zelda games fall in the timeline(s).
