Nintendo is pretty fond of acknowledging its anniversaries. This year, it’s celebrating Mario’s 35th birthday by bringing three of his classic 3D adventures to the Switch, and in 2011, the studio released The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Zelda’s 25th birthday, taking the series back to its in-lore roots. In both cases, Nintendo found fun ways to look forward while also looking back at how far these very successful lines of games have come.
Next year, there’s bound to be another big celebration. Fans are getting pretty optimistic that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 will be Nintendo’s way of celebrating the Zelda franchise’s 35th anniversary after the game was announced last year. Unfortunately, Nintendo hasn’t said a whole lot about Breath of the Wild 2 since the game was announced, short of assurances that the developer is still hard at work.
Fans didn’t go totally without Zelda this year, though, since there was a big announcement: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. This sort of prequel is a big deal for Breath of the Wild‘s lore, and that includes the sequel. There’s been a lot of theories about how the sequel is going to explore this incarnation of Hyrule, including time travel. It’d be ambitious, but definitely not out of the norm for Zelda, but it seems much less likely now.
It’s pretty uncommon for Zelda games to get prequels. Games might appear all over the timeline, but usually they don’t tell a story that involves Link setting up the plot of a game that’s already come out. Age of Calamity stands out that way. It’s possible in large part because Breath of the Wild made it possible. That game establishes right off the bat that a huge part of Link’s life has already taken place before the start of the game, and he’s lost 100 years of time. Link’s amnesia was a great device throughout Breath of the Wild, allowing him to slowly uncover a story that’s already happened as he picks up the pieces from that story’s fallout.
Age of Calamity will be a unique opportunity to actually go back and delve into that story. No longer will Link have to find far-off landmarks and shake loose the lingering scraps of his past from the corners of his brain. Now players will play through the tragic sequence of events that led to that amnesia. However, even though it’s sure to be a narrative that players wish they could change as they lose Link’s closest allies, it seems increasingly unlikely that Nintendo will to return to this period in BotW 2. If anything, it might decide to let Link’s past lie and focus on what’s ahead for Hyrule for a few reasons.
For one thing, Hyrule’s past is going to be well-treaded ground by the time fans have played through Age of Calamity. Not only did players get to experience some of the war with Calamity Ganon through flashbacks in Breath of the Wild, but now there will have been a whole game dedicated specifically to that time period. It might start to get stale if Breath of the Wild 2 is all about revisiting the past. Instead, Nintendo might think it’s a better idea to tell a story about what’s coming next for this society in ruins. There’s plenty of compelling narratives to tell about Link and Zelda trying to rebuild Hyrule while being waylaid by the foreshadowed return of Ganondorf.
Once the past is familiar ground for players to play through, there just won’t be anything left to learn about that time period. If anything, it might be more likely that some level of time travel involves stepping into the future to cut off Ganondorf’s machinations at new angles. A game like that would practically be a spiritual successor of Ocarina of Time, and while that would be a worthy way to celebrate the franchise’s anniversary, it doesn’t seem likely. Right now The Legend of Zelda is in a significant period of change where Nintendo is experimenting with the formula. It’s more likely that the company will try something bold and new rather than follow in the footsteps of old games.
The distinct possibility that time travel is out for Breath of the Wild 2 might be a little disappointing to some fans. This theory really made the rounds for a whil, and was pretty compelling even with the information on the game being so limited. Certainly, Age of Calamity doesn’t prove anything, as the BotW sequel trailer indicates that there will be a lot of magic going around in the game, and it’s hard to say what kind of magic that’ll be until Nintendo actually says more. If Nintendo decides that the way to stop Ganondorf lies elsewhere in the timeline, then it’ll happen, but until that looks likely again, the time travel theory should probably be taken with an even bigger grain of salt.
It’s sort of ironic that the next Hyrule Warriors game would make players doubt there’s time travel in Zelda‘s near future. After all, the last game was all about Link’s distant allies from across his past coming to the same period to fight evil. Age of Calamity promises to be a much more grounded experience, tied directly into the main series’ lore. Now that this theory is cast into doubt, fans would be wise to follow this game closely and see what tidbits of new information might mean for Breath of the Wild 2. It’s said those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps Link will have learned enough about his history in the first Breath of the Wild that he doesn’t have to do it again in the sequel.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 is in development for Switch.
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