Hyrule Historia

While I am still playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I recently read the entirety of Hyrule Historia, a tome that Nintendo released a few years back. It is wonderful, yet leaves you wanting more. Let me explain. There are three main sections of the book: a lot on Skyward Sword (which I have NOT yet read, need to play it first!) the storyline and the design documents/artwork. The storyline obviously includes all of the games (except the Zelda CD-i games for obvious reasons), which starts with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, then The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Four Swords, Ocarina of Time, then splits into three with the "Hero's Defeat" line (A Link to the Past, Oracle series, Link's Awakening, and the two NES Zelda games), what happens when Link continues as a child (Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess, Four Swords Adventures, or the Adult Link era (The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks).

As interesting is that is, it still feels pretty loose, and I can't shake the feeling that the whole thing was cribbed from fan theories (a similar timeline was created by a fan just prior to when this was released, incidentally). Too many races appear and disappear--the Rito and Zora really shouldn't be connected, the Minish should've gone extinct, the lineages of the Master Sword and the Four Sword (the Oracle Series is after Link to the Past, but the Master Sword is supposed to sleep forever after that--made even more jarring in the fact that it's the same Link, although you could argue that putting the Master Sword back "forever" was after the Oracle series). It's pretty obvious that they had no idea what they were doing when they made it, and the increasing "where it fits" every time a game was released make it problematic.

TVTropes states that "The fact that the official timeline presents about as many problems as the average fan timeline is an example of how snarled the series' continuity is. The reason for this is probably that in many cases, not even the games' developers seemed to be aware of the timeline placement of the game they were working on, especially when it comes to the games developed by Capcom."

But there's also some design artwork, including crazy things you didn't notice. Besides some sketches that indicated the developer team liked Tingle way more than you or me (lots of detail there--including some notes on his chest hair), there's also the relation between Ambi and Ralph (spoiler alert--Ambi is Ralph's ancestor, which plays a role in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, but in the official art, their eyebrows are identical. There's also some early design for the dungeons in the original NES Zelda. All of these are fascinating--and given how secretive Nintendo generally is, seeing this probably required a lot of pulled strings.

There's some stuff missing--they talk about "rare Zelda games", such as the The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition title and the BS Legend of Zelda games (Satellaview). And while Nintendo would rather forget the CD-i games ever happened, there's no mention of Link's Crossbow Training (which was to be a full "gaiden game" akin to Majora's Mask), nothing on the "third game" of what would be the Oracle series, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest (much less Ura Zelda), or even the very strange Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland? It would've been cool to see some Zelda paraphernalia as well over the years (remember the Zelda board game? No?)

I'd love to see stuff for other video game series (SimCity, Pokémon) but we can't have everything...