Zelda: A Link to the PastZelda: A Link to the Past w/ the Four SwordsZelda: Majora's MaskZelda: Ocarina of TimeZelda: Ocarina of Time
I'm as surprised as anyone, as aside from some infrequent and quickly corrected Game Over screens over the years, my Link has never personally met that fate. My Link's always been brought briskly back to life – courtesy of a bottled fairy or the reset button – and he's always gone on to continue and complete his current quest.
But Nintendo has now declared, via the just-released Hyrule Historia timeline for the Zelda series, that my Link isn't the one that counts. Not in "Timeline A," at least – that's the new, Nintendo-official offshoot of the Zelda franchise canon that boldly asserts that Link is dead. He failed. He never finished his quest in Ocarina of Time.
Ganon got him.
Or he got stuck in the Water Temple, never to be seen again.
Or maybe Navi the Fairy just never managed to ever get him to wake up, and the Kokiri kid sweetly sleeping in a treehouse never got the call to become a hero in the first place.
No video game franchise has ever been so brash as to assume the failure of its players and then build on that result with storylines set further in the future – no Nintendo franchise, at least. It's unheard of. The end of the game is the credits sequence – the victory celebration. Everyone knows that.
And Zelda fans had already bent their minds to adjust to two different outcomes branching out of Ocarina of Time's ending – the world created by Adult Link's victory, and the alternate world created by Child Link's return to the past to beat Ganon without a battle. But even there, both are victorious outcomes.
The fact that Game Over could be the actual ending – the idea that the screen that appears when you've fallen after forgetting to bottle a fairy could be the final word, or that the world could go unsaved because a player plays only partway and then never returns to their incomplete savegame file – well, it's flabbergasting.
And yet, here we are. With an official, Nintendo-approved timeline stating that that's exactly what happened. In one reality, at least, the Hero of Time was no hero at all.
Now Zelda fans will be debating the ramifications of this new reality for years to come, and I don't intend to try to capture the entirety of that discussion here in this one article. But I do have some initial thoughts to share, and perhaps they can be a starting point for fans' conversations going forward – and not just with The Legend of Zelda.
Firstly, my initial reaction to Nintendo's "Link Died" Timeline A is that it opens up a whole crazy can of worms for the telling of future chapters of the Legend – because if Ocarina's Link failed and that event paved the way for six more stories, who's to say that another of the Links didn't drop dead too?
What if the Link in Majora's Mask didn't stop the moon from falling? If you assume that Link's failure in any game creates a valid alternate timeline for future games to explore (as is now the case), then what kind of story could be told in the world where Skull Kid won, and Termina was actually crushed and destroyed under the weight of the crashing moon? That event was actually depicted in-game, if you recall – making it more canon-worthy than the "off-screen" Ocarina failure, in my mind.
How about in The Wind Waker? That game ended with Link's violent stabbing of Ganon in the face and a triumphant sailing voyage to discover new lands across the sea – setting up Phantom Hourglass and, later, Spirit Tracks. But what if Ganon dodged that fated face-stab? In the alternate reality where Toon Link was killed, what would Ganon have done next? Ruled over the smattering of islands in the world above? Or found a way to drain the sea and restore the ancient Hyrule buried beneath the waves?
And then we've got SPOILER WARNING Skyward Sword, which is just begging for another official split in the timeline – because it's a game that, like Ocarina, depicts different events occurring in two different eras. Those who've completed the quest know what I'm talking about – Link uses the power of the Triforce to utterly destroy the imprisoned version of Demise in what Link knows as "present day." But then Ghirahim grabs Zelda, jumps through a Gate of Time back into the distant past, and revives Demise there – Link, of course, follows him and beats Demise there as well.
So World 1, Demise destroyed in the present by the Triforce. World 2, Demise defeated in the past and sealed in the Master Sword – meaning he wouldn't have been imprisoned in the Sealed Grounds any more and wouldn't have been there to be destroyed in the present by the Triforce. See? Another timeline break.
Oh, but sorry, I forgot to include the third possibility. Link actually dies at the hands of Demise, Game Over, and since Skyward Sword is the first in the chronology then no other Legend of Zelda games ever happen afterward.
If my ideas there seem a little extreme or far-fetched, it's only because my mind is still reeling a great deal from this timeline reveal. It's just absolutely fascinating to me that the connection has been made this way – I, like many Zelda fans, didn't have trouble seeing the connection between Ocarina of Time's seven sages and the "Seven Wise Men" mentioned in the opening moments of A Link to the Past, but pairing that connection with the idea that the sages' seals were only necessary because a past Link had died is enough to make my fanboy brain explode.
As I said, I won't try to encapsulate the entirety of this new discussion here – I simply wanted to open the floodgates, so to speak, and get everyone talking here. What do you think about a game franchise making the death of its hero a part of the canon, when there's no way for that outcome to present itself if you actually finished the game? What possibilities do you see for this storyline path going forward?
And don't feel like you have to limit your thoughts to Zelda, either. What would happen in the Super Mario universe if Mario actually failed to save the princess? Would she just live with Bowser in his castle for the rest of her life? If Mario died, would Luigi avenge him? (Seems a little dark for Mario, sure, but we're just having fun speculating here.)
What about a Pokemon game where you don't become the League Champion? Could that franchise present a game later on in the future, starring a washed-up failure of a Trainer trying to get a second chance instead of a fresh-faced 10-year-old setting out for his first quest?
What about Metroid? Is there a story to be told in an alternate timeline where the Mother Brain actually got the best of Samus Aran? Several people have argued that Metroid: Other M effectively killed off Samus anyway. So what if she were actually dead? Who could the new protagonist in the series be? What would it be like to play a Metroid game without Samus Aran as the star?
It's amazing all the different possibilities that my Nintendo-addicted mind is now dreaming up, here in this brave new world where my gaming company of choice has declared one of my heroes is dead. My Link never died, of course. I always had a fairy. But somewhere out there, some Link failed. And that Link may end up being the most important one of all in the future.
Lucas M. Thomas has been freelancing across IGN's Nintendo channels for over half a decade. His lifelong love of the Legend of Zelda franchise has driven him to do some crazy things, like stay up late writing this editorial during his Christmas break. Consider following his personal brand of madness on Twitter.