Why does Zelda cause such beardiness? (games)
For example, one of the anti-multiple-timeline arguments is Tingle exists in both Majora's Mask (which is ostensibly in one timeline) and his descendent is in Wind Waker (which is ostensibly in the other), but it's not as if Tingle was born after Link (he's a freaky old man in Majora's Mask, when Link is like 8 years old). The fact that Tingle did manage to breed is a bit alarming, though.
How did A Link to the Past end? It's been a long time since I've played it. One of the newer "religions" (started by Gametrailers' flashy analysis which is completely in-depth about the evidence they want to see but ignores a lot of other stuff) states that LttP happens after the original game, but I seem to recall that in LttP, Ganon wasn't destroyed, he was just defeated and sent back to the null space, and the triforce stayed separate. The original game ends with Ganon's utter destruction and the Triforce being reunited. And, for that matter, The Adventure of Link specifically refers to Ganon having been completely defeated and his former followers only harassing Link because they believe that if they get his blood they can revive him.
There's some weak evidence for a fragmented timeline (Wind Waker's preamble being based on people expecting Link to return implying that the adult-Link stuff did happen), but also some pretty strong evidence against it (Link has descendants in that timeline, and anyway there's a lot of temporal bootstrapping in Ocarina). I think it's pretty likely that there's a single timeline, and Wind Waker happens because people took the (relatively fictional) story that Ocarina-Link retold about what happened in his relative (and now nonexistent) timeline as truth, leading to Ganon storming Hyrule Castle, the gods freezing it in a time bubble and flooding the lands, etc.
But really, there's not enough concrete evidence to form a single unified theory and I can't believe I just spent half an hour writing up my own timeline notion until I realized some other stuff which contradicts it and so like WHATEVER.
And anyway, it's just a video game, people! If people start taking a work of fiction seriously, in thousands of years people might have very real religious wars over differing interpretations of what's just a really good story.
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Now that I think about it, trying to make a Zelda timeline seems only marginally less hard than trying too somehow tie Ico and Shadow of the Colossus together -- it's tempting, but there's just not enough to conclusively say for sure.
Plus, starting with Ocarina they've been even more blatant about making the games reference each others' timelines. (Note that the sages have the same names as the towns in Adventure of Link, and then also in Wind Waker there's the stained-glass portrayals of the sages in the Master Sword shrine which implies that the Hyrule castle there is the rebuilt castle post the sealing war, soon enough afterwards that people still knew what the sages looked like - whereas in LttP the fact that most of the sages weren't Hylian had already been lost.)
In the marketing material for LttP it was stated that LttP Link was the great-grandfather of LoZ Link, but I don't think they really started doing anything continuity-driven until Ocarina, and since then they've been very slowly filling in the story with little snippets, but just vaguely enough that it's unclear what the true history is, especially with regards to the side-stories (Link's Awakening, Majora's Mask, Adventure of Link, and Four Swords/Minish Cap).
Through Majora's Mask it was clear that the games were in pairs going back an epoch each time, but the Oracle games confused things and then Wind Waker completely mucked things up. Since then, Miyamoto has said that there's a definite concrete timeline and that in the future there may be a game which clears it up.
Miyamoto has also apparently stated that LttP is chronologically the LAST, but I couldn't find any definitive citation about that.
Also, this morning I thought it'd be pretty cool to make an NES emulator which would use an original game but replace the tiles and sounds with better-looking ones (and additional visual effects etc.) so you could get an upgrade of classic games with perfect original gameplay. Sort of how Super Mario All-Stars was, only without any need for a source port or whatever (more like a ROM hack except replacing the graphics hardware too).
I think you're right that with Ocarina they slowly started making the relationships between the games slightly more explicit. I also only realized that Ocarina is a prequel to LttP at the end, and wonder if referring to "six sages" for most of the game was meant to be a red herring to keep you from figuring it out earlier.
I also can't help but wonder if the three pendants you collect in LttP were made from the spiritual stones in Ocarina....
I also wonder if anyone in Mario fandom has tried putting *its* games into a timeline like Zelda fandom has.
Also the ending of Ocarina and the beginning to LttP are different in the way that legends mutate over epochs. considering that Ocarina happened to a Hylian Link and the Hylians were an ancient and mysterious civilization in LttP, this makes sense.
Too bad the game is so freaking short though. I think I finished it in only 20-25 hours or so, and I wasn't exactly rushing. Of course hurr sidequests and all that other bullshit I didn't bother with but whatever. I usually don't bother to deal with that crap since it's pretty darn boring, and in Wind Waker is eminently optional.
Weird that you keep the pictobox. I wonder what else is different the second time through... maybe getting the pictobox gives you a better one now? Who knows? Who cares?
Which reminds me- does anyone else remember that? I was still pretty young when it came out, and I got so into reading the stuff about some "Chosen Hero" destined to save our world from a falling moon just like in the game, and watching the videos of some college kids playing with a frisbee only to be interrupted my a creepy person calling themselves the "Harbinger of Doom," that I got scared that it might really be happening, and went out into my back yard to stare up into the cloudy night sky for an hour, searching for some sign of a giant approaching moon.
Slightly pathetic, neh?