Zelda Timeline 2026

Last verified: 2026-11-10

Breath of the Wild on the timeline

Breath of the Wild is in the wild-era section, 100 years after a second Great Calamity, and Tears of the Kingdom follows it.

At a glance

Original platform
Wii U / Nintendo Switch
First release
2017-03-03
Timeline placement
Wild Era, 100 years after the second Great Calamity. Nintendo renders the Wild Era after the three branches and does not label it a fourth branch; IGN describes BotW/TotK as 'a time and place all their own', so shared-vs-own is a disputed reading.
Link
Link (Champion; awakens with amnesia)
Zelda
Princess Zelda (holding Calamity Ganon in Hyrule Castle)
Main antagonist
Calamity Ganon
Official key art for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Official key art for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Key art © Nintendo, used with a link to the product page. Chart art on this site is original.

Link wakes with little memory. Zelda is holding Calamity Ganon in Hyrule Castle. The page's section title is The Great Calamity and the Upheaval. Before the present day of this game, the same section tells a founding by King Rauru of the Zonai and Queen Sonia, a Demon King, an Imprisoning War, a Great Calamity, 9,900 years, a second Great Calamity, and 100 years. I am copying that order from the page, not from a fan sketch.

The worldwide release is 3 Mar 2017 on Wii U and Switch. The Switch 2 edition is 5 Jun 2025. Same story, new package. I do not give the Switch 2 edition its own row on the chart.

IGN has described Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom as a time and place all their own. Nintendo's page does not use the phrase fourth branch. I keep both observations. Shared ending of the three older paths is one reading. A separate era is another. The disputed part is the join, not the order of these two games. Tears of the Kingdom is after this one by a few years in the story.

Creating a Champion, the 2018 book, records the choice to avoid clarifications about where this game sits. That book is older than the current web section. I treat the web section as the later text and the book as evidence that Nintendo once refused to pin the game down. The 2026 page is more specific than the book, and it still does not draw an arrow from Zelda II or from Spirit Tracks into the plateau.

Calamity Ganon is the name this game uses. It is not, by itself, a proof that the downfall path's Ganon is the same person in the same century. The wild-era founding is a second kingdom in the text. I leave the identification question open and link the changes log, where the two founding lines are dated.

Sources