Last verified: 2026-11-10

Tears of the Kingdom on the timeline

Tears of the Kingdom is the wild-era game after Breath of the Wild. Its ancient memories hold the second founding.

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

Link is the hero of this Hyrule. Zelda becomes the Light Dragon. The Demon King is the threat in the memories and in the present. The worldwide release is 12 May 2023 on Switch. The Switch 2 edition is 5 Jun 2025, the same day as the Breath of the Wild Switch 2 edition. Two packages, one story node.

Breath of the Wild is the predecessor by a few years of story, not by a branch change. There is no official successor yet. The memories go backward into Rauru and Sonia founding a kingdom, the imprisonment of the Demon King, and a war. Nintendo's wild-era section prints that founding as its own sentence, distinct from the Era of Prosperity line between Skyward Sword and The Minish Cap. I call that a second founding as a description of two sentences. Nintendo does not use my label.

People ask whether this Demon King is the same man as the king in Ocarina of Time. The names overlap in the series. The page shows two kingdoms and a vast gap, including 9,900 years inside the wild-era section alone. I will not flatten that into one lifespan. Age of Imprisonment dramatizes the war and is not itself a square on the chart. Its status is disputed on its own page.

The phrase botw totk timeline usually wants the order of these two games. The order is Breath of the Wild, then this one. The deeper question, where the pair sits against the three branches, is the wild-era section, not a fourth outcome of Ocarina's duel. IGN's line that they occupy a time and place of their own is one newsroom. The page's structure is the other evidence. I show both.

The Nintendo product page linked in Sources includes the official media gallery. Its trailers illustrate the game; release and timeline claims here are checked against the product information and the public chart.

• Previous: Breath of the Wild
• Age of Imprisonment
• Two founding lines