New Zelda - TP Art

[A Black Falcon]

By "the story" I am of course referring to the over-arching story which constantly comes up to explain the connection between numerous games that all have the same characters but take place in very different times/places.

I completely agree, all indications are that they don't care one bit for the overarching story. Every game has its own story, but how they all fit together... meh, who cares? They don't! Between translation issues (there MUST be some, and I've heard of some possible ones, but not what the original Japanese versions said), nebulous long-term plots (what is this I've heard about some official Japanese timelines calling LttP the LAST game in the series? When the US one was clearly stated to be set long before LoZ and its direct sequel AoL? Confusing...), and just a general disregard for the timeline (there is no official timeline that makes sense. The Zelda.com site for a while was pushing a "there is only one Link" timeline that made no sense and went against everything we've come to understand about the plot... offical statements from Nintendo of Japan are usually either contradictory or nonexistent about how the overall plot fits together...

For fans like us all of this is incredibly frusterating, and leads to the endless speculation and effort that goes into fan guesses at what the overall timeline is, but with no official timeline that makes any sense at all, and with translation issues looming over that for the older games ("How much of this is actually what they meant?"), I think that getting a real, complete, and consistent timeline for the series is impossible.

The worst offender is of course Oracles, which I think has been pretty much shown to not fit anywhere in the story... but each title has its own issues.