AAAHHHHHHHHHHH! REAL TIMELINE!

[A Black Falcon]

Actually, there are a few things that are odd but don't hurt the overall timeline. The Sages in OOT are clearly the ancestors of the maidens you rescue in LTTP. That's established very clearly in OOT. The confusion is this. How does a fish, a forest nymph, a rock eater, a ninja, and an arab eventually lead to human descendants?

The idea is that the LttP timeline is one where Link fails to defeat Ganon in OoT, so instead some sages later on have to seal him... and apparently they're not the ones from that game, but a group of Hyrulean ones or something. I don't know, it's pretty sketchy for sure, but something like that is the excuse.

Really the biggest problem I have working it out that way is that I always connected Ganon's comments at the very end of OOT (saying he'll get revenge on Link, Zelda, and the Sage's descendants) as specifically foreshadowing his later abduction of all the sage descendants in LTTP. Since that's the "adult" timeline, it no longer foreshadows LTTP's events at all, but rather Wind Waker's events (which simply isn't as good a fit, since there are fewer descendants for him to get revenge on in that game). The only way it still "works" is if we imagine he said that when he was finally imprisoned in the imprisoning war timeline as well.

I agree. While adding a third timeline can make sense as far as timelines go, it's fairly unsatisfying in some other ways, both in how it adds a "you failed in OoT" ending, apparently, and in this... OoT sure looked like it was designed as an LttP backstory, and now they're revoking that, seemingly, because the stories don't exactly match up? Either they'd actually been thinking this all along, or this is rewriting the story after the fact for sure...

Even so though, it is very nice to actually see a real, official timeline, and it does follow and make sense, which is great.