Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are both fantastic games - and Tears of the Kingdom really does feel (to me) like they just took Breath of the Wild, and added a few more years of dev time to it.
Where do you think Nintendo will take Zelda from here though? Can they keep with the same new formula? Should they? Will a more traditional game feel disappointing after this?
I don’t really know what I want myself. I think they should try something different though. At the same time, I can’t help but think I’d be disappointed if the next game was more similar to something like Twilight Princess. Have they boxed themselves in?
To speak just to plot, I think there is one direction they could move towards next.
In this series, we have yet to even hear whispers of the Triforce. What was previously a central pillar of prior Zelda games has fallen by the wayside. So, the Triforce can come back.
In Tears of the Kingdom, we learned interesting facts about how dragons are made. We have three dragons who have been there since Breath of the Wild: Dinraal, Farosh, and Naydra, who correspond to the goddesses Din, Farore, and Nayru, who created the Triforce. Presumably, these “goddesses” were people once, who ate secret stones and turned into dragons, and they could be key to unlocking the mysteries of the Triforce. If we can un-draconify them like we did Zelda, it would be interesting to have these entities be actual characters in the story.
As far as threats, it’s hard to say. Could bring back old man Demise if they want to stick with the progressively scary Ganon line of villains, but they could easily bring in someone else new or old as well.
Of all the ideas people have replied with so far, this one’s my favorite. I had wondered about the other three dragons from the moment I finished the Dragon Tears quest in TotK, and your idea would be a pretty cool way to give a lot more attention to that aspect of the world.
I’ve sat on this idea since the release of Hyrule Historia. And I think it would legitimize the entire crazy timeline, and do what Nintendo must do next to level up Zelda: massively up their story telling. And it combines with this OP idea of the return of the triforce.
This new game does one key thing: it firmly establishes BOTW/TOTK Link as unequivocal successors to the Child Timeline after the hero is victorious in OOT.
BOTW Threequel continues and concludes this Link’s adventure, and is the first Zelda trilogy with Link-Zelda continuity. We’ll call him Blue Link.
After a banger of an opening sequence, Blue Zelda reveals to Blue Link the cause of this “banger sequence” and its solution: there is a relic called the triforce and it must be reunited not only to seal away evil—but to fix space and time, which has been fractured for millennia.
The three dragons—the fairie surrogates—are basically functioning like the TVA (Time Variance Authority) from the Marvel series Loki. Their human forms exist in another realm: the past.
This past is ultimately met.
It is Old Man Link from the Fallen Hero timeline and is the same Link from Zelda II: Adventure of Link. Who is also the same Link from Zelda I. Think Snake from MGS4 Guns of the Patriots, or Logan/Wolverine from the Old Man Logan story.
So this game is the end of a trilogy for Blue Link and Zelda 1 + 2, simultaneously.
And it’s co-op (if desired). As both Links.
The game might as well be called The Legend of Link.