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I feel like the old zeldas final fantasy style approach where each game is its own seperate thing worked way better Metroid seems like a less is more situation cuz part of the fun of the weird ancient alien stuff is how mysterious it is but like in godzilla all the human stuff is just boring filler

true enlightenment is being able to match their freak and have juuust the right level of investment in these games' stories

Resident Evil looking over at Metroid and Zelda from afar: "Oh cool, they do it too."

Man, that video was so well done. I can’t believe Nintendo did with Zelda what Scott does with FNAF so damn often. “Hehehe you think you have the answer but ACTUALLY it’s this OTHER very similarly-named, completely unrelated thing!” just to cuck people from the satisfaction of having an answer.

Japanese media’s refusal to do comic book or tolkien style continuity worldbuilding is maybe its single biggest strength

the funniest thing nintendo has done continuity-wise is pretend botw and totk aren't reboots. for some reason some fans like to play along

I love how each Zelda game they always make the gameplay first and then are like “alright how we gonna tell a story with these sick weapons and tools”

Pikmin’s probably in this category too as of 4

I think it can work two-fold. Games can have good surface level appeal, and also explore deeper stuff, which I think is the strength of lore when handled right. As an aside, Megaman does actually have crazy lore, like if you go all the way down the rabbit hole it’s honestly some Xenogears shit lol

I couldn’t care less about a single unified Zelda timeline but Metroid has me a little pressed.

You should see the mess they made of the Final Fantasy wider universe

My barometer to determine if a franchise is guilty of this cardinal sin is when I'm willing to open the two hour lore timeline video essay but I'm not willing to finish it

I think Metroids issue is multiple teams not in consort with each other retro and Mercury steam should absolutely be working together with Sakamoto

They probably just split it off from OoT just cuz there was already a split on OoT so might as well do an additional split there. Plus Ganon/dorf isn't in any game in the timeline before OoT (except technically Skyward Sword but that makes sense)

if oot remake is the exact same but they make rauru a zonai, i'm going to eat my entire shirt. it's stupid enough to be something they would do. 3 rights to go left bullshit

Wind Waker's fault actually, ALttP was the original adult sequel (or rather OoT was it's prequel) and then they forgot that and made Wind Waker, so when they went to make the official timeline and were like "well shit now what"

botw was always this new vision that merged the timelines and made everything that came before into a kind of overlapping myth that like i say, was really elegant and resonant and didnt require long explanations, worked purely emotionally. totk is so funny how much its the exact opposite

Isn't that all of the Zelda games? The timeline split into multiple strings. And actually, even BotW and TotK are in slightly different paths. Where the events of BotW happened in some form or another, but not the way that YOU played the game.

That could work too. I think the initial ideas of the games before Skyward Sword was that the stories were just fairytale legends you could experience and not think too much about in it’s continuity. In retrospect, putting together a timeline might’ve been a mistake

This is unironically exactly the kind of shit fnaf does

I liked this characterisation, honestly. That there's civilisation beyond the federation. That the Metroid world can be Star Warsy, with aliens just chilling and doing normal every day things like running a bar and serving hot white ladies.

Zelda in particular will acknowledge previous games and then make a new game that completely disregards everything. BotW was crazy, referencing all the established timelines at once. And then TotK is a sequel but not but also yes, but no actually?

Star Fox fans: oh hey Assault did show you can do pretty much anything with this setting! Nintendo: we're only going to reimagine 64/Lylat wars from now on.

Hot take, but Metroid cares a lot more about its own lore than Zelda. Sure, it makes crazy retcons all the time, but they do them in a "how can we take what came before and do something crazy now". Zelda meanwhile, barely cares if anything fits or relates most of the time.

So what I am getting from the posts under this is that Zelda timeline works on Nasuverse rules (everything is true, there is no canon continuity, every story a glimpse at a different timeline and any apparent connection is only to parallel versions of other stories) but Nintendo doesn't know it yet.

I have the sickness of making fun of Zelda timeline dorks while also focusing on where metroid games fall in the timeline lmao

There is almost no correlation between Prime and the sidescrollers, the teams quite literally do not have any form of cross communication between each other (confirmed by the producers themselves). Samus using more of her left hand is more of a coincidence than any genuine attempt at continuity.

I don't know how prime 4 fits into the chronology, but prime 1-3 focus on phazon and experimentation on plentiful metroids, which has to be before metroid 2

I love it. It's just vibes. Story beats are just loose connective tissue for gameplay elements. There is no big picture or interconnected lore. Gameplay reigns supreme.

I understand the fun speculation (mine is that the suit evolves to a sort of Ultra Varia) but at the end of the day none of it really matters because canonically Samus is always either one of the most dangerous beings in the universe or post-Super explicitly the most dangerous being in the universe.

You’ve articulated something I’ve always sensed but couldn’t describe

I never got the vibe in 4 that she was cured of the Metroid DNA. I just figured it had stablised with the X parasite SA-X, giving her her powers back and ability to use ice beam and such again. Her metroid DNA getting increasingly worse is actually interesting to me.

I keep saying post fusion samus really should be on “kill on sight” terms with the federation and dread gets soooooo close to being that with the emmis and then it’s “no they were reprogrammed samus and the government are cool now. For some reason.” (game still good it’s just weird)

zelda needs its own kumazaki shinya after aonuma leaves

zelda needs its own kumazaki shinya after aonuma leaves

The thing attacked her, nearly killed her, then imprinted and fled. She was too drained to do anything about it. And then later, when also nearly dead, it came back and saved her.

False dichotomy. She's a ruthless pragmatist that discovered a soft spot for an orphaned creature, just like she was.

Details get added, conflated, & omitted as the audience & culture change. The prevalence of Hylia faith vs Din/Nayru/Farore worship changes dramatically, and the three goddesses even get changed to dragons! Then, as you say, Nintendo cares just enough about lore to frustrate and confuse everyone