Category: Uncategorized

This was supposed to be October 2024, but I clicked the wrong one by mistake, and it doesn’t really matter what order I go in, so fuck it, April 2025.

Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered is a historically interesting set of games, but I already know I won’t play these to the finish. They use clunky mechanics on purpose in much the same way Silent Hill 1 used limited draw distance on purpose, creating platforming that required a slow and methodical parkour, which was cool for how realistic it was. But, also, it was really hard and I don’t want to bang my head against it when I have so many other games to play. Also, I guess Lara Croft was a sexual awakening for a lot of twelve year olds back in the day, but I was eight, so it didn’t land for me at the time, and the cone-boobs definitely haven’t aged well. The remaster isn’t quite as geometric, but it definitely doesn’t look good.

Dredge is a game where you captain a fishing boat through treacherous waters to dredge up some kind of sunken mystery. You dodge danger in your little boat while hauling up spooky treasures of some kind. At 5 hours, this would be well worth a look, at 10 hours, I’m hesitant, but I’ll try it.

Aliens: Dark Descent is a xenomorph blasting real time tactics game that features persistent changes to levels and some amount of squad management. This is another entry into I’d Play Your Game If It Was Shorter, because at 25 hours, I’m nervous about the possibility that this game is going to be frustrating to do in real time. It’s got all the ingredients I want for a good XCOM-style tactical game, and it’s definitely possible to have a UI responsive enough and a pace moderate enough for real time tactics to work, but this is the kind of thing that could be really frustrating if it’s done wrong. Maybe it’s just got the ick from Colonial Marines way back when.

1000xResist is a game about Iris, the sole survivor of a mega-plague that came when giant humanoid aliens arrived on Earth, and the society made purely of her clones that struggles to survive even a thousand years later. It’s a heavily story-based game and also seems really horny, what with every single character being a literal clone of the exact same cute girl and the apocalypse brought about by fifty-foot tall alien women. I like horny, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else here, and I don’t like it so much that I want it by itself, and 1000xResist shows no sign of interesting gameplay nor does its plot particularly intrigue (apparently the story I summarized above isn’t totally accurate in some mysterious way, but, I mean, so?).

Nova Lands is off-brand Factorio. It’s got a pixel-y aesthetic that’s kinda cute, but I don’t love this genre enough to go chasing after also-ran titles when I already have Factorio and Satisfactory.

Diplomacy Is Not An Option is a game where you are under attack from twenty thousand orcs and have to build defenses to kill all of them. This feels like it has about as much depth as a really good Flash game from 2010, and that’s not worth a 25 hour time investment.

Distant Worlds 2 is yet another space 4X game. These are relatively easy to make from a graphics and programming perspective, so I get why they crop up a lot, but it’s practically impossible for the worldbuilding and game design to set it apart from Stellaris, Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations III (and maybe IV, which I just learned exists while doublechecking I got the name right), Endless Space 2, and, for that matter, Master of Orion III. Precisely because this genre is so easy to do computationally, a lot of the most ancient games in the genre still hold up. Distant Worlds 2 is already doing one thing right by being a numbered sequel, which seems to help, but the games are too long and the genre too densely stacked for me to take a chance on an also-ran.

Nomad Survival is off-brand Vampire Survivor. I never really got why Vampire Survivor was so popular. It’s alright, I guess, but there was a real craze for it and I never really saw it as anything but an adequate time-killer when I’m stuck on the bus with my phone.

In the long tradition of clickbait titles, I lied. You won’t completely fix Just Cause 4 with this one neat trick. It would help a lot, though.

In Just Cause 4, a major mechanic is that you’re leading an “Army of Chaos” in an uprising against this year’s evil dictator. The Army of Chaos seizes territory from the Black Hand mercenaries employed by the dictator to uphold his regime, and in order to seize that territory, they need two things: First, for you to complete a side mission to weaken the territory, and second, for you to accumulate enough Chaos Points (don’t abbreviate that) to recruit additional squads to your army. You get Chaos Points by destroying Chaos Objects, which are red-painted stuff important to the regime like radar and fuel tanks and which are generally very satisfying to explode, so the game encourages you to both run around blowing stuff up and complete side missions. In friendly territory, the Army of Chaos drives around in hummers spraypainted cyan and magenta, while in enemy territory, the Black Hand drive around in tacticool black hummers and shoot at you. So far, so good – it’s basic open world territory control mechanics with a slightly novel method of shifting territory to friendly hands.

The problem is that there’s also a heat system where the Black Hand spawns reinforcements to chase you, and it’s totally unchanged regardless of what territory you’re in. And while you could fix this as easily as disabling Black Hand reinforcements completely in friendly territory, I think it’d be better to make a bit more nuanced change: Heat no longer increases from killing Black Hand in friendly territory, but does still go up from destroying Chaos Objects. So if you blow up fuel tanks and stuff, the Black Hand will show up to shoot at you, but if you’re in friendly territory, then you can kill all the Black Hand who show up and this will not spawn more/harder reinforcement waves. It’s still weird that the Black Hand spawn deep in friendly territory, but Just Cause is a destructive sandbox, so I think some narrative weirdness is fine. What’s mechanically annoying is that you can’t reliably get heat to go back down once it’s spun up except by running away and hiding out for a while, and there’s no obvious place where that’s effective. Making friendly territory into a safe zone where you can kill any of the Black Hand chasing you without spawning any more would fix this.

Also, it’s annoying how Chaos Objects respawn, especially in friendly territory. Respawning them in enemy territory is fine and helps hedge against it being difficult to find Chaos Objects to blow up to get the squads you need. You only need squads for attacking enemy territory, so if Chaos Objects respawn in enemy territory, then that means that there’s always respawning Chaos Objects lying around to destroy if you need them.

Also, also, the main story missions all require you to liberate the territory where they start from, which is a terrible idea. Being able to get some mild-to-moderate but not overwhelming advantages in main story missions by completing side missions first is fine – you’ll have an easier time completing the main story missions if the territory they take place in or near is full of friendly patrols who will help you instead of enemy patrols who will pile on with the enemies spawned by the mission objectives. Likewise, having some side missions be locked until you’ve completed a main mission is fine – this enemy fortress or that enemy city is involved in the main plot somehow, so we can’t liberate it until we’ve finished the relevant mission. But people shouldn’t be forced to interact with your side content. I guess this might be a “game journalists ruin everything” problem again? Like, maybe in order to get game journalists to review the game in the way it was meant to be played, you have to force them to do that, because if it’s possible to only play the main story content while ignoring the side content (the most important part of an open world sandbox, and that’s something the Just Cause series has traditionally been good at) then they’ll do that and review the game based on one of its less important, lower quality aspects.

I’m speculating, though, it’s also possible that the Just Cause 4 devs just didn’t realize this was a bad idea. After all, the Just Cause 2 devs did all the work of making a sandbox full of destructibles to blow up and then forgot to give any reason to do so nor to make them at all easy to locate, so there wasn’t really anything to do except follow the main story and blow up Chaos Objects whenever you happened to bump into them. They put in all the work to do the hard parts of making a fun open world sandbox but then didn’t do the much easier task of making the destructible objects easy to locate and provide some benefit for destroying them, so the game wound up as a mediocre linear third-person shooter instead. Just Cause 4 isn’t that bad, but it’s similar in how it could be a lot better with a few tweaks that would’ve taken less than a month to patch in, maybe even less than a week.

In the Legend of Zelda series, Link, Zelda, and Ganon continuously reincarnate to do battle with one another as chosen ones of the Triforce of Courage, Wisdom, and Power, respectively. I like the idea of an epic saga of heroes and villains battling each other across the ages, but the Legend of Zelda has infamously done a very poor job of actually delivering that due to the timeline snarl caused by making no less than four games that call back directly to Ocarina of Time (Wind Waker, Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess, and Link to the Past – in the latter case, it’s Ocarina of Time being a prequel rather than the other game being a sequel, but it contributes to the problem in the exact same way). Nintendo doesn’t want their options for storytelling or game mechanics constrained by existing lore, which is wise, although they then tried to cram everything into a single continuity (with multiple timelines) anyway, which was not wise.

But this kind of thing happens a lot. Stories grow organically in a way that eventually becomes contradictory and confused, at which point someone comes along to write a Le Morte d’Arthur or Book of Invasions or something, unifying the stories together into a more satisfying whole that comes from knowing in advance what all the chapters of the story were going to be, instead of making them up one at a time. Unfortunately, copyright law prevents someone from meaningfully doing that. I can say “Wind Waker works just as well as the sequel to any more typical example of a Zelda game, it doesn’t need to be Ocarina of Time specifically and the timeline gets much easier to clean up if we move it,” and I can say “Link to the Past works better as a full replacement for the original Legend of Zelda rather than a prequel, which I’m 70% sure is what the devs originally intended (there’s a couple of reasons to think LttP being a prequel was a very late decision in development), and that means we have to rework the Adventure of Link, but that game was terrible so either culling it from the timeline completely or giving it a bottom-up remake would be a good idea anyway,” and I can say “Tears of the Kingdom’s depiction of early Hyrule as visually distinct and more late stone age/early bronze age compared to the high medieval aesthetic of TotK proper is good and early games in the timeline like Skyward Sword and Ocarina of Time would be better if they followed this aesthetic,” but I can’t actually try to rally support for a version of the Zelda timeline that does any of this. Well, I can try, but the fact that it can never be official, in a legally enforceable way, means the project is doomed to failure.

But I can still wring a blogpost out of one of the aspects of it I’ve been thinking about lately: Giving each of the three reincarnating heroes a different method of reincarnation.

Zelda keeps the original method of reincarnation. The Hyrule royal line periodically produces a female heir with an uncanny similar appearance to the goddess Hylia. As she grows, she intuits things that her previous incarnations knew without having to be taught them. Because she is drawing on many lifetimes of experience, things which Zelda does a lot – like governance and magic – she masters to a level that ordinary humans are incapable of. She’s way past the upper elbow on the time-practicing:improved-skill S-curve, so she’s not ten times as good at these things for having ten times as much practice, but she is better than anyone else alive.

As the chosen of the Triforce of Wisdom, Zelda retains her knowledge and experience from past lives, despite her early upbringing giving her noticeably different (but still clearly similar) personalities. Twilight Princess Zelda still has a fundamental compassion for others and love for her people and country, but she’s a lot more cold and calculating. Ocarina of Time Zelda is much more proactive and adventurous while retaining Twilight Princesses’ mission-focused attitude, while Wind Waker Zelda is adventurous in a fun-loving, free-spirited way. Skyward Sword Zelda is more optimistic and happier. These kinds of changes are to be expected from an individual at different stages of their life, though. Someone who’s been in a certain environment for a long time has their baseline experience and personality changed by that environment, not to the point where everyone subject to the same environment becomes the exact same person, but certainly to the point where someone’s personality can noticeably change based on getting a much better or much worse job. Skyward Sword Zelda and Ocarina Zelda are the same person, but Skyward Zelda lived secure on a floating island surrounded by friends and family who loved her while Ocarina Zelda spent seven years personally trying to hold Hyrule together as off-brand Batman after Ganon’s coup while Link was in time stasis and it kind of crushed the fun out of her.

Ganon is just straight-up immortal. No matter how much damage you inflict on him, he absolutely will not die. The Seven Sages tried their damndest after Ocarina of Time, and it just wouldn’t stick. Ganondorf’s immortality is the most straightforwardly effective way of being preserved across timelines. Lacking Zelda’s regular resets means that Ganondorf is much more prone to a malaise in which he bangs his head against the same problem for a hundred years, but it also allows him to personally pursue goals and micromanage things for decades or centuries without his mental capacities waning, let alone dying. Zelda’s reincarnation into a royal line positions her to simultaneously be a consistent guiding force for Hyrule while also making her responsive to the changing conditions – she has an intuitive understanding of and muscle memory for things she’s practiced in the past, but she does not retain full memories, which means she isn’t tied down by commitments to previous ambitions the way Ganondorf is. Ganondorf gets fixated on a single plan for 100+ years at a time, which means he and his Gerudo subjects can pursue 100+ year plans with much lower risk of the plan being abandoned halfway through compared to most other nations, but it also means that they’re nailed to Ganondorf’s plan until either it succeeds or Ganondorf is willing to admit defeat, and that can lead to a lot of squandered time. Zelda is better at guiding people through changing times, but Ganondorf is better at building political will and physical infrastructure for megaprojects.

Ganondorf’s immortality is also why he’s uniquely capable of mastering the sacred realm/dark realm, and yet the Seven Sages want to imprison him there at the end of Ocarina of Time anyway. It’s not a safe place for people to be, especially long term, which means it will repeatedly destroy Ganondorf’s body in a way that will keep him occupied for a long time, and after efforts to flat-out execute him failed, pushing him through the door and locking it behind him was the next best thing – but eventually, the immortal Ganondorf figures out how to bend it to his will. When Ganondorf returns from the sacred realm, it is with the power to turn into Ganon, an ability which is a terrible curse that slowly kills most people who use it (Link halfway died to it when the half-corrupted Sacred Realm’s magic werewolf’d him in Twilight Princess – although, to be clear, that is 100% a retcon I am proposing to tie that game into a saga of continuous corruption of a single magical otherworld, rather than the canon, where new magical otherworlds with slightly different properties get invented for different games), but Ganon can’t die, so he can do it whenever and it’s only a problem to the extent that his monstrous rampages might do more harm than good to his long term schemes, which is why he tends to resort to Ganon form only after his long term schemes are crumbling anyway.

Link is the inheritor of a legacy. Link is not immortal. Every Link is a different person, and you can give them a different name and design them as different characters (in the actual real games, you can do the first but not the second – under this retcon, you could have a character creator in Zelda games, which would be fun, especially for the vast majority of them that do not give any particular personality to Link, the silent protagonist). Fi, the spirit inside the Master Sword, runs a meritocracy – the bravest hero of the land, whether they are a prodigy Hylian knight or an unnoticed stablehand, is the one capable of drawing the Master Sword. For everyone else, the Master Sword is fixed in place, unmovable, although you can move the thing the Master Sword is in, so if the current Link scabbards it, they can hand it off to someone else to relocate it someplace for the next Link to find. It will be impossible to for anyone but Link to draw the Master Sword from the scabbard, but the scabbard and sword together can be moved around normally. If, however, the last Link stuck it in a pedestal, or left it lying on the battlefield, then it’s stuck there, immovable, unless you chisel out the pedestal/ground and move the entire thing, or a new Link comes around.

And Fi does not bother empowering the bravest in the land just to hold them in reserve. Fi got stuck in the sword as part of the first battle with Ganon in Skyward Sword, and she only wakes up when Ganon is around. In spinoff games like Minish Cap or Four Swords that don’t involve the Master Sword or Ganon, we as the audience know this is Link, but in-universe characters wouldn’t know for sure. The Picori Blade isn’t a divine weapon created by gods to slay evil and wieldable only by the chosen of the Triforce of Courage, it’s just an extraordinarily good sword made by the Minish people, whose tiny size means they have extraordinary attention to detail when making human-size objects, and therefore when they gather their greatest swordsmiths together to combine their efforts into the Picori Blade, the result is something sharper and more durable than would be possible for human smiths. That’s cool, but anyone can pick that up and swing it around. The Four Sword can split someone into four and is tied to shadow doppelgangers and presumably has something to do with the Sage of Shadow, and maybe the seven sages each have some kind of cool sword associated with them, but a maximum of one of those swords (and possibly none of them) is the Master Sword.

Link doesn’t inherit knowledge from previous lives, nor can they pursue ambitions across centuries. What Link inherits is a set of fighting techniques passed down through generations, using sword, bow, bomb, and hookshot. Every Hylian knight learns how to use these things and while Link usually inherits one or two tools from various sages and knights, they often have to assemble at least half of their kit by scavenging dungeons or buying from shops. Link is inheriting the accumulated knowledge as well as the hope and trust of the collective people of Hyrule in a way that could’ve happened to anyone and which, in many eras, actually does happen to lots of other people. In Link to the Past, Link is the last Hylian knight, but there used to be a ton of them. The only thing that sets Link apart is Fi (metaphorically) pointing him out and saying “that’s the best one you’ve got, give it to him.” When Link’s courage and resolve are backed up by a thousand or more years of history, it’s not in the more literal sense of Zelda’s reincarnation or Ganon’s immortality, but in the sense that Link is part of Hyrule, the best of Hyrule, and the Master Sword wouldn’t be out if it weren’t an existential threat, so if Link isn’t enough, Hyrule will end.

Diluvian Ultra is a Doom-style shooter (the genre that people have decided to call “Boomer Shooters,” because we must not acknowledge the existence of Gen X) in which you are Attila, a prince of a species called Diluvians. It’s not really clear how the other Diluvians look or act, because there’s only one other left, and while Attila is a skull-faced demon man, the other survivor, Cathryn, is a hot lady witch. Attila is called Lord of Swarms and his primary ranged weapon is a pistol bug pet he names Bella, so his weaponry might be at least partially unique to him, which means his appearance might be, too. Attila awakens on his tombship after it is invaded by space marines and he must go on a rampage through ten-ish levels death metal album covers to defeat them, with most of the game taking place on the tombship, a giant living ship torn from the surface of Mars and flung across the stars eons ago, mostly a living thing but with chunks of Martian bedrock, especially in the outer shell.

The plot has sort of a role reversal thing going on, with Attila looking a bit like an enemy from Doom might, fighting foes some of whom look kind of like Doom Guy, and starting out in the depths of an alien Hellscape and steadily fighting his way through several different environments of the tombship before finally striking at the space marines’ cruiser in the finale, in reverse of how a shooter might normally start you out in some kind of sci-fi science/military facility and take you into some alien Hellscape for the finale. Other than that theme, the plot is present, but not really anything to write home about, especially since the game has released only one chapter out of three. It’s only a year and a half out from its original release, which isn’t quite “abandon hope” levels of dead, but for a game that’s already got its engine and most of its enemies worked out, and only needs new levels and a handful of new enemies and weapons to keep things fresh, a year and a half is getting to be a worryingly long development time.

The plot as it is mostly just introduces Attila and the invaders, and that Cathryn has betrayed Attila to the invaders, but is running some larger scheme. Exactly what that scheme is does not get explained in the first chapter.

Gameplay-wise, I’m not in a great position to comment because I’ve never played a single game of this genre all the way through, played Doom as a child at a friend’s house because it was the 90s and Doom was big and I can’t recall how far I got into it but it can’t have been far, and also played a mod for one of these games made by Yahtzee and didn’t even finish that. So I’m not completely without experience, but I can fit all of my experience into a single run-on sentence.

And that means that while I think the armor/health divide is a cool new feature, it’s possible that it isn’t. Some weapons deal armor damage while others deal health damage, and I think health damage affects armor and health equally, with the balancing factor being that weapons that only affect armor tend to deal much more damage. The squire bug pistol deals health damage, but the impaler (basically a semi-automatic rifle) does about four times as much, while only affecting armor. The impaler was my weapon of choice, so I’d have to switch to the pistol to finish off the last shot or two of an enemy’s health after destroying their armor.

Attila has separate health and armor as well, and enemies will also deal health and armor damage, indicated by red or yellow projectiles, respectively. Just like the player’s, enemy red projectiles can damage health, while yellow projectiles cannot. However, red damage takes out all exposed red health with a single hit. This means if your armor is reduced to zero, a single red projectile will kill you instantly. Your armor level can’t go above your health level, either. Your health is a bar and I have no idea what numbers are attached to it in the code, but by way of example, say you have 10 HP and AP, you get knocked down to 7 AP, then take a shot of health damage, now you’re at 7 HP and 7 AP – that means you’re at maximum armor, so any armor pickups are now useless. Armor pickups are much more common than health pickups, and certain enemy types drop armor pickups when damaged or killed, so you can zoom around hoovering up armor pickups to rebuild your defenses as long as you don’t get hit by a red attack.

In practice, I found this didn’t affect how I played as much as the way my damage types affected enemy defenses. It’s not like there was ever a situation where I’d be dodging out of a yellow projectile and into a red one or vice-versa, so I’d just try to avoid attacks in general, and lose some combination of armor and health whenever one hit me, and which was which was mostly out of my control. Eventually I unlocked upgrades that let me convert bio-ammo, what my impaler used, into armor, which made it more relevant. Just like you can duck behind cover to reload before rejoining the fray, you can also duck behind cover to re-armor, but it costs ammo for my preferred weapon (and bio-ammo is also used for the chain gun, and the reason I didn’t like it as much as the impaler is precisely because it’s an ammo hog). There’s some timing and risk-reward to that.

I might’ve gotten more out of the game’s health/armor distinction if I’d played at a higher difficulty. Normal didn’t push me very hard – the game has a system where dying consumes upgrade points and resets you to the last checkpoint, with enemies still damaged, and the only time I ever had to restart a level altogether is when I hadn’t gotten to the first checkpoint yet when I died, something that happened occasionally in the final levels, which aren’t shy about throwing some of the most intense firefights at you early on, and which can put the checkpoints in somewhat out of the way places. I never found it difficult to locate a checkpoint at all, but they were sometimes sufficiently out of the way that I had to slug it out through multiple firefights before finding them. Once I had a checkpoint, I was never in much danger. The game’s upgrades aren’t that powerful, so I found it never stung much to keep a large amount of upgrade points in reserve in case of a tricky firefight, and I only needed such a cautious reserve once, against the first appearance of a “Varangian guard,” a twelve-foot tall mech boss that shows up twice. The guard itself is not that threatening, but there are swarms of regular enemies in the same arena, it’s difficult to keep track of them all, and some of them hit like a truck.

I like this system – the limited continues being tied to weapon upgrades means that I don’t feel like dying is totally consequence-free, especially since I will eventually run out, the weapon upgrades are good enough to be noticeable but not so good that you’ll end up in a death spiral if you miss them, and while the game was easy enough on Normal difficulty that I felt like I was never pushing the mechanics too hard, there are higher difficulty levels for people who want that and you could always challenge yourself to beat each level with no deaths if that’s what you want. As is usually the case with this kind of thing, making a hard game means you’re betting everything on your mechanics being worth taking the time to master, and that’s a bet that many games lose on.

I also tried to play Scorn, but while it does an amazing job of being an explorable HR Giger illustration, I’ve run into a bunch of bugs in it where my ability to interact with the environment properly breaks, I couldn’t fix the latest one after about fifteen minutes of effort, and I decided that was all the trouble I was willing to go to. Pretty similar fate as Grime: Loved the aesthetic, was having a reasonably good time with the gameplay, and then there was a game-breaking bug in the controls.

CRWBY claims to have been sticking to “Monty Oum’s vision” for the entire run of the show, that they had the whole thing planned out in advance. A lot of people have expressed skepticism that the slipshod plotting of RWBY reflects some master plan conceived in 2013 and then followed scrupulously for a full decade despite major plot elements like the four maidens being added in along the way. But now that we know the whole story, yeah, I 100% believe that this was a story written in 2013 and adhered to without any significant changes.

What do you mean “we don’t know the whole story?” The last season never aired, but were Miles and Kerry keeping you on your toes with their stunning plot revelations? RWBY released new worldbuilding and had plans to keep doing that until, at the minimum, near the very end of the show, but its character and plot arcs were very straightforward. To their credit, their dedication to adhering to Monty Oum’s outline means they completely missed the obsession with plot twists and “subverting expectations” that gripped the world for a few years before Game of Thrones killed it in 2019. The show has always been about the same thing, going to the same place, so much so that you can tell its outline was pretty tightly focused.

We meet four teenage girls in shonen anime Hogwarts where they learn to fight Grimm, magical creatures who are attracted by negative emotions like anger and fear. This anger and fear is caused mostly by internal tensions, like racial conflict (the nations of the world are pretty much entirely at peace with one another) between humans and faunus. The White Fang are an organization dedicated to fighting for faunus rights by any means necessary. One of the members of the main team is a racist nepobaby, while another is a former member of the White Fang who can pass. For the first two major arcs at both Vale (autumn town) and Mistral (spring town – no, these don’t go in seasonal order, but the seasonal theming is still strong enough as to probably not be accidental, though not so strong I’m totally certain), the White Fang are the main villains. In arc three in Atlas (winter town), the primary villains are the Schnee Dust Company, the evil corporation most responsible for the exploitation of the faunus, while the final arc in Vacuo (summer town) revolves around the people of Atlas, formerly the most racist, being reduced to refugees and forced to beg the people of Vacuo for help.

See, it’s about people putting aside their racial differences and supporting one another – the climax of the show would’ve been about Vacuoans and Atlasians and the Menagerian faunus (who totally do get their own kingdom but don’t count as one of the four seasonal kingdoms, it doesn’t make sense but it’s also a perfectly believable kind of nonsense so whatever) putting aside their differences to stand against the Grimm together. Since main villain Salem’s evil plan is to summon back the two gods who promised to return upon the completion of a big ritual and either destroy the world if world peace had not been achieved or else repair it if it had, the ending here would’ve been that Team RWBY ultimately fails to stop Salem from completing her ritual, but just as all seems lost, it turns out that all the people of Remnant have put their differences aside and are now fighting the Grimm side by side, so actually the gods are going to do the good ritual. That inspiring (I mean, “inspiring,” but whatever) speech that RWBY gave would have successfully achieved world peace and repairing the communications network knocked out at the end of the first arc would’ve allowed it to reach the entire world.

I would not be surprised if Ever After, the primary location for the entirety of season 9, was not even mentioned in the original outline. It fits in just fine, but it’s not necessary to the rest of the outline and while I totally believe that they never replaced elements of the original outline, it seems likely that there were entire seasons that got less than a paragraph overview in that outline. Like, Seasons 4-6 in particular seems like they were probably described as a single combined arc, and Season 5 is the one that got gutted rather than admit that allocating three seasons per kingdom was a mistake in retrospect (they would eventually give Atlas just the two, so if I’m right, they did at least learn from the mistake).

But as much as the process of fleshing out an outline that was probably 2-3 pages long and heavily weighted towards the beginning and end resulted in enormous amounts of cruft, you can see the bones of the outline pretty transparently in themes that are stated from the very beginning, including in the music, which tends to be pretty on the nose about what the story is going to be about (this is fine, and if anything the problem is that it uses lots of relevant buzzwords but as a whole fails to make the point clear enough). A rising generation of young people, as symbolized by the teenaged Team RWBY, will open minds with the purity of their hearts, that in the end victory will come not by force of arms but from a simple soul. Team RWBY loses the physical final battle against Salem, she completes her ritual, but they successfully unite the world in peace with one another and thus trigger the good ritual instead of the bad one.

The story of RWBY was absolutely faithfully executing an outline written in 2013.

A lot of things are made by copying other things and then developing into something more original only over time. Sometimes the process of originalizing happens in editing over the course of multiple drafts, but sometimes it happens over the course of multiple installments in a series and we can see it happening in real time. For example, the xenomorphs from Alien inspired the genestealers in Warhammer 40k, which were eventually folded into the Tyranids faction, a humanoid-ish biomonster faction, and then StarCraft’s Zerg were based on the Tyranids but were much more alien-looking and the 3e Tyranids hewed closer to that look in response, and then when they made an Alien versus Predator RTS they based the xenomorph faction’s gameplay off of being a swarm-y bug faction like the Zerg, while the Predators had more of a small elite strike team feel similar to Protoss and the marines were in the middle and relatively very mobile like the Terrans. So the AvP xenomorphs ripped off the Zerg ripped off the Tyranids ripped off the xenomorphs, completing the circle of plagiarism.

RWBY definitely stole from a lot of shows. They took a lot of their scenes inexplicably from the Legend of Korra, the basic “go to X different themed regions of the world” plot was taken from Avatar, hampered slightly by none of the places being super interesting, dust was basically materia from Final Fantasy VII, grimm were basically Heartless from Kingdom Hearts. You can tell what parts of the show the creator really cared about and had experience creating because it’s much harder to find any obvious precedents for the character or weapon designs.

This could’ve been fine, except…well, except that Monty Oum died due to a freak accident in what should’ve been a routine surgery. But while the show was Monty Oum’s passion project and that passion was much more felt in the seasons he worked on, it had serious plot and pacing problems back then – Monty’s talents contributed greatly to the show, but his much-vaunted “vision” contributed nothing.

And RWBY would’ve been better if they had recognized what game they were actually ripping off with their central plot and ripped it off harder. Part of the problem here is that a lot of the centerpieces of their central plot were apparently late additions, like, the starting in season 3 the whole show is almost entirely about the four maidens, and apparently season 3 is when they first thought up the four maidens. But it does seem like the cycle of reincarnation and the eternal struggle between Oz and Salem was intended from the beginning, even if a third magic system on top of the two the show already had got chucked in two years in.

What RWBY’s main plot seems most informed by is the Zelda series: Immortal figures locked in a battle across the ages, fighting for control of super-artifacts, with the good guys having the artifacts while the bad guys seek the artifacts for world domination (or world demolition, in RWBY’s case). It’s Salem, Oz, and the maidens fighting over a grab-bag of four random artifacts instead of Ganon, Zelda, and Link fighting over the the Triforce, but it’s the same idea. Hell, the four elementally themed MacGuffins of Minish Cap are even similarly themed to the four seasons that the RWBY artifacts are sort of loosely themed after.

And once you recognize that RWBY is failing to rip off Zelda, improvements to the show suggest themselves immediately by ripping it off more and harder. The way a Zelda game works is that you need to go into some number of dungeons to retrieve the magic MacGuffins. Each dungeon is located in a different part of the map and is associated with a different terrain type and usually has some connection to one of the peoples of Hyrule. The magic MacGuffin is guarded by a big boss monster of some kind, not necessarily one directly related to Ganon, sometimes a big spider just lives here, Zelda dungeons just attract boss monsters automatically anytime Ganon fails to provide one.

So instead of the four vaults being opened up by maidens who are already on the good guys’ side, they can be camped on by giant grimm, because the artifacts draw them in somehow. Since the artifacts are grimm magnets, you can’t really put their vaults in the middle of heavily guarded capitals, so instead they’re a bunch of remote fortresses in the middle of nowhere, and in the gap between Oz’s reincarnations, sometimes they get overrun. And then at the end of the Beacon arc, Oz dies, so now Team RWBY has only a vague idea of where the artifacts even are. So in the first arc, Team RWBY meets Oz in anime Hogwarts, gets the down-low on the artifacts, and has to retrieve one of them to protect it from Salem, with Oz pointing them directly towards the objective to save time that we can use to set up why we have to do this in the first place. In the other three arcs, Team RWBY knows vaguely where the vault is, but in order to find it, they will have to go and talk to the townsfolk and get involved in local sub-plots. The climax of each arc is a big fight with the grimm guarding the artifact in the vault, leaning into the series’ strengths (back when it had strengths).

The nature of Zelda MacGuffins is also probably a better guide to what the artifacts do than whatever RWBY was trying to do with them. In Zelda, while individual artifacts have a cool theme or power, mostly what they do is come together to unlock the final dungeon so you can go punch Ganon in the face. This doesn’t put an end to the cycle of reincarnation forever, but Hyrule is saved for a hundred years, and honestly I kind of appreciate the Zelda games for not acting like evil must be totally eradicated before it counts as a happy ending, it’s fine if it’s just defeated for a lifetime and when it returns heroes will need to rise against it once more. That’s certainly much better than the RWBY thing where Oz has to prevent Salem from gathering the artifacts until he finds a way to immanetize the eschaton, which is presumably going to be accomplished by Ruby Rose giving one of her dorky speeches or something? Like, she makes an impassioned plea on the internet for everyone to stop being evil and it just kind of works. Given that the internet being taken down when one of the towers is destroyed is a plot point, that’s probably the intended ending.

But instead it could just be that gathering the four artifacts will defeat Salem right now. Like, each artifact could power up one of the RWBY girls in some way, and then all four of them together can fight Salem. Sure, “get MacGuffins to beat the bad guy” is not a super deep plot, but having a politically charged plot was a terrible idea for RWBY. Every single political talking point they incorporated into the show aged like milk. The White Fang plot and trying to make Oz a morally grey character was biting off way more than they could chew, and the requirements for defeating Salem – literal world peace – were even harder to write. It’s a mercy the show got cancelled before they had to try and make that work. They would’ve been way better off just telling a straightforward good vs. evil story, one that was basically just an IP scrubbed Zelda game that leaned into cool boss fights.

There’s a popular meme that during the Clone Wars, especially as depicted by the Clone Wars TV show, the Republic committed tons of war crimes. People joke about how the Republic used the Geneva Conventions as a checklist and will unironically point to these alleged war crimes to claim that the Separatists were justified.

They’re wrong. Red Five makes lists of ten Star Wars things and tried to get in on the meme – and he wasn’t even able to find ten actual examples of Republic war crimes. Let’s run through them real quick to see how many of them actually qualify:

1. False Surrender. Obi-Wan famously fakes surrender negotiations on Christophsis to buy time for Ahsoka and Anakin to destroy the Separatist shield generator and swing the battle in favor of the clones. Anakin sort of does this later at Ryloth, although it’s not clear if the fake surrender was a necessary part of the ploy or if he just wanted to set up his “you can still have my ship” quip, and then more unambiguously on Yerbana, where he fakes a surrender to lure the enemy commander out for an assassination prior to an assault. So we’re starting strong here with an actual war crime committed not just by Anakin Skywalker specifically, but by by-the-book Obi-Wan Kenobi, who we can assume is acting with the Republic’s blessing.
2. Torture. By “torture” what Red Five mostly means is “threats of execution,” which is still (usually) a war crime, but also it’s done almost exclusively by Anakin and Ahsoka, and especially in Anakin’s case it’s often a point made that he’s doing it where other Jedi and the Republic in general can’t see. The old Republic never had a chance to try Anakin for war crimes because they were dissolved before they found out about them, and the New Republic is probably perfectly happy to slap some war crime charges on top of the long list of crimes Darth Vader committed. There is still the scene with Cad Bane where Obi-Wan and Mace Windu join in. Technical nitpick, Cad Bane is asked to identify himself as an enemy combatant and does not do so. Torturing a non-combatant is a crime against humanity, not a war crime. But in general this is an actual bad thing done by the Republic, not by Anakin Skywalker acting alone.
3. Illegal Weaponry. If you thought those first two were undermining my point, then don’t worry, we’ve reached the stupid part. No, using flamethrowers is not a war crime. You are responsible for the fires you start on purpose which means using a flamethrower can lead to war crimes if the fires spread into civilian areas, but that doesn’t happen during the second battle of Geonosis. This is not a war crime. And the reason Ki Adi Mundi is excited when he tells the clones to bring up the flamethrowers is because the flamethrowers are (correctly) expected to be the final blow – he’s excited because the battle is nearly over.
4. Killing Fleeing Combatants. What?! Of course killing fleeing combatants isn’t a war crime. Why would you think this is a war crime? You are not required to wait until your enemy feels confident about the superiority of their position before you’re allowed to fight them.
5. Killing Unarmed Enemies. Also not a war crime. Assassinating enemy officers who don’t currently have their weapons on them is not the same as killing soldiers who are attempting to surrender, Mace Windu wouldn’t be a war crime anyway because Chancellor Palpatine is part of Mace Windu’s own nation, and no, Mace Windu is not legally required to fall for Palpatine’s fake surrender. Assassinating the Chancellor is undoubtedly a regular crime, but, y’know, so what? The galaxy would unambiguously have been much, much better off if Mace Windu had succeeded here, so this is neither technically a war crime nor is it in the general spirit of the “Jedi commit tons of war crimes” accusation.
   
   Also in this section is killing a medic – that’s only a war crime if they’re actively engaged in medical duties and are clearly marked as such. General Grievous’ medical droid A4-D has no such markings and wasn’t providing medical assistance to Grievous, but was shouting warnings, monitoring cameras, and operating door controls. No, you cannot paint red crosses on all your frontline infantry and thus make it impossible to fight any component of your army without committing war crimes, the Geneva Conventions aren’t that stupid, medics are only protected when they are actively being medics.
6. Use Of Child Soldiers. Ahsoka Tano is indeed just under fifteen when she is deployed to the front lines of Christophsis as a combatant. She’s just barely been assigned a mentor, so we can assume that most padawans in the war zone are older than her, but some significant chunk of Jedi padawans actually are child soldiers. The clones do technically count, but that’s because the Geneva Conventions were written under the assumption that none of the signatories have access to alien species or genetic hypertech. The Red Five video is pretty upfront about that, though.
7. Use Of A Slave Army. There are no specific war crimes regarding slave armies, but slavery is a crime against humanity. It’s also against Republic law. Palpatine orchestrated a situation in which the Republic would be forced to choose between accepting slavery or being eradicated, and while there’s not anything written into international law that specifically carves out exceptions for Sith conspiracies, there is obviously an enormous gap between “the Republic was blase about slavery” and “the Republic could be pressured into accepting slavery temporarily if a Sith conspiracy had arranged a sufficiently dire alternative.”
8. Violating Neutrality. No, it is not a war crime to invade Darth Maul’s coup de’tat regime because the Republic had signed a treaty with Mandalore’s previous government. Death Watch made assassination attempts against Duchess Satine Kryze while she was on Coruscant. The Republic has casus belli even if we accept that the treaties with the old government apply to Maul’s new regime. Just because Darth Maul is not a part of the Confederacy of Independent Systems doesn’t mean that the Republic isn’t allowed to declare war on him. It is not a war crime to be at war with two different countries.
9. Training Terrorists. By “terrorists” what Red Five actually means is “guerillas,” and no, it is not a war crime to train guerillas. The Onderon Resistance never attacks civilians, uses threats of violence to influence domestic policy, or otherwise uses terror to accomplish their goals.
10. Ordering Friendly Fire. Pon Krell was a Separatist. He was an infiltrator who ordered friendly fire because he sold out the Republic to the Separatists. The Jedi are not responsible for war crimes because one of their members betrayed them. That’s not how legal culpability works.

So when attempting to come up with a list of ten war crimes, what Red Five actually manages is two actual war crimes, two crimes against humanity (close enough), one of which was under very contrived circumstances, five things that are not war crimes, and one war crime committed by a Separatist defector.

I think this meme got going because almost all the war crimes/crimes against humanity that the Republic actually does commit, it commits in the movie that started the series. False surrender, child soldiers, slave army, there’s no torture but Ahsoka does pull a lightsaber on a civilian under pretty minimal provocation. So that first movie is genuinely a war crime-a-palooza. And then there’s almost nothing for the entire rest of the series, but the meme is entrenched and so people go fishing for anything that has sort of a war crime vibe to it and don’t bother doing the thirty seconds of Googling required to check. Like, the Geneva Conventions are online, you can CTRL+F for “incendiary” and read the relevant laws yourself.

If you wanted to consume all Star Wars content, could you do that? How much of your life would be dedicated to this project?

You may be surprised to learn that the answer is “yes” and “less than a decade.” I’m assuming that this is a primary hobby but not a job, so you can dump about an hour a day on workdays and two and a half on the weekends for 10 hours a week and 500 hours a year. You can get way higher than this if your life exists to facilitate consumption of Star Wars content, even if you have to work a normal day job to feed that, and even so, while this will be a massive part of your life for several years, it’s surprisingly doable.

I am making a few assumptions about what counts as “all Star Wars content,” however. First, I’m assuming you have streaming access to all content already, so the question of “how do you watch every episode of Ewoks” is presumed to be “in sequential order” without bothering with how easy it is to actually get access to a show from the 80s that got ignored by canon even before Disney took over. Second, I’m assuming you don’t really care about special editions, HD rereleases, ports and adaptations, and so on. Once you’ve watched A New Hope, you’re good, you don’t need to read the novelization and play Super Star Wars, too. You’re in it for the complete story of Star Wars, but you don’t feel the need to watch the theatrical cut, special edition, and HD remaster of the Original Trilogy, any more than you feel the need to acquire every DVD copy of Return of the Jedi and watch the contents of each disc separately just in case there are minute differences.

I also assume you don’t care about action figures or other collectibles where acquiring them is the experience. At that point, it’s not a matter of scheduling, it’s a matter of your means.

Movies

Dead simple. Fifteen movies (three trilogies, Clone Wars, Rogue One, Solo, two Ewok movies from the 80s, and the Holiday Special, although even someone who is asking for all of the Star Wars might draw the line at that last one), so that’s going to be fifteen weekend viewings, or a little under two months’ worth without touching the weekdays or doing a single weekend marathon for something like an entire trilogy.

TV Shows

This isn’t just doable for someone who sets out to consume all Star Wars content as a significant life goal. This is a thing anyone who really likes Star Wars will get 80% of the way towards on accident. Almost every Star Wars TV show and movie is something you’ve actually heard of and you might have already seen over half of them. You know about Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, the Bad Batch, the Mandalorian, Andor, etc. etc., and depending on when you grew up, odds are decent you’ve already seen large chunks of at least one or two of those series’. The only Star Wars shows that you might not have heard of are Droids, Ewoks, Visions, and Tales, and maybe some of the live action ones have slipped past you like The Acolyte, since Disney really is starting to machine gun them out so fast that you might need an actual list in front of you to keep track of them all.

And since these shows gravitate towards being either 22 minute episodes for a half-hour TV bloc (with commercials) or 44 minutes for an hour long bloc (with commercials), that means you can watch one or two per weekday with space left over for other small content like comics. There’s a total of 260-ish weekdays per year and less than 520 episodes of Star Wars content across all series’ (even counting shorts), so after two years you will run out even without ever touching your weekends, let alone doing a six-hour weekend marathon for something like Andor or the first season of the Mandalorian.

Comics

There are over a thousand Star Wars comics, but believe it or not, provided you don’t have to worry about collecting physical issues, this is one of the easiest mediums to get caught up on for Star Wars. A single comic only takes about 15-20 minutes to read, which means the entire 1200-ish comics in all of Star Wars, Legends and Canon, can fit into a single year. Realistically, you probably want to read one issue a day over the course of about 5 years, combining it with 40-45 minutes of other content on weekdays and slipping some into the margins on weekends when the movie (or whatever) only takes up 130 of the 150 minutes you have.

Books

There are something like 400 Star Wars books across both Legends and Canon. A few dozen of these are novelizations of movies or TV shows, but most of the books released under the brand of a TV show are original stories with the same characters, era, and tone as the TV show. A lot of them are young adult or middle grade novels that can be read in a single weekend (the average adult reads about 30,000 words in two and a half hours, for 60,000 words across two days of the weekend), but the X-Wing novels tend to be two weekends’ worth of reading individually and there’s ten of them. If we try to leave these to the weekends, then even granting that half of them will take only one weekend, that’s still 600 weekends or over ten years’ worth.

But we do have spare time on the weekdays in years 3-5 when TV shows give out but the comic a day is still only taking up 20 minutes of the hour of time set aside, and novels are going to be read in multiple sessions anyway, so we can treat them as a bit more of a liquid to be poured into glasses than we do the comics, movies, or TV shows where we want each film/episode to be finished in a single day.

Doing some quick calculations on 400-ish books each taking an average of 4-ish hours (averaging between young adult and adult novels), there’s 1600 hours of content here, and 40 minutes of spare time in each weekday in which we are reading a comic issue but have no more Star Wars TV to watch. That comes out to 10 hours of reading time for every 3 weeks, across the three remaining years we’re reading comics for, that is 520 hours, plus 780 hours from the weekends of those years and we have 1300 hours, but we also have the weekends from after we ran out of movies but before we ran out of TV shows, which give us another 480 hours for 1780 hours total.

This means that if you start reading books on the weekends once you run out of movies, and then start reading books on the weekdays in addition to your one issue of a comic book once you run out of TV shows, you will run out all existing Star Wars books about five months before you’ve run out of comic books. The only reason the comics have lasted so long is because we’re so lackadaisical about them – one issue per weekday, usually only twenty minutes, as opposed to books, which are 40 minutes a weekday plus 150 minutes each on Saturday and Sunday. But we will finally run out of them once we get into our last category.

Video Games

There’s about 50 video games, with wildly varying play times. Some of these fit within 10 hours (Republic Commando) and others represent hundreds of hours by themselves (the Old Republic). Discounting the MMORPGs, 20 hours is a fairly reasonable average, which means the 180 hours of time left over from the books isn’t even getting us a fifth of the way through, but it will take less than 2 years to get through the remaining 80%+.

You’d probably want to intermix novels and video games on the weekends rather than doing several years of intermixed comics, novels, and TV shows followed by several years of pure comics and novels followed by a few months of video games and comics followed by a year and a half of pure video games, but in terms of “how long does this take” the answer is 7 years. Rounding up to a decade should comfortably account for any slop in the calculations.

Achilles and the Franchise

What about the additional content released during that decade, though? Will you ever catch up?

Well, they release about one Star Wars movie, 2-3 seasons of Star Wars TV, and less than one Star Wars video game per year (seriously, Jedi Survivor was the only 2023 game, Squadrons was 2020, Fallen Order was 2019, the release pace is glacial). All those put together represent less than a month’s worth of content. Estimating comics and novels is slightly harder because there’s more of them, but it seems like there’s a few dozen comics per year which accounts for 1-2 weeks’ worth of content and roughly 5-10 novels per year, which represents about 2 months’ worth of content. Totaled up, Star Wars content comes out about 25% as fast as it can be consumed, which means at the end of the seven year project there will be an additional 1.75 years of content, and at the end of that there will be another four-ish months’ of content, and at the end of that another month-ish of content, and then a week, and then two weekdays’, and then a single twenty minute comic issue, and then we round down to zero, and you total that all up and you will need about two years on top of the initial seven years to consume all the content that came out during those seven years.

If we take the ten year estimate, it takes about three and a half years before you catch up on what came out during that decade, so the total time to catch up is about thirteen and a half years.

There is a lot of Star Wars, but it is surprisingly doable to become “the Star Wars guy” who knows all of the Star Wars. It requires sustained effort over a very long period of time, but not at an intensity that would be impractical to sustain for such a long time.

Fans are prone to certain annoying behaviors regarding unreasonable expectations of hyper-consistency from media, to the point where it’s detrimental to the media itself. I say that, but I’m honestly not certain how true it is, because I know examples where the fans were not to blame for settings hemming themselves in with lore, but I can’t actually think of examples where this problem actually did happen in response to fan demand. Star Trek is the stereotypical example of fans having a higher demand for lore consistency than creators, but I haven’t actually checked. Is that true?

The most egregious example of people blindly assuming that a lore tumor was the result of creators giving into fans is the Zelda timeline. It’s not an uncommon opinion that the Zelda games are meant to be retellings of the same basic story with new twists, a legend with no specific continuity, and that the fan efforts to impose a timeline on them are to the detriment of the games, especially when the games feel pressured to play along with things like the Hyrule Historia releasing official timelines and cramming in games that clearly want to be their own thing into the timeline.

That sounds like a thing fans would do, but it is a matter of historical fact that this is not the case. Every problem with the Zelda timeline, including the existence of a Zelda timeline at all, is Nintendo’s fault. The “the games are just legends with no specific timeline and which frequently retell the same story in different ways” interpretation is a fanon retcon that ignores the lore of the games. Not supplemental material like the Hyrule Historia book, but the games themselves.

The first game in the series is the Legend of Zelda. The Adventure of Link is a direct sequel. A Link to the Past is declared a prequel by its title and the back of the box – this is only true in English, the Japanese title and marketing is different, so it does seem like the developers intended Link to the Past to be a Super Nintendo remake of the NES original similar to Super Castlevania IV, but the fans are not to blame for taking Nintendo of America at their word. Ocarina of Time is a direct prequel to Link to the Past, depicting the events of Link to the Past’s opening cut scene. Majora’s Mask is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time. Wind Waker is also a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time. Twilight Princess is also also a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time. Every one of these three games makes explicit references back to Ocarina of Time without referencing one another, in addition to Ocarina having been a prequel to Link to the Past in the first place – this is where most of the trouble comes from. And then Phantom Hourglass is a direct sequel to Wind Waker, and Spirit Tracks is a direct sequel to Phantom Hourglass. Skyward Sword is not a direct prequel to any specific title (it makes no reference to the plot of any game besides itself), but it is very explicitly the first game on the timeline.

By the time the Hyrule Historia was released in 2011, the only Zelda games that did not have explicit placements on the timeline were the handheld games Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages/Seasons, and Minish Cap, plus the Four Swords multiplayer mode for the Link to the Past Gameboy Advance port and the Four Swords multiplayer game made for Gamecube based on that mode.

Even if we count the original Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past as retellings of the same story and thus not on the same timeline as one another, and remove Adventure of Link as being lore-incompatible with Link to the Past’s version and therefore also count it as incompatible with the timeline, that still means eight games are in some kind of timeline with each other (Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, Skyward Sword), while another eight are free floating with no connection to the main timeline (Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link, Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons, Minish Cap, Four Swords, Four Swords Adventure). And those eight games include the Oracle pair in continuity with one another and the first two games in continuity with one another, and also includes Four Swords mode as a game unto itself rather than a prototype for Four Swords Adventure. And also most of these games weren’t made by the main Zelda team, and exactly zero of them are incompatible with the main timeline – most of them can be dropped in wherever and it’s fine. The timeline snarl comes from games in the main timeline, because they are mutually incompatible sequels to Ocarina of Time.

By the time Hyrule Historia came out, the point when Nintendo allegedly gave in to fan demand and cranked out a half-assed timeline because the fans were desperate for all the games to be in continuity with one another, fully half of all Zelda games were in a timeline with each other, including all the ones that made the timeline hard to keep straight.

Think that having a contrived three-way timeline split is the fans’ fault? Nope, Hyrule Historia invented that. The idea that there is a timeline where Link died and that’s why Hyrule is in decline in the original Legend of Zelda game and its sequel was not really something any fans were talking about before Hyrule Historia had a three-way timeline split.

Think that having multiple timelines at all is the fans’ fault? Still no, this was not a fan invention while trying to reconcile the mutually incompatible Wind Waker and Majora’s Mask, this was something Nintendo devs said in interviews before Wind Waker came out.

Twilight Princess isn’t hard to place on a timeline because it wasn’t intended to be part of a timeline in the first place. Twilight Princess is hard to place on a timeline because it was intended to be part of a timeline, and it turns out the timeline was bad.