#i do think the combat system of eow looks annoying as shit still tho. that being said i have preordered already

[blueskittlesart]

So my first LoZ game was TOTK. I got it as a gift and I just recently obtained BOTW. After watching the Echoes of Wisdom trailer, I have a few questions and figured considering the document u could prolly answer.

Are the Rito a staple of the game? They don't appear to be in EoW.

Are Sidon, Riju, Yunobo, and Tulin/Teba similar staples? Do their tribes appear without them, the characters changing?

What are Deku? Are they korok alternatives?

Finally, where do u think the game would fall on the timeline?

Thank you so much.

omg yaaay i havent talked at length about zelda lore/theories in a while lets go

Rito are a relatively new addition to the franchise. the only games which feature them are wind waker (2002) and its sequels, and botw (2016) and its sequels. the canonical explanation for why the rito just showed up is that they evolved in the thousands of years between wind waker and the game that came before it on the timeline. Based on the general vibe of eow i've seen in the trailers, it looks like it probably comes before wind waker on the timeline or exists in a different timeline entirely. so i think the rito probably haven't evolved yet. because the rito haven't been around since the very beginning like other races in the games, the devs seem to have more freedom to pick and choose whether they want them around, so i wouldn't exactly call them a staple race in the way that zora and gorons are.

While the RACES of hyrule are staples of the franchise, the specific champions we see in botw/totk are not. those characters don't reincarnate the way link, zelda, and ganon do, so they only exist within that one specific link's time. So while we'll definitely zee zora and gorons in eow, we almost definitely aren't going to see any familiar characters.

Deku are a race of forest spirit-adjacent. things. their first appearance was in oot iirc. the great deku tree, as you may remember from botw/totk, is a very old, very powerful forest spirit who rules over the forest. in oot, deku scrubs were usually hostiles you had to either fight or negotiate with, and in mm, link could become a deku scrub via a kind of terrifying mechanic we don't have to get into here. based on the eow trailer, in this version of hyrule the deku scrubs are korok/kokiri substitutes. the race that lives in the forest is one of the most inconsistent pieces of overarching zelda lore, so yeah tldr you can just assume theyre basically koroks.

the timeline question is. well. before the most recent trailer I was almost completely convinced that it was going to be on the alttp timeline, somewhere after link's awakening. but that was based solely on the vibes and the bare glimpses of the hyrule map we got in the first trailer. now that we've gotten a much more extensive look at the map and the races of hyrule, I think it's a little more likely that the game takes place sometime before oot. the map looks similar enough to minish cap while featuring races and regions that made their debut in oot, so I think that it makes sense for the game to fall somewhere in between the two, and I think that a lot of the choices they made sort of lend themselves to the game being a transition between minish cap/4 swords and oot. the crack theory is that it takes place AFTER botw/totk, purely because of how visually similar bind looks to ultrahand and the appearance of certain races being super similar to botw/totk, but i think the pre-oot theory is MUCH more likely.