The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Fresh Air

reddit wrote:Not gonna bother with much of an intro on this one - I have a theory.
The game begins when Link awakens in a bizarrely Metroid-esque "Resurrection Chamber", a regal female voice urging him to wake up and take the Sheikah Slate before going to a spot on his map. Outside, he stumbles into a hooded old man, who offers advice to Link about the world outside. At some point, the old man offers to trade his paraglider to Link, in exchange for retrieving something called a Spirit Orb from a strange shrine.

Sequentially, I believe the next thing that happens is the cinematic we got very brief glimpses of in today's new trailer. Link apparently has to climb to the top of a golden tower that's probably the golden point on his map in the demo in order to find the shrines, as suggested in later Treehouse stream dialogue with the old man, and from there I imagine he would have a pretty great view of the giant evil cloud demon wrapping up Hyrule Castle like a kraken. It's here that, supposedly, the woman's voice informs Link that he was asleep in the Resurrection Chamber for an entire century and the world has been terrorized by Calamity Ganon, a swirling cloudlike entity trapped within Hyrule Castle and struggling to break free. Once again, if the secondhand information I've gathered is correct, apparently there's also a golden light inside the castle.

https://imgur.com/a/laaPt

Two items of note: one, Link's clothes are clearly way too small for him. The sleeves cling just past his elbows, the hems of his pants brush his midcalf, and the hem of his shirt is at his navel. You can even see the muscle lines on his pelvis, indicating that his waistband won't go high enough, either. Since it's the outfit you get from chests inside the chamber, this seems to suggest that Link went into the tank as a younger person and grew at a reduced pace, as opposed to entering complete stasis.

Attentive viewers have also noted the missing frames in the middle of the trailer right before the violins kick in - a single second of black screen and cut audio directly after this quick glimpse of action. My guess is that the frame involved a clearer look at the horned head of the Calamity, and they decided at the absolute last second to cut it out in case it was too revealing.

After obtaining the first Spirit Orb, the old man meets you outside your first shrine, telling you about the Sheikah and musing on their history, before revealing that he's kind of a hustler and you're going to have to get three more Orbs before he'll give you the paraglider that may very well be the only way to leave the Plateau.

https://imgur.com/a/FycWb
So there's the first hour of pre-dungeon gameplay! Let's sidetrack for a minute and talk about said Plateau. It's a high, flat area filled with ruins and wild animals, apparently divided from the rest of Hyrule by a deep gorge. The only inhabitants besides the animals appear to be Link, the old man, a small army of Bokoblins, and the evil fart gas itself. My guess is that the Plateau was divided from the rest of Hyrule as either a part or a side effect of the process of trapping the Calamity, and that the farther you get from the center of the map the more populous the land becomes, in a fun subversion of the way fantasy open-world maps are often laid out. The Great Plateau and the birthplace of Hyrule are now considered an inaccessible wasteland, devoid of sentient life and to be avoided at all costs.

But if that's the case, then who's the old guy? "The King of Hyrule" is the obvious answer; regardless of where BotW fits on the timeline, he bears a strong resemblance to the King of Red Lions in both appearance and tone. It's definitely the most obvious answer... but perhaps too obvious. Isn't the buzzword associated with this game "breaking Zelda convention," and isn't the wise old man NPC one of the oldest and most iconic conventions of the series? "Here's the real King hiding in the ruins of Hyrule Castle" is a plot that's already been done by a Zelda game, and given the design direction of this game so far, I can't imagine they'd want to recycle anything so broad for their narrative. Besides, we don't know that Hyrule itself is completely in ruins, only that this first zone is. Like I said, heavy civilization is probably way out on the edges of the map, meaning early gameplay requires a lot of living off the land and large settlements are progression rewards - and that's part of why it would be spoilers to show off any of them.

If he's not the king, then who is he? Well, I hope you stick around for the end after this, I think I can make it work. It's Ganondorf.

I know, I know, but think about it. Take away the snowy Santa Claus beard and you have a broad-shouldered male character with a wide nose, dark skin, a high forehead, and dark clothes with striking angular patterns. He carries himself in a manner extremely reminiscent of prior 'Dorfs, and even strikes the exact pose as Ganondorf's TP official art.

https://imgur.com/a/huoFS

The old man seems unnecessarily mean to Link at several places, too, screaming at him for taking the baked apple and deliberately holding out on a promise to get a favor. He even invites the player to overlook him - claiming to be "only a strange old man" and dismissing the idea that Link needs to pay attention to him, despite following him around the Plateau, as he can be seen innocently chopping wood behind Link in the official trailer.

I'm putting forth that he's a willful, deliberate subversion of "It's dangerous to go alone!" and is actually a threat. Maybe it's a mistake to blindly hand over sacred artifacts to a stranger in exchange for a kite - why does he want those Spirit Orbs anyways? Is the reward for your sacred Goddess-set trial really intended to just be handed over to some old hobo? It seems even more possible when you recall that SS and ALBW, two of the most recent lore-focused Zelda titles, both chose to flirt with subverting the classic Hijacked by Ganon plot in interesting ways.

"Yet another forgotten entity. A mere ghost of its former self..."

Of course, if the old man is Ganondorf, that still leaves the question of the so-called Calamity Ganon. The information is all secondhand and not completely clear, but to sum up: you awaken to a mysterious female voice commanding that you open your eyes, who then instructs you to proceed to a golden tower. There you activate the shrines and the woman's voice tells you about Calamity Ganon, trapped in Hyrule Castle, who continues to grow stronger and whom you have to defeat to stop it from razing the world. Link sees Calamity for the first time... and Calamity, apparently, sees Link.

Allowing for the very real possibility that I've been getting corrupted word-of-mouth, it seems as if the mysterious voice is the only source of information Link has about Calamity Ganon and his hundred-year sleep, at least in the demo. Even if I'm wrong and the old guy brings it up at some point, we've established he's not necessarily trustworthy - and it remains to be said that blindly following the instructions of the beautiful voice you hear in your dreams is another extremely old-school Zelda narrative convention.

Once again, please bear with me through this next bit. What if it's actually Calamity Hylia?
It's a little weird that Ganon would be trapped in the physical location of Hyrule Castle. When he's been held back before, he's either banished to the Sacred Realm or sealed by the Master Sword. Zelda, on the other hand, is trapped in the castle all the time. She's connected to that place over and over throughout the series, held prisoner by everything from social responsibility to dark magic barriers to tiny demons pretending to be parliament officials - it's simultaneously her home, her workplace, and her cell. Broken, discarded statues of Hylia can be found in the ruined Temple, and the Master Sword in the logo is rusted and heavily damaged, which has never happened to it in all its long centuries of being forgotten in forests. It almost seems to suggest that the magic within the sword has been poisoned.

Also, you know, the Calamity is pink. It's straight-up just a bright hot pink color. (Its horned helm also bears a striking resemblance to Phantom Zelda.)

https://imgur.com/a/F9hsz

I'd also like to talk about the Guardians for a moment. Their name and their visual appearance indicate that they're Sheikah in origin, bearing an especially close resemblance to the shrine entrances, but they glow with the same violently pink energy as the Calamity and seem to be geared to viciously go after Link. The obvious conclusion to draw is that the Calamity somehow obtained control over the Guardians, regardless of whomever it turns out to be - and the scattered placement of the stone Guardians around the Temple of Time make it clear that they were attacking it, or trying to tear it to the ground. Could the Sheikah have made an army for their Goddess, where either the soldiers or the commander or both were corrupted?

Which is not to say that Hylia is the antagonist, necessarily. It could still be evil Ganon and good Hylia in this situation. Perhaps Hylia is trapped within a tortuously painful seal that causes delusions or something - we'll understand more when it's made clear how and why you're sent to find the shrines, and what Spirit Orbs actually do. (Allow me to take this time to point out that the shrine monks are clearly desiccated corpses that may have undergone self-mummification.) Ultimately, that matters less to me than convincing you that not all might be as it seems.
Now, there is another possibility that allows for Old Manondorf - it could still be Calamity Ganon, but Ganon as a separate being, as if the spirit of the Demon King and its mortal host were divided. You could find ways to write that, too. Or maybe Zelda is Zelda and the wise old man is a wise old man and I'm just a human being trying to engage in critical thinking after watching a stream for six and a half hours on three hours of sleep. Who knows?
At the end of the day, I just think that the roles of suggested-Zelda and the old man are far too typical for Zelda narrative to take at face value, considering how dramatically and effectively they transformed the gameplay aspects of the series with this title.

Thanks for reading. Thoughts?

ES wrote:People are losing their minds, no one no ones where this fits in the timeline lol

Starting when the game launches on March 3, players will be able to purchase an Expansion Pass for $19.99, granting access to two new sets of downloadable content for the game when they become available later this year. Immediately upon pre-purchase or purchase of the Expansion Pass, three new treasure chests will appear in the game’s Great Plateau area. One of these treasure chests will contain a shirt with a Nintendo Switch logo that Link can wear during his adventure, exclusive to the Expansion Pass. The other two will deliver useful items. The first content pack is scheduled to launch this summer, and will include the addition of a Cave of Trials challenge, a new hard mode and a new feature for the in-game map. The second content pack will launch in Holiday 2017, and adds new challenges that will let players enjoy a new dungeon and a new original story. The Expansion Pass will be available for both the Nintendo Switch and Wii U versions of the game and are identical. Content packs cannot be purchased individually.