Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!
And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.
If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.
Of course shippers are always going to do their thing but really Skyward Sword is basically the only game in the series with actual hints of those two being in love.
Some others have them at most good friends, and in a few they barely meet at all. Including one with a way more credible potential love interest.
The first Hyrule Warriors is based on the premise that all Links and Zeldas through time and space (being basically reincarnations) are destined to be together, but, it’s not canon and written like an insufferable fan fiction, original Mary-Sue character very much included.
The first Hyrule Warriors is based on the premise that all Links and Zeldas through time and space (being basically reincarnations) are destined to be together
I don’t recall any romantic spin of this in HW, they are tied to each other and will pop up at the same time, but not to fall in love. This is just the continuation of the OoT/SS curse of Demise / Ganondorf, “I’ll follow you both every time you show up”.
While there is no direct romantic interaction between Link and Zelda, the whole motivation for Cia to turn evil is because she wants Link for herself, but it’s just not meant to be because all Links (sharing the same soul, that part is indeed canon) already have a universally appointed “soulmate”.
What that soulmate deal could actually mean might be debatable (it’s kind of loaded already), but anyway, Cia is only interested romantically. She’s got a literal fucking temple full of roses and statues dedicated to the guy.
Also her slightly saner alter-ego comes to the same conclusion, and just drops the case instead because she’s nice. They’re basically supposed to be omniscient.
The Link-Zelda ship problem is that all Zeldas are each other’s blood daughters, and all Links are the same “soul of the hero” despite being different people. So they don’t want to have any incest story baked in this reincarnation stuff, and it stays platonic most of the time. This was a retcon (kinda) introduced Skyward Sword, probably to justify why they’d been avoiding it the whole time, previous games like LttP and OoT would only say that the various Links were just from some royal knight families or “the last of the families of knights”.
Skyward Sword is the very first incarnation of both of these characters (Zelda being the first human incarnation of Hylia, and we don’t know about Link), so they can be in love - it goes out of focus, but it’s assumed to still be there at the end. And then BotW is the very end of the timeline, tens of thousands of years later, so that’s fine, they’re very clearly in love there by the end, and live together in TotK.
There’s also some hints in the Wind Water timeline (I think in Spirit Tracks but I never played it), because that timeline insists that this is a new hero unrelated to the previous soul of the hero.
Despite being an old guy who was around for the original Zelda game, Skyward Sword was actually the first Zelda game I ever sat down and seriously played. I really enjoyed it!
And as a completionist, I appreciated that it’s canonically the first game in the franchise. It gave me a foundation for the lore of the series, so I have a better understanding of every other Zelda game I’ve played since.
If there’s anything I didn’t like about it, it was that there was a borderline romance subtext going on between Link and Zelda at the beginning of the game, which doesn’t ever go anywhere. I half expected them to fall in love by the end, but they kept it strictly platonic once the plot started rolling. I learned later that that’s pretty much par for the course in Zelda games. Link is always the protector, not a love interest.
Of course shippers are always going to do their thing but really Skyward Sword is basically the only game in the series with actual hints of those two being in love.
Some others have them at most good friends, and in a few they barely meet at all. Including one with a way more credible potential love interest.
The first Hyrule Warriors is based on the premise that all Links and Zeldas through time and space (being basically reincarnations) are destined to be together, but, it’s not canon and written like an insufferable fan fiction, original Mary-Sue character very much included.
I would argue that Breath of the Wild strongly hints at a loving relationship developing.
I must admit that its been too long since I played Skyward Sword to usefully compare the two though.
I don’t recall any romantic spin of this in HW, they are tied to each other and will pop up at the same time, but not to fall in love. This is just the continuation of the OoT/SS curse of Demise / Ganondorf, “I’ll follow you both every time you show up”.
While there is no direct romantic interaction between Link and Zelda, the whole motivation for Cia to turn evil is because she wants Link for herself, but it’s just not meant to be because all Links (sharing the same soul, that part is indeed canon) already have a universally appointed “soulmate”.
What that soulmate deal could actually mean might be debatable (it’s kind of loaded already), but anyway, Cia is only interested romantically. She’s got a literal fucking temple full of roses and statues dedicated to the guy.
Also her slightly saner alter-ego comes to the same conclusion, and just drops the case instead because she’s nice. They’re basically supposed to be omniscient.
This shit is awful.
The Link-Zelda ship problem is that all Zeldas are each other’s blood daughters, and all Links are the same “soul of the hero” despite being different people. So they don’t want to have any incest story baked in this reincarnation stuff, and it stays platonic most of the time. This was a retcon (kinda) introduced Skyward Sword, probably to justify why they’d been avoiding it the whole time, previous games like LttP and OoT would only say that the various Links were just from some royal knight families or “the last of the families of knights”.
Skyward Sword is the very first incarnation of both of these characters (Zelda being the first human incarnation of Hylia, and we don’t know about Link), so they can be in love - it goes out of focus, but it’s assumed to still be there at the end. And then BotW is the very end of the timeline, tens of thousands of years later, so that’s fine, they’re very clearly in love there by the end, and live together in TotK.
There’s also some hints in the Wind Water timeline (I think in Spirit Tracks but I never played it), because that timeline insists that this is a new hero unrelated to the previous soul of the hero.