This Potential Zelda: TOTK Plothole Could Be Explained By Link In BOTW

is a rare direct sequel in the series, and the only one so far to re-use the majority of the previous game's world — but the returning characters and story elements from also bring with them some noticeable plotholes.

Other games in the series are usually more like separate parts of an anthology than continuous pieces of the same story, so the series has rarely had to concern itself much with keeping a strict continuity, but this approach may have backfired when it comes to. Although every mainline game stars a hero named Link (or, in most games before , whatever the player named him), different games in the series will rarely star the same «Link» — and even those that do, like and, tend not to re-use the same game world.

In the transition from to, however, using the same protagonist, the same Hyrule, and many of the same returning characters will have some players wondering about one noticeable plothole. Despite most characters from returning in the sequel, many of those NPCs don't seem to recognize Link in , sometimes in spite of being side quest givers in the previous game.

An easy, but potentially unsatisfying explanation, is simply that Nintendo wanted to minimize confusion for players who skipped the previous game, and so only carried forward Link's relationship with a select few important NPCs — but another way to reconcile the inconsistency is to assume that follows up on 's main story without acknowledging its side content.

Most of the NPCs that don't recognize Link in are primarily associated with relatively minor side quests in, so the assumption that Link just canonically didn't bother with many of those side quests is one way to make 's plotholes make more sense. Alternatively, it's relatively easy to rationalize that, in the years that have passed between the end of and, many of the NPCs that Link interacted with may have just forgotten the person that did a relatively minor task for them once.

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