[The real consequences of blurring video games and real life..]

I'm not gonna lie; when Phoenix Wright first came out, I was so into it that I found a rip of the Overtaken! theme and put it on my phone. Whenever anyone would say something contradictory, I would pull out my phone, play the song, and start the courtroom drama.

Needless to say, I got some weird looks, but it was totally worth it.

--Jack Kieser

[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess]

So. Just hit 71 hours and the last dungeon. I have to say, the game is damn worth the cost. In my books, it's easily the best Zelda game ever. Including beyond OoT and LttP.

Just something I'm wondering about, from the timeline gurus..

Where in the hell in the timeline did they find the time to relocate the temple of time from the Hyrule castle city, to the lost woods/Kokiri forest? Is there some big, important game between OoT and TP that will perhaps explain how the original Temple was perhaps destroyed and they had to rebuild it in the lost woods/Kokiri forest? And more importantly.. what happened to Kokiri village? Was it clearcut to make room for Ordon village?

All valid questions. Note the difference between TP's temple 4 cut scene and OoT's ending. At the end of OoT Ganon was banished in the sacred realm. He must have come back somehow and caused some trouble.

As for the temple of time being relocated, note that the whole kingdom's layout was changed. For the Zora kingdom to be north, you would have to rotate OoT's map 90 degrees to the counterclockwise. That would put not Ordona province, but the first temple/6th temple over it. It would also make Karakiro no longer correspond to the island in WW and death mountain would be pretty far off from the WW location. Also, the temple of time was still in Hyrule/Castle City in WW. Do you remember opening the gate to the temple of time? You moved from the real world to somewhere else. What you had in the lost woods was a gate from the woods to the temple of time, which lacks a definite location as of TP. This is probably due to Ganon destroying it in the bridge between MM and TP.

Since there was no reference and no legends about the hero of time, you can safely assume that another game takes place between TP and WW, and then a the failure that led to WW. So, after TP, Ganon should free himself twice. Once to continue the legend that Link became in TP, and one for Link to not return and for Ganon to destroy hyrule, but not the newly rebuilt temple of time.

Ok, so I go to Digipen (Nintendo's college for gaming), and you could say a few of us have played TP quite a bit. The positions of some places in TP Hyrule have been kind of confusing for us, too, but there might be an explanation to it all without the addition of an extra game anywhere.

First, let's get a few postulations down.

A) We are over 100+ years after OoT, so geography is bound to change in subtle ways. Many differences don't really have earth-shattering reasons.

Remember that Ganon apparently came back at some point before TP (thus needing to be banished again). This is going to inevitably be a possible explanation for anything.

C) Technically, the game on Wii is running in Mirror Mode, so that has to be taken care of before any explanations are given.

Ok, notice that after de-mirrored, with the exception of Zora's River/Domain, things match up a little better. But we're still off by a bit. Unless you take Ganon into account. At the end of Oot, Hyrule was left relatively untouched. Then, between MM and TP, Ganon returns and begins wreaking havok. Obviously, certain places were destroyed (i.e., Kakariko), but it is also a very real possibility that Ganon destroyed the place responsible for his capture and dethroning in the first place - Hyrule Castle and the surrounding Castle Town. This would explain the derelict condition of the Temple of Time (note: we know it is the same Temple because of the location of the Master Sword chamber. If the "past" temple and the ruins in the grove are placed on top of each other, this is evident.).

Then, why is the current castle and surrounding town so far away, and what about the woods? Simple explanations, as always, yield the best answers. The castle and town are so far away because of migration. After all, if you had lived in the original Castle Town and watched it be decimated by Ganon, wouldn't you want to leave? As for the woods, there is no indication that those are the Lost Woods a la OoT at all. The Forest Temple is merely a happy coincidence; neither the placement nor the layout is in any way related to the original Forest Temple, so they cannot be the same. As for Ordon Village, who's to say a small group of townspeople refused to leave? The original castle town could have easily had forested area around it (remember the small area to the left of the Castle Town in OoT with the hole for a Piece of Heart) that was inaccessable in OoT that, given 100+ years, could have overgrown into the Faron Woods.

The positioning of Kakariko and Death Mountain can be accounted by simple geography; after all, there is no way that Death Mountain was originally so close to Hyrule Castle anyway. The natural expansion of the overworld, therefore, accounts for this. As for Kakariko's appearence, it is possible that everyone just left, probably for the new Castle Town. Without enough villagers to keep the town afloat, it turns to the shambles we see today.

It is also natural for the remaining relics of the Gerudo to be eradicated as well. After all, Ganon WAS a Gerudo. After his second coming (the Hylians wouldn't have remembered his first rule, and so wouldn't have iconoclast-ed the Gerudo then), the Hylians drove off/ killed off the remaning Gerudo (with the possible exception of Telma's family) and destroyed all evidence of their existance, with the exception of the un-destroyable Mirror Chamber/Mirror of Twilight.

This, then, leaves Zora's Domain and Zora's River. Unfortunately, what is known about Hyrule's past does not account for the relocation of the Zoras, and it cannot simply be pawned off as caused by Ganon because even he cannot physically move an entire river system, nor would he need to. Thus, we are left with few possibilities, but possibilities none the less. Either, as with Death Mountain, Zora's River was longer and more winding than was geographically possible in OoT (a shaky and unlikely scenario, at very best), or simply Miyamoto ran out of room on Hyrule's right side and needed to move the Zora's for convenience sake (remember, this is a very likely possibility for ALL of TP Hyrule's differences).

Unfortunately, due to the Zelda series' nature, we'll probably never know for certain, but at least we can still postulate.