SNES intro text for LttP:
Long ago, in the beautiful kingdom of Hyrule surrounded by mountains and forests... legends told of an omnipotent and omniscient Golden Power that resided in a hidden land.
Many people aggressively sought to enter the hidden Golden Land... But no one ever returned.
One day evil power began to flow from the Golden Land... So the King commanded seven wise men to seal the gate to the Land of the Golden Power.
That seal should have remained for all time...
...But, when these events were obscured by the mists of time and became legend...
A mysterious wizard known as Agahnim came to Hyrule to release the seal. He eliminated the good King of Hyrule...
Through evil magic, he began to make descendants of the seven wise men vanish, one after another.
And the time of destiny for Princess Zelda is drawing near.
Canonical GBA intro:
Long ago, in Hyrule, a beautiful kingdom surrounded by forests and mountains... legends told of an omnipotent and omniscient Golden Power that lay hidden.
It was hidden in a sacred realm beyond the reach of men, but one day... ...a doorway to that realm was suddenly opened...
Hoping to claim the Golden Power as their own, the people began to quarrel and fight... Many sought to enter the hidden Golden Land... But none returned, and instead evil power began to issue forth from the dark portal... So the king commanded seven sages to seal the gate to the land of the Golden Power. Many brave knights were lost in the battle to protect the sages from the tides of evil, but the seal was cast! Evil flowed no more! And the seal would remain for all time...Or so the people hoped...But when these events were obscured by the mists of time, and became legend...
A mysterious wizard known as Agahnim appeared as from nowhere... and with strange magic powers he eliminated the good king of Hyrule...
He cast spells on the soldiers and kidnapped young maidens descended from the sages in order to break the seal...
This destiny fast approaches for the final maiden... the princess, Zelda...
So the door to the Sacred Realm was opened somehow, but no one came out of it with the Triforce (except Ganon[dorf] apparently?). Sounds like Link opened the Door of Time and then died or something? Also there's no mention of the hero, even though this revision was done after Ocarina, and had revisions made that seem to be specifically intended to bolster the ties to Ocarina (e.g., changing "Seven Wise Men" to "Seven Sages" (some say they should've made the maidens have the same races as the OoT Sages if that's what they were going for, but I don't subscribe to virulent anti-miscegnation propaganda like that)). Not mentioning a hero is a big detriment to the (apparently now Jossed anyway) theory that Four Swords Adventures was the Imprisoning War, but as a sequel to the Failure timeline, it fits.
So, Wind Waker is in the Adult timeline, Twilight Princess is in the Child timeline, and Link to the Past is in the Failure timeline. That sounds about right all around, doesn't it?
Where do the CD-i games fit in?
Maybe there's another timeline split before Skyward Sword, where the difference is that everyone is stupid, and that's also where the TV show goes. Maybe Bowser went back in time and kidnapped Star Children there too and that's just the way that stupid TV show alternate universes get created in this multiverse.
And incidentally, I am taking Miyamoto's tolerance of a three-way timeline split in Zelda as definitive proof that my three-way Mario timeline split theory is absolutely correct.
Which reminds me, those purple bouncy Octoroks that are on floating rocks in the sky in Skyward Sword are totally
Electrogoombas (which are now called Octoombas apparently (but the picture down there is of a variant on them that's just called
Octopus which I picked because they resemble them even more)).
There's also the pink ones that look a lot like Land Octoroks:
Crossbreed the pink ones with the brown ones, and in a few millennia, you've got Sky Octoroks.
Now, Fi says in Skyward Sword that the Grass Octoroks evolved from some kind of ocean-dwelling mollusk-like things, but what does that goddessless scientist know? If Grass Octoroks evolved from Water Octoroks, then why are there still Water Octoroks, huh? You can't explain that.
(Everstones)Besides, those are Deku Scrubs.
So how many timelines are there, if Mario and Zelda are in the same 'verse? If both serieses have at least one timeline split, and one series comes before the other, does only one of the first series's branches lead to the world of the other series, or do all of its branches lead to slightly different versions of the other series? Maybe Mario comes first (I've always leaned toward this, honestly), and when Bowser splits the timeline into the one where Mario and Luigi grow up in the Mushroom Kingdom and the one where they grow up in Brooklyn and have really stupid TV show adventures, the Brooklyn timeline leads into the Zelda TV show and the CDi games, while the Mushroom Kingdom timeline eventually leads to Skyward Sword.
I kinda maneuvered that back into being on topic, I guess.