Hyrule 𒆙is perhaps Nintendo’s most iconic location. The🃏 home of The Legend of Zelda, the mystical land of Hyrule is a world full of lore and history that fans debate feverishly over. The series has done a great job at developing the region, especially in recent years, by shedding more light on the culture and people of Hyrule. That’s not to say the earlier games💮 aren’t full of details, however. You can go back to the very first Zelda and infer a lot from the nearly uninhabited land. The series’ narrative strength has aཧlways been its visual details and Hyrule is one of the best examples of 🦋that.
As The Legend of Zelda is a series that prides itself on finding secrets and exploration, it should come as no surprise that Hyrule, itself, is also full of its own secrets: deඣtails hidden in the background waiting to be found by perceptive fans. Sometimes these small details say a lot abඣout Hyrule, and the parallels Nintendo likes to draw between games. The franchise has always had a very distinct style of storytelling and world-building, but it’s often easy to miss those connections.
When it all comes down to it, Hyrule is one of t💯he most lived-in worlds in video game history. At the same time, however, it’s also incredibly morbid, highly detailed, and a near obsessive with maintaining certain elements. It’s a world that only Nintendo could think up. It’s Hyrule.
15 Hyrule Has At Least Four Parallel Worlds
Hyrule is complicated, to say th🐎e least. Each 🅘and every Zelda game brings in so much new information that fans squabble over. After that, there are a mountain of d൩eveloper interviews, and a handful of new lore books like Hyrule Historia and Hyrule Encyclopedia. Things get retconned, things 🉐get unretconned, but one thing that stays constant is that Hyrule has a lot 🔯of layers to it. Literally.
A Link to the Past in💛troduced the Dark ꦕWorld, a world parallel to Hyrule that Ganondorf controls. Majora’s Mask introduced Termina, a fever-dream-like Hyrule ful♛l of rich lore that will never b๊e given more depth. Twilight Princess had the Twilight Realm, and A Link Between Worlds gave us Lorule. There’s a lot going on under Hyrule’s surface, and it’s hard to make everything coexist with one another given the limited information we have but, at the same time, it only adds to൲ the allure that these worlds have. The mystery i🗹s a natural part of The Legend of Zelda and parallel worlds, no matter how illogical or odd, o﷽nly amplify that
14 The Downfall Timeline Has Two Princess Zelda Existing At The Same Time
The latest♈ confirmed point we have for the downfall timeline is The Adventure of Link, a game in which Link has to traverse across Hyrule to awaken a slumbering Princess Zelda. The thing🅷 is, though, there’s already a Princess Zelda hanging out in Hyrule at this point. Most people might miss the fact that t🐈he official backstory for Zelda II claims that the Zeꦑlda Link is trying to wake up is NOT the Zelda from the original game but a Zelda from years ago who was cursed.
As is typical for The Legend of Zelda, Link manages to wake this Zelda up but what does this mean for the Regency? This is a Hyrule that just got back on track after Ganon’s attack in the first game so adding another princess to the mix ꦫcertainly compl☂icates things considerably. Does the new (old?) princess aid Hyrule politically? Is there a tension for Link’s affection? Do they share a bunk bed? Just some of the questions that having two Zelda in Hyrule raise.
13 Hyrule Was Only Flooded For 100 Years By The Start Of The Wind Waker
When you play through The Wind Waker, you’re exposed to a world that has been fundamentally changed. Society has evolved to adapt to their ocean fueled existence, entire civilizations cut off from one another. In many ways, it’s a dark and dangerous world filled with eons of history and lore. The very title of the sea ridden Hyrule, "The♓ Great Sea," boasts of a world entrenched by water. Too 🌱bad most of The Wind Waker’s my༒sticism is sওhattered by the fact it takes place one century after Ocarina of Time.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate, isn’t it? It almost feels like a mistake or a mistranslation, but series director Eiji Aonuma has confirmed in interviไews that it’s been a mere 100 years since the flooding happened. Actually, it could even be interpreted that it’s been 100 years since Ocarina of Time meaning the flooding happened even closer to The Wind Waker. Given how little the inhabitants of the world know about the pre-flood Hyrule, you’re better off just assuming yꦗears work d✃ifferently in The Wind Waker or that Aonuma is really bad at math.
12 Grooseland Was Technically Hyrule’s First Name
Hyrule is an incredible name if you꧃ th𝓀ink about it. It might be because of the influence The Legend of Zelda has had on video game and mainstream culture, but just hearing th🥃e name invokes a sense♍ of pure wonder and fantasy. There’s a reason the original game was subtitled A Hyrule Fantasy. It’s a dramatic land out of this world. That’s why it’s so funny when Groose✤ names📖 Hyrule Grooseland in Skyward Sword.
Obviously, we know that Grooseland isn’t going to stick, but it’s hilarious that the first chronological name Hyrul👍e had was named after one of the series’ biggest doofuses. Just imagine, A Grooseland Fantasy for the NES. It’s a name that v🌃ery well might have fit in the 1980s but let’s just be grateful Nintendo thought up Hyrule first. While the inhabitants of Hyrule might never find out their country’s original name, we, the players, will always know the majesty of Groose’s naming conventions.
11 Hyrule’s Geography Is Ever Changing
One of the hardest aspects of The Legend of Zelda for hardcore fans to reconcile is Hyrule’s ♛constant geographical rearrangement. Breath of the Wild made an attempt at creati💟ng a cohesive world that lined up with the previous games but, no matter which way you cut it, someth🧜ing’s going to be off. The only real explanation can be that Hyrule’s landscape is changing drastically over time and towns are moving around.
Think about it, each game is hundreds of years ap🍬art which gives plenty of time for entire villages to move around and for landmarks to shift with the passage of time. If you take that into consider💃ation, it actually becomes considerably align all the different Zelda maps. Ocarina of Time’s world map fits nicely into Twilight Princess’, and then both can be jammed somewhere into Breath of the Wild with consideration given to scope.
10 Hyrule Was Most Likely Part Of A Larger Continent
Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons have Link traveling to two completely cut off lands from Hyrule: Hooldrum and Labrynna. Now, there’s really nothing too out of the ordinary 📖about these countries, but that’s exactly the evidence we’re looking for: there’s nothing out of the ordinary.
There are some cultural differences, of course, bꦅut Hooldrum and Labrynna have some pretty heavy Hylian influences. The goddesse🎶s even manifest themselves in these countries as opposed to Hyrule. The idea here is that Hooldrum and Labrynna were once apart of Hyrule, but continental drifting pushed them apart. Given how slowly technology and culture tend to advance in the series, it makes sense they’d hold onto some Hylian traditions.
9 You Could Fit Every Zelda Map Into Breath Of The Wild And It Still Wouldn’t Fill It
Breath of the Wild is big. You know it’s big, I don’ꦕt have to tell you that. But do you really understand꧋ just how big it is? To give you an idea, you could fit every map from every Zelda game, and it wouldn’t fill all of Breath of the Wild. At first glance, that might be unreasonably huge for an open-world game. It’s fun to explore a sandbox, sure, but there ⭕comes a point where there’s more fluff than fun. Thankf🐻ully that isn’t the situation here. What makes BotW’s massive map all the mo🦋re interesting, however, is that its size kind of makes sense.
If you look at previous Zelda games as just taking place in a few concentrated regions of Hyrule𓄧, you can start to pla💜ce where certain games took place. Ocarina of Time was primarily in the Great Plateau region, Twilight Princess was mostly in the center of the map, and ℱthe original Zelda most likely took place in the Akkala region. Who knows if Nintendo will hang on🌼to t💫his geographical consistency (probably not), but it’s nice they made an effort with Breath of the Wild.
8 Vaati Was Hyrule’s First Real Antagonist, Not Ganon
Ganon is such a staple of The Legend of Zelda 💫that it's almost hard to believe he wasn't the first entity to try and terrorize Hyrule. Hundreds of years before he would get a chance to wreak ha𓆏voc on the country (or maybe just 100 if we’re using Wind Waker math,) Vaati tried to establish himself as the force to be reckoned with🔜.
By virtue of The Minish Cap being the earliest chronological point in the series a♏f💛ter Skyward Sword, Vaati got two attempts to take over Hyrule before Ganondorf showed his ugly mug. What's particularly interesting about Vaati’s presence is the significance of him being Hyrule’s first real antagonist is completely understated. Of course, it would be hard to reconcile ꧃the fact he was introduced decades after Ganon was but, regardless of real world context, Vaati’s inclusion and subsequent absence of reference is an interesting part of Hyrule’s lush history.
7 Hyrule Is War Torn In The Child Timeline
Most people remember that 🍸a war is mentioned br🐎iefly in Ocarina of Time after Link ✅completes the Forest Temple, but there’s quite a bit of evidence that lends credence to the fact that 🌃Hyrule, in the child timeline specifically, has been ravished by war quite frequently. The Hyrulean Civil War that Link learns about is just one piece of a bigger puzzle. Given Ganondorf’s attempt to take over Hyrule, his imprisonment in Twilight Princess, and the complete absence of the💦 Gerudo in said game heavily implies that the Gerudo weren’t treated quite well after Ganondorf’s treason got out.
Think about it, Ganondorf, the Gerudo King, would obviously rally the Gerudဣo to fight for him. We know he has an army and we know ꧋that there are no Gerudo in the Gerudo Desert by the time Twilight Princess. We also know Hyrule is prone to civil war tha༒nks to Ocarina of Time. It’🧜s not explicitly stated, but it doesn’t have to be. Th💫e devil’s in the details.
6 Hyrule Is Technically Postapocalyptic
When you stop to think about it, living o༺n Hyrule would be absolutely horrifying. It's a war-torn land that's constantly being attacked by either a pig monster or a gargantuan floating eyeball bent on🙈 conquest. The very first game depicts Hyrule as a near complete wasteland for Hylia’s sake. The fact of the matter is, more times than not, Hyrule is post-apocalyptic.
A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Tim🌠e, The Wind Waker, and Breath of the Wild all feature a Hyrule that has been near destroyed. Whether it's due to Ganondorf’s tyrannical rule or the goddesses flooding the lands, Hyrule is apocalyptic in nature, always on the brink of ruin or recovering from near absolute destruction. Skyward Sword even directly references this, so it's clear Nintendo is doing this intentionally. It's a bold choice, especiaꩵlly for a Nintendo series, but it💛's one that makes sure the franchise will always be full of tension.