Is Zelda Set in the Distant Future?

For what it's worth, I loved Skyward Sword. I loved the controls, I loved that the overworld was a giant puzzle waiting to be solved. I shared the same frustrations that everyone else did, though. I found the controls a burden sometimes, and I definitely missed feeling like there were things to see and do in the game besides advancing to the next dungeon.

But what I found particularly odd about Skyward Sword, seeing how it's the first chronological title in a series that's so heavily rooted in medieval themes, is how mechanical the game felt -- especially when traveling into the past. That's when I started wondering if Zelda's actually set hundreds or thousands of years in the future.

Let's get this out of the way and admit that this is just a video game, and the developers are really just letting their creative wings spread unburdened by the logic of the first game in the series featuring technology far advanced compared to later entries. The team at Nintendo wanted to make Link travel back in time to a bunch of weird, robot Furbies with super-cool technology, which is set even farther back than the first game in the timeline. Now that's out of the way, let's get down to business.

So, what I've been thinking about is that just maybe the games are set far passed modern time, where science has advanced far enough to create strange, light powered mine carts in some creepy, super race of man-rodents. During this period, something cataclysmic inevitably happens and sends mankind (and Zora/Goron, etc) back into the stone ages we remember from games like Ocarina and Link to the Past. It isn't until Twilight Princess, which is one of the very last titles in the timeline, that we finally start seeing weird gadgets, like that chicken-mech-cannon that shoots Link into the Sky Temple -- and when society has rebuilt its wherewithal in the tech world. When I'm wondering why the tech in Skyward Sword surpasses that of later entries in the series, it seems like the only explanation is that it happened far in the future and saw the world crumble in on itself, only to have to start over and provide the medieval world we've grown to know in Zelda games.

Other theories are welcome, of course.

The only logical reason I have despite the fact that it's a video game: magic.

It's all magic. The geography changes, the out-of-place mechanisms, and everything that doesn't seem logical in the timeline order: magic.

well the game is set in its own universe, let's get that out of the way. there's no way to bind zelda to the real world, even assuming that eventually magic becomes a thing.

now with that said, "past" and "future" are very relative terms, and you shouldn't bind technology with time, especially when discussing something like fiction lore. zelda isn't set in "the future" because someone before the current generation of hylians had more advanced (often erroneously called "futuristic") technology. what we can affirm is that before humans, there was an advanced civilization that was lost to time. that's a very common theme in both fantasy and sci-fi, the idea that before the current dominant race settled, there were others that had developed the technology and then either were driven extinct or just left, leaving ruins of their past as legacy. hell, even the chozo from metroid are like that.

the only differences when comparing this to our world are that 1- when looking at earth, we only see ruins of our own past, and as such the abandoned technology follows a somewhat linear progression; and 2- we haven't really found traces of any civilizations that aren't human in the whole universe, so it's not like we could have found something more advanced than us.

TL;DR: more advanced technology =/= the future.

oh and regarding twilight princess, let me remind you that both that cannon and the city in the sky were not built by human hands, so technically hyrule hasn't achieved that technology yet. still, zelda has a lot of magitech in its lore, spread throughout various games of the series. those laser-beaming eye-towers are not exclusive to skyward sword, and can be found even in buildings built after SS' time, like the tower of the gods in wind waker (which also feature giant robot totally-not-andross, elevators, and robot statues). in other words, it's too hard to judge technology advancement when magic is a factor.

@BrunoBRS: I think you nailed it on the head there. So I suppose I'll have to reword my theory and simply state it's entirely possible Zelda takes place in the distant future, in its own world compared to the length of ours.

I wish most people on the Internet were this well spoken and logical. Reading a compelling argument is so much more preferable to -- "no. Just no. Only an idiot would say that." My hat's off to you my friend.

haha, thanks :P