Editing The Legend of Zelda (section)

==The Story==
You play as one of the many incarnations of Link, a (typically) green-clad Hylian youth somewhere between 9 to 18 years of age who sets out to fight evil to accomplish some heroic goal, often related to rescuing someone. This most often means Princess Zelda, whom the series is named after. In pursuit of this goal, he often clashes with the evil Ganon (or Ganondorf), who wants to rule the world, or some other menace ranging from a jerk wizard who kidnaps girls to a fucking terrifying mask trying to destroy everything.

Central to the series is the Triforce, an artifact of immense power that taps into a user's power, wisdom and courage to use. It has near reality-warping powers in its full form, which is why Ganon(dorf) seeks to obtain it. Link occasionally has to find bits of the shattered Triforce in his quests, or people capable of sealing Ganon(dorf) away. At some point, the pieces of the Triforce became sealed within the three main characters, with Ganon(dorf) getting the Triforce of Power, Zelda getting the Triforce of Wisdom, and Link getting (or sometimes having to find) the Triforce of Courage. The Triforce is of such immense value that at one point there was a civil war over who could control it, leading to, in several games, 1) Link's parents being killed and forcing him to live in hiding, 2) a tribe of wizards getting banished into a parallel realm, eagerly waiting for a chance at vengeance, 3) causing the entire Sacred Realm to become a cursed dimension after Ganon succeeds in grabbing it, and probably even more situations.

Note that it is not always the same Link who appears in the series: while some of them appear in several games as the protagonist (One appears in four games, and three others in two games each) there is often a new Link in every game. And while they look alike, they are not related to one another - except in one case where it is strongly hinted that they are family (namely the one from Ocarina of Time and the one from Twilight Princess). This is because the games are constantly soft-rebooting (really it's that it takes place over a VERY long stretch of time and each Link, Zelda, and Ganon are reincarnations). Hyrule itself will change too every so often; sometimes it will feature the same familiar geography of Hyrule castle, Death Mountain, Zora Village, etc. And other times it will feature very dramatic changes, such as all of Hyrule being flooded. Even in games where the major land features are present they often get jumbled up and moved around.

The Zeldas on the other hand are related to one another: the first one was the reincarnation of the goddess Hylia and all Zeldas are her descendants, making them the Blood of the Goddess. And while the various Links might not be related they inherit something as well; the Spirit of the Hero which gives them the drive to stand up to evil and use the various tools they find despite them never having used or even seen them before.

The villainous Ganon is the same one over and over again though, being the reincarnation of the [[daemon|demon]] Demise. Occasionally, it's stated he can't truly die; he only ever suffers temporary defeat. Even while he gets killed at the end of some of the games, his followers try to resurrect him (and sometimes even succeed), making him the same guy again and again. At varying times he's an evil sorcerer, a king of thieves, a master swordsman, a literal demon, sometimes all of the above. Even so, he takes many different forms; early on he's a piggish brute (literally), though later he adopts a more human form (in this form he's always called Ganondorf) when he uses subversion as his main strategy, typically as one of the rare Gerudo males, though he can still be capable of some horrifying shit if he's in possession of the Triforce of Power. Eventually, he becomes insanely powerful and is able to curse the land of Hyrule itself, resurrecting fallen monsters, polluting it with his malice/gloom, and seizing control of the kingdom's automaton army. And even when he was sealed away by a hyper-advanced precursor civilization, he still had enough power left over to become an eldritch abomination called "Calamity Ganon" that would wreck Hyrule's shit while his real body was busy breaking free. In every single case, his weakness remains the same: only the awakened Master Sword and/or special arrows (Silver Arrows or Light Arrows depending on the game)can seal him away.

The fact that the timeline also branches off into multiple paths simply makes it more confusing to keep track of. Fortunately, Nintendo not only printed a game-by-game explanation of the timeline, but they also gave a definitive starting-off point in Skyward Sword, taking place just prior to the founding of Hyrule and the establishment of Link, Zelda, and Ganondorf as perpetually reincarnating characters.