The Legend of Zelda: Chains of Time
Okay, so this was my other Zelda idea I mentioned in the Attack of the Machine Made post.
Set in the far future of the Adult timeline, long after Spirit Tracks (though I came up with the idea around the same time that Spirit Tracks came out), New Hyrule is a futuristic place, with advanced magitechnology. The director of the New Hyrule Science Foundation has just finished an expedition to the millennia old ruins of Old Hyrule, deep under the Great Sea. Two artefacts of particular interest are a mundane-seeming (but somehow untouched by time) blue ocarina and a statue of a man with an actual sword stuck into its forehead.
Through some shenanigans, the chief of security for the NHSF, Link, accidentally pulls the magic sword from the statue, which suddenly becomes a living, breathing person. The man knocks out all the security guards in the room, including the chief (because he’d never held a sword before that day, so tried using a firearm instead), and makes his way through the building.
When Ganondorf (because we all know that’s who it is) finds the lab studying the Ocarina of Time, he brute forces a spell that opens a hole in time and goes through, intent on finding some way of undoing his losses in history.
After puzzling out the magic involved, and looking in the ancient archives for clues, Director Zelda sends Chief Link after Ganondorf, in an adventure that goes both backward and sideways in time.
Each time Link catches up with the Incarnation of Demise, he has to team up with his own previous/parallel incarnations to defeat the enemy, but it’s when they get all the way back to the time of The Hero of Time that things go awry.
The first and youngest Ganondorf sees before him all the failures that he’s going to have, all the older hims that have travelled further and further back to try and Set Wrong What Once Went Right, and decides to absorb all the powers of his futures. That’s right, I had Ganon Hijack the plot from Ganon himself!
The various Links come together and defeat this super-Ganon (which, in this post Breath of the Wild world, I want to call Calamity Ganon), with the Hero of Time and his Princess Zelda using the Ocarina to send all the future versions back to their own time with no memory of what just happened.
I envisioned this game as an RPG, where you have an adventuring party, but they all just happened to be Link (but for funsies, you could rename all of them, so, as an example, you could have a party made of Spantzz, Loafus, Slurmp, and Buttlet), and each would have unique specials based on which game they were from.
The name, if you hadn’t figured it out already, comes from the fact that a chain is made up of Links.
