One of the persistent mysteries following the release of The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is the fate of Sheikah technology. Nintendo, as it turns out, has an answer for this. But it probably isn’t what you want to hear.
In a new interview, director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, who worked on both games, had this to say, courtesy of Nintendo Everything:
“They disappeared after the Calamity was defeated (sealed). All of the people of Hyrule also witnessed this, but there is no one who knows the mechanism or reason why they disappeared, and it is considered a mystery.
It is believed that since the Calamity disappeared, they also disappeared as their role had been fulfilled.
It is, anyway, commonplace for mysterious events and strange phenomena to occur in Hyrule. Thus, people have simply assumed the reason behind the disappearance to likely be related to ancient Sheikah technology and it seems there is no one who has tried to explore the matter further.
The main civilizations in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are completely different, so we thought about the game based on concepts that match each of these civilizations.”
Now, we should remember that Nintendo thinks of their games in terms of gameplay before they look into narrative. So, in contrast to a studio like Santa Monica Studio, Insomniac, or The Coalition, who come up with new game ideas based on what they had done in previous games, Nintendo puts the story in the backseat.
Most of the time, that works out fine. For example, when it comes to the Mario games, Nintendo does not take the idea of canon or lore too seriously. We can consider each different Mario game to be set in its own universe, or perhaps more appropriately, that they are each their own separate theatrical production.
For The Legend of Zelda, things are quite different. There is a general idea that all the games happen in one timeline, but different generations of Link and Zelda meet each other, and also find themselves facing Ganon, who is himself an immortal being.
While Nintendo doesn’t place that much emphasis on connecting the games together, they do have to put care that the story aspects of their game at least make sense in connection with each other.
Obviously, in this case, the answers Nintendo provides are not sufficient at all. We can kind of see that Purah used some Sheikah technology to make her own. We also know that the gap between the two games isn’t that big, as Fujibayashi implies.
This is clearly an oversight that they didn’t have a better explanation for. For what it’s worth, that’s fine since being forced to confront this might actually have hurt Nintendo’s creativity and game design. On the other hand, the company could use this as a prompt for making future The Legend of Zelda games.
