I’m not a huge fan of Musou/Warriors games, but Age of Calamity was interesting enough. Age of Imprisonment blows it away. Unlike AoC, AoI is canon. And it blends seamlessly into TotK’s narrative. Nothing feels forced or contrived. It’s so satisfying seeing the snippets of Zelda’s memories from TotK fleshed out with extra context. It really is “the rest of the story.” And a lot of it is told through cut scenes, easily watched on your video platform of choice if the gameplay isn’t your cup of tea.
Cheers to the creative teams for pulling this off. I love the world that they built and the characters within it. The lore, the environmental storytelling of BotW, the cinematics of the Warriors games. This is easily my favorite Zelda era.
“Word of God” says it’s canon, but it can’t be in the same timeline as BotW because the story of AoC actively prevents BotW from ever happening. Then again, TotK retcons a bunch of stuff from BotW as well (like pretending the Guardians and Divine Beasts never existed or somehow “just disappeared” which still cotradicts the after-credits end scene from BotW) so personally I think that’s just an alternate timeline, too.
Or maybe the devs just didn’t put much thought into continuity.