With the information we have about Botw 2, I believe that Age of Calamity while being a prequel to Breath of the wild, is actually going to be the final game in the trilogy, with the ending to Age of Calamity being the true ending to the 3 games overall. Obviously, this sounds crazy without any context, so let me explain how I believe the timeline will fall when Botw 2 comes out.

I believe the Botw is still the first game in this timeline. All of the events in the memories through the game occurs, the champions die in the divine beasts and link falls in battle and is taken to the Shine of Ressurection. The events of Breath of the Wild take place, Calamity Ganon is defeated, and Hyrule returns to the peace we see at the end of the game.

After this, we obviously get into Breath of the Wild 2, where we see from the very little information we have, there is something beneath Hyrule Castle. We do not have any confirmation of who this is or why they are there, but this will be brought up later in the theory. We know from the trailers of Breath of the Wild 2 that it is highly likely to involve time and time travel in some way. We see multiple instances in the trailers of things moving back in time, for example the water droplet and the metal spikeballs on the mountain being sent back in time. This along side Rudania not being on Death Mountain in the trailer, and there not being any lava flow on the mountain, which Daruk states only happened recently, I believe that it is clear that after encountering the thing below Hyrule Castle, you go back in time to before the divine beasts were created 10,000 years ago.

Now is when Age of Calamity gets involved. We know that the only difference between the past events seen in Breath of the Wild and the events seen in Age of Calamity were caused by the Egg Guardian. But this Egg Guardian came out of seemingly nowhere. While this could just be another “What if” story for what if Zelda found this random Egg Guardian, I think it is something we could see be made when Link and Zelda go back 10,000 years into the past. We know Zelda has past experience with the guardians to an extent as she did a lot of research with them. Not as much as someone like Purah, but definitely a lot. With this information I think it is fair to say that after this time technology is discovered in the past by Link and Zelda, it is possible that Zelda could make the Egg Guardian, or at the very least work with the Sheika Tribe that made the divine beasts and guardians to help make the Egg Guardian in order to stop Calamity Gabon’s imminent return. This Egg Guardian would then be sent into the future, that being the past to Breath of the Wild 1, in order to complete prevent the destruction of Hyrule and everyone losing their lives to Calamity Ganon.

This would lead to Age of Calamity technically being the final game plot-wise in the Breath of the Wild trilogy.

Now for some plothole patching and explaining some more stuff.

Firstly, is what is beneath Hyrule Castle that is seen in the first BotW 2 trailer. I believe that person is Astor from Age of Calamity, just from earlier in the timeline. Even though the Egg Guardians didn’t exist in Botw’s memories, I believe that saying Astor would still exist in Botw’s past is a reasonable statement. With Astor existing and not getting involved with the Egg Guardians he wouldn’t run into Link or any of the champions. So he goes about his business and reawakens Calamity Ganon. In this stage, Calamity Ganon would need some energy to form and create itself. I believe this is where Astor comes in. After reawakening Ganon, he goes below the castle to give any Malice energy or whatever you want to call it from his staff seen in Age of Calamity and himself to Ganon. This in my opinion is even further backed up when we see the excess malice down below Hyrule Castle, with Calamity Ganon gone, there is nowhere for this energy to go, so it begins spewing out. Astor obviously is not able to get below Hyrule Castle in Age of Calamity before he is killed by the dark Egg Guardian, but like I mentioned before, without the Egg Guardians existing, the champions and link would not even know of Astor, and he could get below Hyrule Castle after Calamity Ganon is summoned in Botw

Next is about the Egg Guardian itself, and why if Zelda created it, a dark Egg Guardian also exists. I don’t have very much reasoning behind this other than maybe some reason with, “In order to send egg guardian into the future, it had to create a negative version of itself to cancel itself out” or something like that.

Then is the whole point of if the other Hyrule Warriors game isn’t canon, why is this one, to which while I haven’t played it, I know it involves all of the timelines merging for some reason, and Botw has aspects and items from all 3 timelines, so my only explanation is from a different theory I heard from someone else that the other Hyrule Warriors games merge the 3 timelines, that goes into Botw, etc etc.

The last plothole I can think of for now is the difference in last events between past Botw and Age of Calamity event-wise. The two main examples are the excessive enemy counts in AoC never heard of or seen in Botw and the different placing of certain events like when Calamity Ganon was reawakened. For example, in Botw, Calamity Ganon reawakened after Zelda went to the spring of wisdom, and in AoC I believe it happened the day before she went (correct me if I’m wrong on that) either way, it’s different. I believe both of these resulted from the dark Egg Guardian having the same memories as the good one, and with Astor seeing this, got Calamity Ganon to awaken sooner, and it needed more enemies in order to try killing the everyone better and sooner so that unlike in Botw, calamity Ganon wouldn’t be defeated. This same logic applies to the stronger Blights, Astor knew the previous ones weren’t good enough to defeat link, so they were made stronger.

That was A LOT. If any of this doesn’t make sense, comment something and I’ll explain it in the best way that I can again, and if any of my info is wrong, I haven’t played AoC in awhile, so I’m sorry about that, yell at me in the comments lmao.

I made this because I believe there is a lot of evidence supporting this theory, and I haven’t seen it anywhere else. And if this theory is true, I want proof that I thought of this before the game came out, because saying I did without proof would mean nothing. If you read this, thanks!