The Zelda Timeline's Consistency

The detailed Zelda timeline isn't terribly interesting. A lot of its written blurbs are full of material that can be gleaned from playing the games, and the whole thing is written from an "in-world" rather than "real-world" perspective.

However, not to sound like a broken record, but the real use of the detailed Zelda timeline is seeing how it all jives together. Like anything that's gone on for 25 years, looking at it as a whole yields much more than just looking at it in pieces. In particular, having just read the section dealing with A Link to the Past, this picture came up:

It's a picture of the Wise Men from the game's introduction. Things get intriguing when you remember that what happens in A Link to the Past's introduction is a sort of retelling of what happens around the time of Ocarina of Time. Why would such an esoteric detail matter? 

Because one of the Wise Men is quite a bit shorter than the others. Also, A Link to the Past was released in Japan in 1991, while Ocarina of Time was released there in 1998.

Now, Zelda games are notorious for their long development cycles. It's also usual for the actual stories of Zelda games to be built after the core mechanics have been set up. But, to have a story detail from A Link to the Past, a game made seven years earlier, match one from Ocarina of Time goes beyond suspicious. It's the sort of thing that could practically convince you that Hyrule Historia's timeline is the real deal.