Random Thought - Spirit Tracks

I like to go on about how I didn't like Spirit Tracks all that much. I do this because I didn't see it as that new of an experience, and it followed directly after Phantom Hourglass, which I also wasn't overly impressed with. Well, it's not so much that I didn't like Spirit Tracks... it just seemed somewhat boring.

However, Spirit Tracks does something that I didn't think about until shortly ago - it presents a (spoilers, maybe?) newly established Hyrule, complete with large landmasses rather than the small and scattered islands of the Great Sea in Wind Waker.

The interesting thing about this is that it reaffirms the possibility of "normalized" Zelda continuity in the Wind Waker timeline (also [one of the] Ocarina of Time timelines, depending on your views of that whole conundrum).

By "normalized" I mean it reestablishes the Zelda continuity on a fixed landmass rather than having it moving between oceans, allowing the story to resume its general formula that it maintains through all its land-based games, even lending itself to the possibility of linking up with one of the other games (though I'm not sure which, I'd have look more closely at the overworld map), or perhaps a future title.

Of course, that means that the cycle of extension from the Ocarina timeline could end up being the most extensive confirmed temporal progression of all the Zelda games (heck, it's definitely four games already with Ocarina, Wind Waker, Phantom Hourlgass, and Spirit Tracks).

Then again, that means we'd be abandoning the possibility of revisiting the Great Sea and the drowned world of Old Hyrule from Wind Waker.

Just a thought.