My big issue with Zelda is that the conflict of Ganon/Ganondorf being the big bad who abuses the Triforce of Power and must be taken down by the wielders of Courage and Wisdom has gotten incredibly stale and if the next title is just good vs evil instead of exploring human nature and gray morality.
This would never come true but a while back I was working on my own fan Zelda title which I'd love to share:
Setting
Link, Zelda and Ganondorf each hail from one of the three main nations and have parents who are wielding but abusing the triforces of courage, wisdom, and power. Their nations culturally reflect the respective triforce values.
Link's society is very primal, nomadic, and naturalistic. The biomes are very jungle/swamp/forest coded and their belief system is very animistic and shamanic. The entire nation is a warrior culture where danger is preserved so people feel challanged to be courageous and the idea of seeking comfort is shunned. Violence and hedonism are common. The main inhabitants are very brawny humans who live with the Ruto and Koroks and Link's father could be especially huge and disappointed that his son looks fairly thin and small (a 'runt') in order to make their final battle more rewarding.
Zelda's society would be very futuristic, wise but secretive, xenophobic towards races of the other nations, and intent on keeping their knowledge, science, and technology from the rest of the world or in her mother's case conquering the world with it. So much so that their cities are built underwater or in fiercely arctic conditions so people of the other nations can't conquer them easily due to lacking the technology to reach and exist in those places. They're likely non-religious and very scientific minded and ally themselves with Zora and Yeti, making the existence of a Temple especially difficult for Zelda to find since it hides in plain sight due to being converted into a laboratory.
Ganondorf's society is very medieval in aesthetic and values the mastery over monsters and demons as a means to be powerful and be sort of a dark version of a pokemon world in how everyday life looks. Ogres do heavy construction work, moblins and bokoblins do menial crop harvesting work, lizalfos work fish farms, octorocks detonate rocks in mines, Gorons wear Pols Voice as hats that can break rocks down into edible gemstones, and exceptional monsters are raised as companions people battle each other with. It's a society run by a demon king or queen who has conquered the rulers of the other houses in a competition that follows the death of the previous king/queen and the remaining houses battle for the next best positions until the houses with the weakest battlers can only remain in a serf caste. The main people are Gerudo, Gorons, and Mogmas. The land is very volcanic and high desert inspired with limited pockets of fertile land operated by the most powerful houses.
Gameplay/Story
At the beginning of the game you can select which of the three nation stories to tackle first based on choosing to play Link, Zelda, or Ganondorf and can only play on that continent as that character until they complete their nation's 'temple' and their sage sends them to the sacred realm to await the other two and you then play through their stories until the sages meet with them in the sacred realm to explain their divine mission.
The second stage of the game, a mission to forge a brand new triforce and destroy the old one, is explained to them by a fourth sage that leads the others, a little girl in the form of a spirit who can travel through time but never physically exist in the world due to binding her soul to a device that Zelda unearthed at the beginning of the story. She is able to clue them in that they are at the end of a timeline where Demise expanded his curse to not only corrupt the triforce of power but the other two as well. They each need to seek out secret dungeons that the goddesses hid when creating the world to prove their worth to wield their respective triforces, but since they are hidden in opposing nations, they have to work together using a device that this fourth sage uses to phase in and out of timelines. That enables the player to change characters at will at this stage of the game but the other two can follow them in spirit forms and can switch in to use their abilities to access places in the three different nations that they couldn't alone. Only those with the blessing of their nation's sage can use this device the way Impa can. The one condition being that if they switch into a character belonging to a race from an opposing nation they get aggrod on site and in Zelda's land they're one shot killed from laser turrets to up the difficulty since every Zelda needs an anxiety inducing challange.
Link's dungeon is hidden in Ganondorf's nation, Ganondorf's is hidden in Zelda's nation, and Zelda's is hidden in Link's nation because the goddesses suspected that each of these chosen ones would have the most to learn from a specific virtue. Once their triforces are obtained the characters can assist the character currently selected in their spirit form the way the champions could in BotW once their divine beasts were completed.
The final stage of the game is just three separate but final dungeons/battles done in any order but once again alone as separate characters. By the laws of his people Link must fight various generals until they deem him courageous enough to 1 v 1 challenge but actually defeat him because of his newfound wisdom and power of heart. When he defeats his father he lets out a battle cry that undoes the one that his father used to frenzy the army and gives a rousing speech for the cause of peace and the courage to welcome the people of the other nations without the xenophobia his father and kings before him reinforced.
Zelda, in a certain time limit, must go through various areas in a labyrinthian R&D facility to dismantle various components of the ultimate weapon her mother is about to use and finally show she's wise enough to undermine her evil invention with inventions of her own and that she'd been scheming to stop her mother while putting up a facade all her life for so long that Zelda has dismantled the weapon before her mother finds out about this ultimate sabotage and she had the courage to speak up when the council asks who did this and the power in her voice to explain rationally why their nation should be led by her instead.
Ganondorf must rise through a league of demon battles that determines the next demon queen/king with the heads of various houses before a final face off with the current demon queen, his mother who disowned him for being an illegitimate child with a man from an opposing house that also didn't want him and he has to show both parents that he is the power they made a mistake in abandoning. When the competition is set to begin Ganondorf discovers that the demon his mother has summoned is so fearsome that not a single house steps forward to participate and she's slated to continue her reign until he shows up and musters up the courage from Link to step forward and the wisdom from Zelda to defeat her ultimate demon.
The ending is a meeting between the three chosen ones to thank each other for their help and companionship and how they moved forward in creating a world of peace between the three nations and you get a cutscene of the world and how it changes over fifty years and the lives that they each lead until they convene one last time with the device. Each agree that they needed to do one last thing together which is to destroy the device along with their own lives/spirits in order to free Impa who has been trapped in there for the entire Zelda timeline so that she can finally live a full life in the world the three of them feel satisfied with after decades of work.
Abilities
Link: Use of weapons, bows, hookshot, shields, and wrestling/hand to hand combat. His sage blessing enables him to temporarily merge his spirit with a nearby animal in order to further interact with his environment.
Zelda: An ability similar to ultrahand except it's to forge combat weapons and firearms with her main weapon being two magitech pistols. She can also phase through objects above and below her because she studied an ancient slate she unearthed. Her sage blessing allows her to create a small handheld computer with various applications on it that activate various components of a high tech suit she found within her temple that transforms into a flight suit with wings and jet boots, dive suit that makes her look zora-like, a subzero suit that makes her look fluffy like a yeti, a lava suit that makes her look like a skinny Goron, or a stealth suit that turns her invisible for a limited time.
Ganondorf: He's been raised by Mogma ever since being disowned by both his mother and father's houses so he's very adept at stealth and bargaining and can assess the value of almost anything correctly and he's big and muscularly powerful even as a teenager but can only go hand to hand briefly enough to run and hide from people and monsters in his first stage of the game. His punches can do considerable damage but he has an extremely low health guage that makes him a glass cannon. He can also use the elements of fire, water, wind, lightning, earth, or ice if they are nearby and can be drawn from. His sage blessing is the ability to capture, summon, and give commands to monsters and demons so that he no longer has to protect himself with stealth and elements outside of a few instances later in the game or unless the player prefers elemental attacks instead of creature summoning outside of select battles.
Personalities
Link: Loud and talkative, extroverted, definitely an overly flirtatious himbo, trusts others too easily, a bit of a Napoleon complex. If he sees an opportunity to be a trickster and reaction test Zelda or Ganondorf through the story he makes sure to use it. Very stupid and slapstick sense of humor which clearly comes from his father.
Zelda: Ambitious, studious and hard working, already shows a lot of wisdom even though she lacks specific knowledge to apply it until the ending, can sometimes have her head in the clouds, or maybe she's just scheming up another invention when she gets like that. Seen as a prodigy by everyone around her, seems to have access to anything and anywhere in her nation, and is used to working on her own. Sees the other two as a liability during the story and they rarely prove her wrong until the end. Very sardonic and witty sense of humor.
Ganondorf: As quiet as Link in all of his previous games aside from a line once in a blue moon, very shy and introverted. Once the three are a group he's able to bargain any transaction involving rupees after being raised by slick Mogmas. He's very oblivious to the fact that he's handsome and one of the few male Gerudo since the m/f ratio is 1:9, an attractiveness which Link torments him with by sending suitors his way at every story beat until he realizes he's worthy of having suitors. Gains more confidence and overcomes shyness through hanging out with Zelda and Link in the story and having to give commands to demons that require authority in their master's voice. Very self deprecating and cynical sense of humor.
Nintendo if you are reading this I know you will do none of it but please put Gorons wearing Pols Voice as hats into the next game!
