Nintendo Owns the Kremlings: Squashing a Myth

[Kosheh]

My theory: Nintendo doesn't give a fuck, so any info you find will just contradict everything else.

Hey that's basically what I said in another topic let me post it here because it's like, exactly what you said, but like
check it out it's three paragraphs long

I feel like games by Japanese development teams throughout the 90's didn't really think things through on the matters of continuity. Each title was new and fresh and was an expensive risk taken by that company - and with each game tells a new story as it's somewhat tedious to hear the same story repeated several times (case in point: people's disappointment with Starfox Zero not exploring a new chapter) That's why you have games like Legend of Zelda, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy and Shin Megami Tensei exploring different plots with different characters in different locations; they don't necessarily bear any continuity with one another.
You're probably better off thinking of Nintendo's games in this way so you don't lose any sleep over it.
Interestingly though, I feel like Nintendo's localization teams are solely responsible for throwbacks to older games through dialogue alone - but I think that's solely to keep veteran fans roped in.

It's not until you have this day-and-age of games, where Western developers began to take the helm of game design and create long, intricate, character-driven storylines with tons of continuity between games, where the games continue to build on an existing universe instead of constantly making new ones to elaborate on that now have older, inquisitive, hardcore fans speculating on their continuity and as a result, modern Japanese developers, like American developers are beginning to weave continuity into their game's plots (the best example I can think of at the moment would be the Pikmin series, and the Mario and Luigi saga, in terms of "casting") whereas older franchises are scrambling to weave some continuity into their plots due to demand (as seen in Hyrule Historia)

It's...weird, frankly. It seems to me like Japanese developers focus on core gameplay mechanics with story details as an afterthought (which results sometimes in everything being so different from game to game sometimes, like the original Paper Mario in comparison to TTY it built on the old formula but did everything so differently that it felt incredibly fresh) whereas Western developers develop the two in tandem that results in a more fluid universe and less fan speculation.

tl:dr;

Japan: "What's continuity"
Adventure Island developer: "ah yes continuity. forever will our games live on in obscurity"

West: "World of Warcraft overarching storyline"
Developers afterward: "Lol"

2004

West: "Good lord Japanese developers stink. None of their plots mesh together"
Square Enix: "We fixed that. Check it out -releases sequels to numbered FF games-"