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Following

Distant Sequel

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Some stories take place a very long time after their predecessors, whether only a few decades afterwards or after centuries or millennia. Depending on the amount of time passed and the events that took place in earlier stories, the previous story's characters and events may by the time of the sequel have become famous or part of the historical record, or even entered into myth. If sufficient distortion and mythologizing takes place over generations or centuries of word-of-mouth retellings, then the sequel's account of the events of earlier stories may have become rather different from how the audience remembers it.

Another trait of a Distant Sequel is that it can allow for significant changes to occur in the story's world. Actions taken by the main characters in earlier stories may have had the time to change the world in significant ways, characters may become parents or grandparents or leave distant descendants — who may in turn become the sequel's main characters — nations may rise, grow and fall, and science and civilization advance or regress.

See also Distant Finale, where a work's last episode, scene or chapter is set a long time after its main body, which can easily lead into this trope if a sequel is made to a work with a Distant Finale. Compare with Dashed Plot Line, where the plot skips years ahead several times over the course of the story. A Sequel Series may be more likely to be distant from its predecessor than a sequel within the same series.

Distant prequels are also covered by this trope, as the primary theme — the time gap between the two stories and the changes that take place during it — remains largely the same. In a sense, a work with a distant prequel itself becomes, retroactively, a distant sequel.

Sub-Trope of Time Skip. Not to be confused with Sequel Gap which is when a sequel is released a long time later in Real Life, although it is certainly not uncommon for many works to be both of these tropes.

The opposite of this would be an Immediate Sequel, while the Prequel equivalent would be Prequel in the Lost Age.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

    Audio Plays 
  • Big Finish Doctor Who:
    • Dalek Empire: The third series takes place 2,500 years after the first two. It focuses on the attempts of Siy Tarkov and Georgi Selestru to warn the Galactic Union about another Dalek invasion of Mutter's Spiral (a.k.a. the Milky Way Galaxy).
    • I, Davros takes place on Skaro during the Thousand Year War between the Kaleds and the Thals. It tells the story of Davros from his teenage years until the activation of the first of his Dalek creations, shortly before the events of "Genesis of the Daleks".
    • In "Primeval", the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa visit her home planet Traken in about 1000 BCE, almost 3,000 years before the Doctor's fourth incarnation visited the planet in "The Keeper of Traken" and it was destroyed by the Master in "Logopolis".
    • "Spare Parts" features the creation of the Cybermen, thousands of years before the First Doctor's first encounter with them in Antarctica in December 1986 in "The Tenth Planet".
    • In "The Reaping", Kathy Chambers encounters the Sixth Doctor and her old friend Peri in Baltimore on September 24, 1984 and helps them to defeat the Cybermen. Her brother Nathaniel's back is broken by a Cyber-Leader. In its sequel "The Gathering", the Fifth Doctor meets Kathy in Brisbane on September 22, 2006. She is attempting to prolong Nathaniel's life by partially converting him into a Cyberman. Notably, "The Gathering" takes place before "The Reaping" in the Doctor's personal timeline.
    • In "An Earthly Child", the Eighth Doctor is reunited with his granddaughter Susan and meets his great-grandson Alex Campbell in the 2190s, about 30 years after his first incarnation defeated the Daleks and left Susan behind in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth". However, considerably more time has passed for the Doctor in the interim.
    • In "The Cradle of the Snake", the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough visit Manussa at the height of the Manussan Empire's power, about 800 years before the former three visited the planet during the time of the Sumaran Empire in "Snakedance".
    • In "The Exxilons", the Fourth Doctor visits the Exxilon colony E9874 thousands of years before the destruction of the Exxilon civilisation and his visit to their home planet during his third incarnation in "Death to the Daleks".
    • Bernice Summerfield:
      • In ''The Relics of Jegg-Sau", Benny encounters the robot K103 on the planet Jegg-Sau, more than 600 years after the newly regenerated Fourth Doctor battled its prototype K1 in "Robot".
      • In ''The Kingdom of the Blind", Benny encounters the Monoids in the early 27th century, approximately ten million years before the First Doctor encountered them (on two occasions 700 years apart) aboard the titular ship in "The Ark".
    • Torchwood: "The Victorian Age" explores Captain Jack Harkness' early involvement with the Torchwood Institute in 1899, more than 100 years before the events of the series.

    Comic Books 
  • Buffyverse:
    • Fray takes place in the Bad Future of the 23rd Century, more than 200 years after the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Its protagonist is Melaka Fray, a recently activated Slayer who fights vampires (commonly called "lurks") and other demons in the town of Haddyn, formerly known as Manhattan.
    • The graphic novel Tales of the Slayers tells the stories of various Slayers over the course of thousands of years from the first Slayer Sineya in prehistoric Africa to Melaka Fray.
    • The one-shot Spike and Dru: All's Fair takes place in 1933. While Spike and Drusilla are in Chicago, the four brothers of Xin Rong, the Chinese Slayer killed by Spike in 1900 (as depicted in "Fool for Love"), seek their vengeance.
  • The DCU:
    • All of the stories in Legends of the Dead Earth are set centuries or millennia after the 20th Century. Both Batman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #4 and Sovereign Seven Annual #2 take place at the end of the universe 19-20 billion years in the future.
    • Batman: I, Joker takes place in 2083, then 85 years in the future. Gotham City is a police state ruled by a tyrant called the Bruce, a descendant of Batman. Joseph Collins assumes the identity of The Joker and plots to free Gotham from the Bruce's tyranny.
    • Batman: Dark Knight Dynasty depicts the Wayne family's battle against the immortal Vandal Savage over the course of almost 1,300 years. In Dark Past, the English crusader Sir Joshua Wainwright fights Savage in 1222. In Dark Present, in the 20th Century, Bruce Wayne is inspired by the legacy of his ancestor Sir Joshua to become the Dark Knight and dies in battle with Savage. In Dark Future, the Wayne Enterprises vice president Brenna Wayne lives in the flying city of New Gotham in 2500 and manages to defeat Savage by stranding him on a meteor.
    • In Robin 3000, Bruce Wayne's 31st Century descendant, a teenage boy named Tom Wayne, assumes the identity of Robin after his uncle Bruce Wayne XX is killed by an invading alien race known as the Skulps.
    • In a series of stories featured in various Superman titles, Klar Ken T5477 is a direct descendant of Clark Kent who operates as Superman XX in 2965, exactly 1,000 years after the first such story was published.
    • The World of Krypton backups that appeared in several Superman titles ranged from being set immediately prior to Krypton's destruction when Clark was a baby, to the very dawn of Krypton's founding with an Adam and Eve Plot of two alien settlers.
    • ''The Kents was a series set in the 19th century starring the ancestors of Ma and Pa Kent.
    • In Batman #26, after Earth is conquered by Saturn in 3000, Bruce Wayne's descendant Brane finds a time capsule buried in 1939 featuring recordings of his ancestor and Robin in action. This inspires him to become the new Batman and fight against Earth's Saturnian oppressors, who are led by the warlord Fura.
    • Superman #400 explores the Man of Steel's legacy in a series of stories entitled "The Living Legends of Superman" which move increasingly further into the future. They begin in 2199 and end more than seven million years after the 20th Century.
  • The whole premise of Marvel 2099 is that it is set decades in the future from the present-day Marvel universe (except the version seen in Timestorm, which is implied to be an alternate present). When the original line was published, they were over a hundred years in the future, as the present stories were taking place in 1993. As time goes on, it does get closer and closer to the present, though.
  • Inversely, any story about Captain America, the Invaders, or other WWII-era heroes in the present day becomes more and more of a distant sequel as time goes on. When Cap first came back, his original stories had taken place merely two decades prior, give or take a few years, now they are set 80 years from the present. A similar situation applies to the Agents of Atlas and any other heroes whose origins are firmly entrenched in a real time period.
  • Planet Hulk: Worldbreaker is a sequel to the Planet Hulk arc, but set a thousand years later. Some of the gamma-powered heroes of the 20th century are still alive, though.
  • Rorschach (2020) is a sequel to Watchmen, taking place over 30 years after the events that transpired. It's not at all a direct continuation of the story featuring the original cast (although the faked Alien Invasion that decimated New York is a major background element), instead concerning itself with a nameless detective unveiling a conspiracy behind a copycat of the long-deceased Vigilante Man, Rorschach.
  • Planet of the Apes: The main BOOM! Studios comic book series explores the difficulties and tensions experienced by apes and humans living together in the city state of Mak from 2680 onwards, more than 600 years after the main storyline of Battle for the Planet of the Apes and 1,300 years before Planet of the Apes (1968).
  • Star Trek Expanded Universe: In the Star Trek Unlimited story "A Piece of Reaction", the Enterprise-E visits Sigma Iotia II in 2371, 103 years after the events of "A Piece of the Action".
  • Star Wars: This is fairly common in the Legends continuity's Expanded Universe, as it covers several millennia of galactic history:
    • Dawn of the Jedi takes place no less than 25,000 years before the movies, during the earliest origins of the force-using order that would later schism to form the Jedi and the Sith.
    • Tales of the Jedi is set 5,000 years before the movies and 100 years before Knights of the Old Republic.
    • Star Wars: Legacy takes place about one hundred years after the the original Star Wars movie trilogy, after numerous wars and political upheavals. The main characters are the descendants of the first trilogy's main cast, several generations removed, and when older characters show up it is typically as ghosts.

    Fan Works 
  • 3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: Retrograde takes place fifty years after the events of the other stories in this universe, and follows a happily married Clara and Thirteen, along with their adopted daughter Matilda, after they have settled down 2064 Brighton.
  • Antipodes is set ten thousand years after the time of Friendship Is Magic's first season, long after the fall of Equestria, and the events of the show are remembered only as faded myths of a bygone age.
  • A Song of Ice, Stone, Wind and Flame is set a full 18,000 years after the events of Season 2 finale of The Legend of Korra. 8,000 years before the story begins, the next Harmonic Convergence caused the Avatar and spirits to enter the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, so, by the time of the first chapter, bending the elements and the Avatar are well-known to the people of Westeros.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later:
    • As the name states, the story is set two and half decades after its parent work. A considerable amount of things happened in the intervening time, including Manny ditching his family to move to New York and Rodrick getting married.
    • Its Alternate Universe, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rich and Famous, while not as distant from its parent fic, takes place in the year 2032, which sees what happens if Greg became Rich and Famous.
  • Everywhere at the End of Funk: Daddy Dearest mentions that Boyfriend is now in his thirties, making the events of that mod take place at least eleven years after the events of Friday Night Funkin'.
  • Fallout: Equestria takes place hundreds of years in an alternate Bad Future, after Equestria has been blasted into a ravaged hellscape in the magical equivalent of a nuclear exchange. The Mane Six are still recognized for what they did in the years of the war prior to the apocalypse, although not all are remembered fondly. Civilization has had time to rebuild itself in rather unusual ways, and the only characters from the show still around all achieved biological immortality through ghoulification or... more peculiar means.
  • The Frozen West: The story takes place among a griffon civilization with about a thousand years of recorded history, beginning with a mysterious storm at the dawn of records, that inhabits the twilight area of a Tidally Locked Planet. A team of explorers uses a new airship to push into the unexplored frozen hemisphere, they eventually come across the ruins of ancient cities that show the reader that the story takes place a millennium after the events of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, after Nightmare Moon won, stopped the sun and moon's motion, and caused Equestria to become eternally dark and frozen and to fade from the memory of the people that survived the end of the world.
  • Jaune Arc, Lord of Hunger is eventually revealed to take place more than four thousand years after Darth Nihilus' death in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Nihilus' spirit had spent most of that time in a Deep Sleep inside his mask, until Jaune stumbles across the mask and wakes him up.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part Nine: Stairway to Heaven takes place over 2,000 years after Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Jo Jolion.
  • The Legend of Genji is set 35 years after the end of The Legend of Korra, by which point most of Korra's friends have become middle-aged adults with families of their own, while her mentors are either retired or dead from old age.
  • The Pieces Lie Where They Fell is set a thousand years after the events of "A Canterlot Wedding" end in disaster, and follows a new generation of Element Bearers. The show's characters are still remembered, but often in highly distorted and mythologized ways, and a Flim-Flam Corporation has apparently grown out of the Flim-Flam brothers' snake-oil businesses.
  • Power Rangers Cosmic Defenders takes place 35 years after its predecessor Power Rangers Wing Force. The one character from that fic appearing with any regularity is now a mature military reader, having been the Kid-Appeal Character previously.
  • Worm-in-Waiting takes place over a thousand years after the events of Warframe, following the Origin System's inhabitants having migrated to Earth Bet after the events of the game

    Film — Animated 

    Film — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • Arrivals from the Dark: The novels typically take place decades or even more than a century after each other. Often there's a new main character in each novel, most of whom are related. The first book takes place in 2088, the second books jumps 37 years, the third novel is 141 years after the second, the fourth is 44 years after that, the fifth is set 42 years after the fourth, and the sixth and likely final book jumps forward 148 years. The Trevelyan's Mission spin-off series begins 231 years after the final main novel, in the 29th century. The skips between spin-off novels are significantly shorter, often mere months.
  • Babylon 5: The short story "Space, Time and the Incurable Romantic", published in Amazing Stories #599, takes place from 2560 to 2593, approximately 300 years after the events of the series. Marcus Cole, having been revived from stasis, has a clone of his lost love Susan Ivanova created with all of the original's memories up to when she was critically injured in the Battle of Sector 300 in "Between the Darkness and the Light".
  • The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set 60 years before The Hunger Games, focusing on a teenage Coriolanus Snow.
  • Buffyverse: Like the similarly named graphic novel, the four Tales of the Slayer short story anthologies explore the lives and experiences of numerous Slayers over the course of almost 2,500 years from Thessily Thessilonikki in 490 BCE to Buffy's immediate predecessor India Cohen in 1993.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia:
    • The Magician's Nephew is set 1,000 years before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1,300 years pass between The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, a generation or so between Prince Caspian and The Silver Chair, and seven generations between The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, which in turn takes place at the end of the world. This allows the world to change, often significantly, between novels, such as Narnia being overrun and conquered by the Telmarine people between the first novel and Prince Caspian.
    • Due to time flowing differently in Narnia than in our world, far less time passes between sequels for the human protagonists than for the land of Narnia. The Pevensie siblings are children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and they're only teenagers or young adults by The Last Battle, even though millennia have passed in Narnia. The Magician's Nephew is the only one that's a distant sequel (or rather, prequel) in Earth time as well as in Narnia time — it's set in The Edwardian Era and focuses on Digory Kirke as a child, while the next book (chronologically) happens during the Blitz and shows Digory as an old man.
  • Dune loves this trope, but also does an Immediate Sequel (or near-immediate) or two:
  • Ender's Game: Speaker for the Dead is set about three thousand years after the first book, as this is the amount of time needed to travel from Earth to the book's setting, the planet Lusitania, in a slower-than-light sleeper ship. For Ender himself due to the time dilation, it’s been 22 years.
  • The Enduring Flame Trilogy takes place a thousand years or so after The Obsidian Trilogy, by which point the latter's heroes have become the figureheads of the setting's main religion.
  • Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series: Many of the books' component stories were first published in the Pulp Magazines of the time. The overarching story achieves a Dashed Plot Line effect due to skipping between characters, often with Time Skips of a generation or so between stories.
  • The Helliconia books are set centuries apart from each other, showing how the eponymous planet changes as it and its parent star Batalix orbit around Freyr, cyclically affecting the planet's climate over centuries. The story of Aoz Roon overthrowing the two chiefs of his village and becoming one himself in Helliconia Spring is remembered in Helliconia Summer as nothing more than a cautionary tale that was probably made from whole cloth.
  • Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle): Escape from Hell takes place a hundred and fifty-odd years after Inferno — Allen spends an unspecified amount of time reforming in the Vestibule after being blow to kingdom come in Cocytus, and only learns of the gap when he gets back to Dis. The essentially timeless nature of Hell means that this doesn't hugely impact his experiences in traveling through it, especially since the story was implied to already be set in the real world's future, and this serves chiefly to emphasize how easily the centuries pass by in the Pit.
  • The Lord of the Rings starts 59 years after The Hobbit ends and then there is another 17 year jump before the main story of the Fellowship starts; this is not immediately noticeable due to most main characters belonging to species that are either very Long-Lived or actually ageless, but enough time has passed for Bilbo to become an old man with an adult nephew and for the city of Dale to be ruled by the grandson of Bard, who becomes its ruler at the end of The Hobbit.
  • Mass Effect: Annihilation takes place thirty years before the main events of Mass Effect: Andromeda.
  • Redwall: Most novels are set a generation or so apart from one another, so that any given work tends to feature as main characters people who were either children in the previous book or who are the offspring of the previous work's main characters. As there are twenty-two novels in the series, the end result is that the last few books in chronological order take place a good few centuries after the first ones, and extensive dynasties and family lines can be traced among the characters who are each other's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
  • The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
  • Silverwing: The prequel novel Darkwing might set a record for longest time gap between the main story and its followup. While the first three stories are ambiguously set in the present day (although in an Alternate History), Darkwing is set shortly after the K-Pg extinction event, over sixty million years ago, chronicling how the first bats evolved.
  • Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
    • The first two stories in the short story anthology Enterprise Logs, "The Veil at Valcour" and "World of Strangers", take place in 1776 and 1942 respectively, hundreds of years prior to the rest of the stories in the collection and the usual time frame of the franchise in general. "The Veil at Valcour" is set aboard the Royal Navy vessel HMS Enterprise during The American Revolution while "World of Strangers" is set aboard the US Navy vessel U.S.S. Enterprise (CV-6) during World War II.
    • The short story "I Am Become Death" in the anthology Strange New Worlds II takes place in 4367, 2,000 years after the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation. By this time, humanity has gone extinct, having been replaced by a race of androids created by Data.
    • "The Second Star" in Strange New Worlds III takes place in 2425, about 50 years after the events of Star Trek: Voyager. Tarina tells her grandchildren about her encounter with Voyager's crew in 2373.
    • "A Girl for Every Star" in Strange New Worlds V takes place in 2123, about 30 years before the events of Star Trek: Enterprise and more than 140 years before those of Star Trek: The Original Series. The 11-year-old Jonathan Archer meets a young Vulcan girl named T'Rama, who later becomes the mother of Sarek and the grandmother of Spock.
    • "Our Million Year Mission" in Strange New Worlds VI is set in 1012260, on board a ship called the UberEnterprise NCC 1701-∞, which launched on the ten thousandth aniversary of Kirk beginning his five year mission, and has since spent a million years exploring the cosmos.
    • "Guardians" in Strange New Worlds VII begins in 2297, thirty years after the events of Star Trek: The Original Series, and moves increasingly further into the future until it reaches 52267 when the mother Horta's eggs hatch.
    • "Assignment One" in Strange New Worlds 8 takes place from September 10 to 11, 2001. Gary Seven prevents Shaun Geoffrey Christopher from boarding one of the planes that crashes into the World Trade Center so that he can command the first manned mission to Saturn in 2020.
    • "The Rules of War" in Strange New Worlds 9 takes place during the Eugenics Wars in 1994, about 160 years before the events of Star Trek: Enterprise. The story concerns Jonathan Archer's great-grandfather Nathan Archer fighting Dr. Stavos Keniclius in North Africa and managing to negotiate a temporary cease fire with him so that a school can be evacuated. Captain Archer tells Trip about this event in "Hatchery".
    • "Mestral" in Strange New Worlds 9 takes place on the first day of World War III on May 1, 2053. The title character, a Vulcan who has been living on Earth disguised as a human since 1957, meets Zefram Cochrane ten years before his warp flight and introduces him to Lily Sloane.
    • "The Immortality Blues" in Strange New Worlds 9 takes place in 2063, 206 years before the events of "Requiem for Methuselah". The immortal man who later calls himself Flint helps humanity to rebuild in the aftermath of World War III.
    • The short story "Stone Cold Truths" in Tales of the Dominion War takes place in 2525, 150 years after the events of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: New Frontier. The retired Brikarian Starfleet officer Zak Kebron tells his son Cal about his experiences during the Dominion War (2373-2375).
    • The first two novels in the trilogy Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars take place from 1974 to 1996, approximately 300 years before the events of "Space Seed" and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. They tell the story of Khan Noonien Singh's life from his early childhood to his rise to power to his leaving Earth aboard the S.S. Botany Bay in 1996.
    • The TNG novel The Captains' Honor revisits the Space Romans planet Magna Roma in 2365, 97 years after the events of "Bread and Circuses".
  • Warrior Cats: The Dawn of the Clans series takes place in what the modern Clans would describe as being ancient times, focusing on the very creation and foundation of the Clans, generations before The Prophecy Begins took place. By the time of the main series, the events of Dawn of the Clans have long since faded into fuzzily remembered legend.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Cobra Kai is set 34 years after the events of the first film in the original The Karate Kid trilogy, and revolves around former Cobra Kai star Johnny Lawrence, who reopens the dojo in a quest for redemption.
  • EastEnders: The TV film CivvyStreet takes place in December 1942, more than 40 years before the events of the series. It explores the impact that World War II had on the residents of Albert Square.
  • House of the Dragon opens in the year 101, before skipping several years later to the ninth year of Viserys I's reign, "172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen", who was 16 at the beginning of Game of Thrones. This means that the first episode is set 188 years before GoT. The first season has a lot of timeskips, which span around twenty years or so, though the producers have stated that there will no longer be significant timeskips in future seasons, implying that the main bulk of the story will still be well over 160 years before GoT. Also doubles as a Prequel in the Lost Age, since it takes place when House Targaryen is still in power, and dragons still fly all over Westeros.
  • iCarly (2021) begins roughly a decade after the original iCarly. Carly and Freddie are now in their mid-twenties and Spencer is now a very wealthy artist.
  • Nirvana in Fire 2 takes place at least sixty years after Nirvana in Fire.
  • Powerpuff takes place 18 years after the events of The Powerpuff Girls, though it sets the original events in 2003 to fit the pilot's present of 2021.
  • Star Trek:
  • Tin Man is revealed to be this to the Land of Oz books and not just a straight Dystopian Oz adaptation in the third part by revealing Dorothy moved to Oz full time like she did in the books, becoming matriarch of the ruling family of which DG is a current scion.
  • The Tribe: All the adults (and a lot of the children) in the world have been wiped out by a man-made virus, and the survivors are living in small tribes (some friendly, some antagonistic) and struggling along with a mixture of tech from Industrial Revolution-era to modern technology (they have computers). The series ends with a second virus being unleashed and the remaining inhabitants of the city fleeing the imminent cloud of death to safety to continue rebuilding civilisation... but in the distant sequel series The New Tomorrow, society has regressed to an Iron Age level (a tribe of farmers, another of hunter gatherers, and a tribe of Privileged who live on slave labour), and what is remembered of the days of the Mall Rats and Bray, Zoot, Ebony, etc has been shrouded in myths. The only question left to wonder is — if this is set sufficiently far after that the events of The Tribe have faded into myths, why are there still no adults anywhere to be seen?
  • Ultra Series: Ultraman Mebius takes place twenty-five years after Ultraman 80, as a continuation of the Nebula M78 Timeline (Showa Era).
  • Vikings: Valhalla is a set a century after the events of Vikings at the tail-end of the The Viking Age, with many of the characters being descendants of the original series' characters.

    Radio 
  • The Green Hornet: The main character, Britt Reid, is typically depicted as the grand-nephew of John Reid, The Lone Ranger. As such, The Green Hornet is typically set two generations or so after the events of the earlier series, enough time for the Green Hornet's parents to be dead from natural causes.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Century: Each game in the original trilogy is set one century following the previous. While the Excuse Plot shows the trading companies being controlled by the same families, very few real life people would live to see the events of all three games.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar is a very distant sequel to Warhammer Fantasy. Precise timescales aren't specified, but the game's backstory begins with the destruction of the earlier setting, after which come unspecified numbers of millennia as the survivors of the setting of Fantasy, known in Age of Sigmar as the World-that-Was, come across the Mortal Realms and populate them with new races, civilizations rise and fall, and cataclysms shape and reshape the Realms. By the game's present, only a relative handful of immortal characters remain from Fantasy; otherwise, the setting has changed so much as to be essentially a completely new world.

    Theatre 

    Video Games 
  • Ace Attorney: Unlike the 2010s-set Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney installments, the spinoff; The Great Ace Attorney is set during the late 19th century and follows Phoenix's ancestor Ryunosuke (a native of Meiji-era Japan) and his allies as he attempts to become a lawyer in Victorian London.
  • Andro Dunos has a sequel set 28 years after the original, and a Happy Ending Override that reveals despite thwarting the Alien Invasion, decades later earth still gets conquered.
  • Assassin's Creed: A common occurrence, as the games are set all over recorded history.
  • Azure Striker Gunvolt Series: In Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, Kirin reveals that the game takes place several decades after the previous installment. This is even alluded to in promotional material, in which Gunvolt is referred to as the "eternally young man" and retains his 14-year old appearance despite the Time Skip.
  • Baldur's Gate III takes place a century after the events of Baldur's Gate II, with the party members having become Legendary in the Sequel.
  • Battle Arena Toshinden: The fourth and final installment takes place around a decade after the original trilogy. We can tell by the fact that former protagonist Eiji has gone gray, and Kayin's daughter Naru went from a little child to a bombshell.
  • Call of Duty: The first three games were set during World War II; the Modern Warfare series is set around The New '10s, around seventy years later.
  • Castlevania takes places over centuries with the Belmont clan's fight against Dracula:
  • Chzo Mythos: This happens twice.
    • The first game, 5 Days a Stranger, takes place in the 1990s, ending with the death of multiple characters and the assumed defeat of the murderous ghost John DeFoe. The sequel is 7 Days a Skeptic, which takes place in 2385, aboard a spaceship, with only loose connections to the original game — otherwise, it's a new cast of characters being terrorized, once again, by John DeFoe.
    • The third game, Trilby's Notes, is set only a few years after the events of 5 Days, bringing the series back to a focused, overarching plot. Although the next game 6 Days a Sacrifice follows this overarching plot trend, and even adds some meaning to the events of 7 Days, it also takes place in 2189.
  • Cyberpunk 2077, being a Sequel in Another Medium, is set 57 years after Cyberpunk 2020, and 32 years after Cyberpunk RED (which was set in 2045).
  • Dark Souls:
    • Dark Souls II takes place at least a thousand years after the events of the first Dark Souls, by which point the Chosen Undead's journey to determine the fate of the Age of Fire is nothing but a faded memory.
    • While the first two games take place close enough to each other that the First Flame showing no sign of permanently fading, Dark Souls III is set countless thousands of years in the future, after so many cycles have come and gone that the Flame is at risk of permanently going out and the events of the first two games aren't just legends, but the legends of long-dead civilizations. The Ringed City DLC is implied to be set even further in the future.
  • Divinity: Original Sin II is set 1,200 years after Divinity: Original Sin, and although it is not a direct sequel to it (it actually more closely follows Divine Divinity), the two games form the two end points of the same story arc concerning the Dangerous Forbidden Technique Source as the origin of the divine power: D:OS explains how it got corrupted, while the sequel allows you remove it from the world entirely in some of the endings.
  • EarthBound Series: Mother 3 is set an indefinitely long amount of time after the events of EarthBound (1994); by this point, the world already experienced an apocalypse, with the survivors deliberately erasing all of their memories about life before the cataclysmic event. EarthBound itself is also a milder example in the sense that it is set an ambiguous number of years after the events of EarthBound Beginningsnote , but is decidedly still "contemporary" in its setting compared to Mother 3.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The first four main series games all take place within a roughly 30 year period at the end of the 3rd Era, during and immediately after the reign of Emperor Uriel Septim VII. Skyrim, the fifth game in the series, then takes place in the 4th Era, over 200 years after the events of Oblivion, following a number of wars, political upheavals, and a massive eruption that devastated Morrowind's setting.
    • Meanwhile, The Elder Scrolls Online is a distant prequel to the main series, being set in the Second Era, several centuries before Tiber Septim founded his imperial dynasty. Tamriel as depicted in the MMO looks nothing like the "dark ages" described sparsely in the main series' in-game sources, highlighting how much historical knowledge has been lost over the nearly 800 years between the Planemeld and the fall of the Septims.
  • Fallout: While individual games are set no more than a few decades after their predecessors, the years add up between installments — Fallout 4 is set 125 years after the original Fallout, and, while still set in an After the End Scavenger World, later games show signs of civilization having been rebuilt considerably from the point of the first few games. Among other things, agriculture, trade and nations larger than village-sized city-states all reappear as time goes on. The New California Republic, which the player helps establish and defend in early games, has for instance grown into a powerful nation by the time of Fallout: New Vegas. Conversely, Fallout 76 takes place nearly sixty years before the first game and 25 years after World War III, with the people of Appalachia even worse off than the Capital Wasteland and pre-War life still relatively fresh in people's minds.
  • Final Fantasy
  • Fire Emblem:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 3 is set 30 years after the first game. It's been so far into the future that the horrors of child murders at Freddy Fazbear's have turned into urban legends and scary campfire tales, ones which are apparently popular enough to commercialize on.
  • Fuga: Melodies of Steel takes place a thousand years prior to fellow Little Tail Bronx games Tail Concerto and Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, and its setting of Gasco is the previous form of Solatorobo's setting of Shepherd.
  • Heroes of Jin Yong has a sequel, Wulin Warriors, set a hundred years later. There's a Memorial Statue depicting the first game's hero, built in his honor.
  • Hogwarts Legacy takes place in Victorian Britain, over a century before the events of Harry Potter.
  • Jumper Three takes place millennia after Jumper Two, due to Ogmo spending all that time in a spaceship. The game doesn't even provide any specific number, it just throws up a random number as a number of years that passed since Ogmo boarded the rocket in the intro.
  • Legacy of Kain: The franchise often jumps around by centuries or millennia between games — Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain, for instance, takes place 400 years after the original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Most games are implied to take place anywhere between a few lifetimes to centuries and millennia away from each other, as Link and Zelda reincarnate over and over again throughout Hyrule's history, and events from various games often feature as legends of ancient deeds in chronologically later installments. While clear amounts of time are never given, games at the far end of the franchise's timelines, such as Spirit Tracks and The Adventure of Link, take place millennia after games such as Skyward Sword and The Minish Cap that are set in the early parts of the setting's history.
    • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is the first game to explicitly state thisnote , taking place a very long time after a great flood destroyed Hyrule at some point after Ocarina of Time, long enough that Hyrule itself, Link and his deeds and the Triforce have all long passed into legend, and that language drift has caused the dialect of Hylian spoken in Ocarina of Time to become an incomprehensible dead language to the people of the game's present.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks takes place about a hundred years after the events of The Wind Waker, after the previous game's main characters discover a new habitable continent and found a restored Hyrule upon it. The game's incarnation of Zelda is the granddaughter of Tetra, and a single very aged character remains to tell the new cast about about their predecessors' exploits.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one to effectively the franchise as a whole. Exactly how long after the other games Breath of the Wild takes place is not stated, but 10,000 have passed since the ancient, technologically advanced Hylian civilization sealed the Calamity Ganon away in the game's backstory. This is on top of the amount of time that would have been needed for the medieval Hyrule seen in most games to develop the technology needed to create robots, Giant Mecha and other such wonders to begin with, making the amount of time that must gone by between the times of the other Zelda stories and Breath of the Wild vast indeed.
  • Lunar: Eternal Blue takes place about 1,000 years after Lunar: The Silver Star, although it shares two returning characters.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda takes place six hundred years after the original Mass Effect trilogy, due to the time needed to travel between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. The impossibility of contact between the two galaxies and the fact that the colonists spent the travel time in cryogenic sleep mean that this has little immediate effect on the ongoing plot, although the characters are all very well aware that everyone they ever knew and loved is likely dead by now.
  • Mega Man loves this trope.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a prequel to the entire Metal Gear series that takes place in the 1960s.
  • Mortal Kombat X is set 22 years after the events of Mortal Kombat 9.
  • NieR is a unique example: the game uses Ending E from Drakengard as its backdrop, wherein the protagonists of that game are flung across time and space to Tokyo in the year 2003. The game's prologue opens in 2049, by which point the aftermath of the events of Ending E have caused the world to fall into decline. After the prologue, the game picks up 1400 years later. NieR: Automata, meanwhile, takes place in the year 11945 AD, several thousand years after the events of NieR.
  • The original PAGUI and it's sequel are set 10 years apart. Huo Wang-Lin, the seven-year-old protagonist of the first, returns as a Kid Hero All Grown-Up.
  • Pokémon:
    • Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes place during the distant past of the Sinnoh region, before humans and Pokémon developed the close bond they share in the present day. The period's culture and technology are based on those of real-life Japan around the 16th century, and numerous species of Pokémon are encountered that, by the series' present day, have long since gone extinct or been replaced by modern variants.
    • In a similar but downplayed vein, Pokémon Sun and Moon is implied to take place a decade after Pokémon Red and Blue, with the grown up versions of the old protagonist and rival aviliable to battle in the post-game.
  • Sea of Stars is a very distant prequel to The Messenger, with a billion years set between them.
  • Sakura Wars (2019) takes place twelve years after Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, by which point the original Combat Revues from Tokyo, Paris and New York seal themselves to thwart the demon invasions, the new World Luxury Operatic Federation (WLOF) is formed, and Sumire Kanzaki has managed to establish a new Imperial Combat Revue in Tokyo.
  • Shinza Bansho Series: Due to the immense timescales it operates by, the series embraces this trope quite frequently as it is a huge multiversal epic with each new installment focusing on a new gods era, usually at it's tailend. This also means that various settings of the series vary wildly in terms of tone and style. From the Dystopian Cyberpunk story Paradise Lost, to the contemporary fantasy Dies Irae, to the medieval Japanese Kajiri Kamui Kagura. The High Fantasy Avesta of Black and White inverts this by being a distant prequel.
  • Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic occurs 3,956 years before the main Star Wars movies, and Star Wars Eclipse takes place two centuries before them in the "High Republic" era.
  • Tales Series:
    • Tales of Symphonia takes place thousands of years before Tales of Phantasia, enough time for magitek civilizations to rise and destroy themselves in a war before a meteor impact sends the world back into another technological dark age. An exact time gap is not given, but the general consensus is four thousand years, with Symphonia's ending acting as Year Zero for the calendar used in Phantasia.
    • Tales of Berseria similarly takes place in the far distant past of Tales of Zestiria.
  • Soulcalibur V takes place 17 years after Soulcalibur IV.
  • Strider (Arcade): Strider 2 is set 2000 years after the original Strider, in a world where Meio's plans were eventually successful.
  • Tekken: The third game is set 19 years after the second, with the sequels following the new timeline. The games now focus on Jin Kazama, son of Kazuya Mishima, the hero-turned villain of the first two games.
  • Wild ARMs: Each of the games takes place hundreds or thousands of years apart from each other. It's never stated exactly how long nor which order they're in, but enough time passes that the entire planet can be geographically shuffled, including one game where the oceans have completely dried up.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country takes place around 500 years before Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
    • Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
      • The game is explicitly set in the future of the first two games, with Shinya Takahashi stating that "the story of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 ties together the futures of the worlds depicted in Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2." Played with later. While it has indeed been hundreds if not thousands of years, that's only in the "Endless Now" of Aionios. It's unclear when exactly the worlds merged together, with some plot points implying it was only a few decades after 1 and 2. Once the worlds are separated again at the end of the game, they are able to continue with barely a hiccup, and it's unclear what impact Aionios had on the two worlds.
      • Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed takes place over one thousand years before the main game.
  • Ys: The first game takes place 700 years after the later-released prequel Ys Origin, while the other games all take place within a few years of each other.

    Web Comics 
  • Gravity Falls fan-comic Deal: Deal is set thirty years after Gravity Falls, showing a world where Dipper and Pacifica have children and Bill Cipher returns with a vengeance.

    Web Original 
  • Bosun's Journal: The bulk of Bosun's Journal takes place over a timespan of a hundred and thirty-odd million years, sufficient to see posthuman life on the ship fall into savagery and then animalism, evolve and diversify into various clades, and then produce a number of new sapient species and their own descendants. Bosun's Return is instead set some time after the first series' Distant Epilogue, placing it comfortably six billion years in the future. By this time, Earth has undergone so many geological, technological, and biological changes that it is almost entirely unrecognizable, rendering it almost an alien world for the expedition sent to its ruins.

    Web Video 
  • The fan-made series Danganronpa: Despair Time is set approximately thirty years after the end of The Tragedy, where the world has largely recovered and Hope's Peak Academy has opened up divisions in other countries; the United States' East Coast Branch is on its 27th class. Of course, things haven't exactly one back to normal, with the titular Sadistic Game Show apparently a popular piece of entertainment.
  • Empires SMP Season 2 is set over a thousand years after the events of Season 1, and those events have become so distant that the two seasons' storylines are thus far virtually independent from each other (in most perspectives of events). In spite of this, there remains a deep connection between the seasons, ranging from small-scale Continuity Nods to Mythology Gags, to Pearl's omnipresence as a deified Posthumous Character, and Sausage regaining his Past-Life Memories from Season 1 and the Afterlife SMP is a prominent character arc in itself.

    Western Animation 
  • 101 Dalmatian Street takes place in 2019, almost 60 years after the events of Disney's 1961 101 Dalmatians film.
  • Batman Beyond takes place in the future of the DC Animated Universe, specifically 2039, where an aging Bruce Wayne trains a new Batman, Terry McGinnis.
  • Castlevania: Nocturne is set a few centuries after its predecessor. The first series is set in a somewhat vague timespan but is roughly placeable at the tail end of the 15th century; Nocturne is instead set at the start of the French Revolution and shortly after the Haitian one, in the early 1790s. It focuses on Victor Belmont's distant descendant, Richter Belmont, as he battles new supernatural forces.
  • Dragons: The Nine Realms takes place in the same universe as How to Train Your Dragon, only 1,300 years after the events of the original trilogy, putting it in the modern age.
  • The Legend of Korra takes place 70 years after Avatar: The Last Airbender, by which point Aang has died of old age, allowing the Avatar to be reborn among the Water Tribes in the form of the protagonist. Characters from the previous series, all now famous historical figures, are either in old age (like Toph, Katara and Zuko), deceased (like Sokka), or deceased but still present as spirits (like Aang and Iroh). Other characters include the middle-aged children of the first show's main cast, many with children of their own. The world has also undergone an industrial revolution, with the main setting being a fifth nation, known as the United Republic, that was established in the intervening years.
  • My Little Pony (Generation 5) is a sequel to My Little Pony (Generation 4), but long after the original generation's events have passed into legend. The events of the previous generation are described as "Ancient Equestria" in-universe, and it is established that the pony races separated and magic disappeared in the intervening centuries.
  • Samurai Jack: The fifth season takes place fifty years in-universe after the fourth season, by which point most characters — except Jack, who seems to have become immune to aging — have become elderly and have families of their own.
  • Transformers: Beast Wars and its sequel Beast Machines have a cast from Cybertron in the distant future of the original cartoon, by which point the original's events are the stuff of myth (even though some of its veterans are still alive). Although in the former, it turns out both the Maximals and Predacons have traveled to Earth in the distant past.

Alternative Title(s): Distant Prequel

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