Set Right What Once Went Wrong / Video Games

Setting Right What Once Went Wrong in Video Games

Series Plots

• In Eternal Champions, a being called the Eternal Champion lives in a Bad Future. He searches through time and finds ones that could have prevented the future from happening, but died before they had the chance. He gathers them together and has them fight in a tournament to decide who gets the chance to avert their own death and prevent this future.
• An elementary tactic in Achron. Occurs often in multiplayer games as a response to another player screwing with your past.
• Basically the whole premise of Daikatana, although the main characters spend so much time screwing around in the mythic past that one could be forgiven for thinking it was otherwise.
• In the "Fractured Futures" event of Dragalia Lost, Euden is greeted by a time traveling dragon named Chronos who offers to help him correct past horrors, like stopping his father King Alberius from becoming possessed by the Other. Another time traveler, Audric, is there to stop him, especially Chronos, and takes Euden to a Bad Future where instead of his sister Zethia who became possessed by the Other, it was himself and his army has practically won. Chronos feels he's doing this for Euden by getting rid of Future Zethia, but it just turns Euden against him. As for Audric, he's an aged down version of his father from the same bad future.
• Loopmancer uses this trope as it's premise. You can reset time by dying and restarting the time loop, to try to set things right again and again and again. Unfortunately there are limits to where the loop can extend - you can't stop your daughter's death five years ago unless you reach the best ending.
• The plot of Marathon Infinity in the round-about way.
  • This is the premise of the fan-made Game Mod Marathon: Eternal. Earth is devastated by an interstellar war, and the hero is sent back in time to ensure that Humanity wins. Avoids a Temporal Paradox because the Lost Technology doing the time traveling can also jump between different dimensions - the plan is to create an alternate timeline where Earth isn't destroyed and transport the refugees from the original Earth there.
• We learn in the end of Arc the Lad 2 that It was the reason behind Arc's father disappearance: he tried to set things right, and failed
• Timespinner: The Main character belongs to a isolated clan who guard an ancient time-manipulating artifact, the titular Timespinner. They train "Time Messengers" to travel back in time when a disaster occurs and warn the clan about it.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The whole point of the Wings of the Goddess expansion in Final Fantasy XI. In fact, the player's version of Vana'diel was revealed to be the Set Right What Once Went Wrong outcome of the nine Cait Siths nudging the Crystal War into a better direction, until people from the other timeline decided to set wrong what once went right. Leads one to wonder how long the Pandemonium Warden fight took in the "bad" version of the universe.
  • The point of Final Fantasy XIII-2 is to fix the timeline and help everyone find happiness while averting future disaster. They fail, and cause a massive Time Crash.
  • The Time Crash that the heroes cause halfway through Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light allows them to do this. Visiting all the towns in the past lets them kill the demons that were corrupting or usurping many of the world's rulers through manipulation, plagues, and outright Demonic Possession. It also averts tragic events from their own timeline, like Lilibelle's death.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers: the Crystal Exarch of the First (who is actually a denezen of the Source, G'raha Tia) hails from a Bad Future where the Garlean Empire brought about the end of the world by means of a deadly chemical weapon. To that end, he traveled through time and reality itself in an attempt to halt the coming calamity in the First, and in so doing, prevent calamity in the Source.
  • Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: In an alternate timeline, the party fails to defeat Emperor Vlad, with Vlad killing everyone save for Rain, who lost his eye, his arm and his leg. With the help of Dark Fina, Rain goes back in time and assumes the identity of Akstar to train Lasswell to prevent Vlad from killing everyone again.
• As a game about time travel, naturally Chrono Trigger has a case of this early on, where Chrono and Lucca have to fix an error in the time stream... that they caused by sending somebody back in time. Oops.
• In Fire Emblem: Awakening, "Marth" traveled back in time to prevent The End of the World as We Know It which was originally set into motion with the death of her father, Chrom, and took her companions from the future with her. Unfortunately, Grima came back too in order to make sure she couldn't stop his resurrection.
• In Dark Fall 2: Lights Out, Parker stumbles into a time portal while investigating the disappearance of some lighthouse keepers, and discovers both the reason they vanished, and that he'll be blamed by history for murdering them if he doesn't fulfill this trope. Likewise, while Darkfall: The Journal doesn't actually involve time travel, it does give the hero a chance to avert What Went Wrong, by foiling a supernatural menace in the present.
• The overarching plot of the popular Half-Life Timeline mod trilogy. Scientists at Black Mesa discovered time travel as a corollary to the dimensional portal technology they were working on... and gave it to the Nazis. Now Gordon must travel to the ends of time and even to parallel Earths to set right what once went wrong and stop the Nazi timeship fleet, eventually, after all else has failed, traveling back to Black Mesa a few hours before the Resonance Cascade event to stop the fateful experiment before it even began.
• In Sonic Generations, the two Tails postulate that the two Sonics running through previous points in time restores color and life to those settings. Also confirmed by Eggman, who says he used the Time Eater to undo his previous mistakes.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Sonic fails to reach Eggman's carrier before it crashed, causing both the former and Princess Elise to die. Silver and Sonic then both use Chaos Control to travel back in time so the latter can reach the ship and save Elise from Eggman.
• Implied in-game and inferred by fans before being eventually declared canon in regards to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and by extension the series as a whole), and also one of the cornerstones of the infamous Split Timeline. The whole game deals with Link's efforts to kick Ganondorf off the usurped throne of Hyrule (which Link was sort of responsible for in the first place), which he succeeds at with the help of Zelda and the other Sages. Then Zelda sends Link back to before all that happened so Link can experience the childhood he was robbed of. Link therefore uses this opportunity to warn Zelda and everyone else of how Ganondorf was planning to steal the Triforce, which leads to Ganondorf being captured and executed. However, this sets up the plot for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, where Ganondorf survives said execution and is trapped in the Twilight Realm, where he gives Zant the power to usurp the throne of the Twili and uses him to return to Hyrule. So things were set right, but they ended up going wrong in a different way.
  • The Hyrule Historia book reveals a third split in which Link's death allows Ganondorf to claim the Triforce, leading to a massive war taking place to seal Ganon in the Dark World before he could conquer Hyrule which in turn led to the events of the 8 and 16-bit era of Zelda games as well as The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.
  • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity takes place before the events of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, wherein the battle to contain the Calamity Ganon ended in defeat for the forces of Hyrule, forcing Zelda to seal Ganon and herself away and Link being placed into stasis for 100 years. In Age of Calamity, a benevolent and diminutive Guardian robot opens a portal back to the past, where it hopes to impart knowledge of events to come to Zelda, Link, and the Champions in the hopes of averting the coming Calamity.
• In the Interactive Fiction game Jigsaw, the antagonist is trying to set right what once went wrong (preventing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for example), while the player character must try to keep history on track. (At least, that's how it starts; then it gets a bit more complicated.)
• Radiant Historia is about a soldier who is given a book called the White Chronicle, allowing him to travel back to certain points in time on his journey to help guide the world to its "correct" history (i.e. one that doesn't lead to its destruction through constantly-expanding desertification). Invoking this trope is required to complete the game. Many other temporal tropes apply at various points in the game, but this trope pops up beautifully in a simple sidequest: a woman is mourning the death of her husband from sickness, saying "if only he'd taken this medicine...". To complete the sidequest, just travel back in time with the medicine and give it to the husband (saying it's from his wife). Both husband and wife will be mystified about how you knew and where it came from, as the wife hadn't told you yet about her husband, but that fixes the future so they both live and are grateful.
• In TimeShift, the Big Bad gets the suit that lets him time-travel at will and reshapes the world to his own ideals, so the Hero has to get the toned-down suit and go back after him in order to try to fix things.
• Singularity has the main character trying to do this after a time-travel incident leads to the Soviet Union taking over the world with time-manipulation technology. It doesn't work. At best, the scientist who invented the time-manipulation technology takes over the world because of your actions.
• Millennia: Altered Destinies is built on this trope. You play a human cargo ship captain who is abducted by an alien race called the Hoods and given a timeship with the goal of stopping the hostile Microids from taking over the Echelon galaxy (except that they have already done that in this timeline) and moving on to the Milky Way. To this end, you are to seed four suitable planets with life and help the four different races evolve and deal with various crises. Your ship, the XTM, can go back 10,000 years into the past in 100 year increments. You also have access to the complete history of the four races that, unlike you, doesn't have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory. This means that, as soon as you change something, there is a temporal storm that updates the database right before your eyes. Essentially, you have 2 goals in the game: help the 4 races spread out throughout the Echelon galaxy in equal amounts (defeating the Microids) and have the 4 races reach the technological stage at which they can build replacement parts for your ship's wormhole drive to get back to Earth. Due to the game mechanics, you usually can only accomplish one of these.
  • Unfortunately, there is an alternate version of you, who has been recruited by the Microids to stop you. He will randomly show up at any point in the past to destroy one of the races, undoing all your hard work. You can't kill him, just as you yourself can't be killed.
  • Interestingly, the creators originally planned to have a Nonstandard Game Over if you happen to have screwed up the history of the four races so much that it can't be fixed. Your ship would be destroyed by a powerful temporal storm. Then they realized that this could never happen in-game, and eventually removed that ending.
• The premise of Day of the Tentacle. Dr Fred sends the protagonist trio back in time to "yesterday" to turn off his Sludge-o-Matic machine, preventing Purple Tentacle's exposure to a mutagen sludge, its Start of Darkness and first Take Over the World step. Unsurprisingly the travel goes wrong and the adventure unfolds.
• The plot of Warriors Orochi 3 is mostly this. The game opens up with a gigantic eight-headed serpent called the Hydra killing nearly every member of the Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors and Warriors Orochi universes save Ma Chao, Sima Zhao, and Hanbei Takenaka. After they fail an all-out assault on the Hydra they are rescued by Kaguya, who sends them back in time and begins this plot.
• In Body Harvest, Adam and Daisy travel back in time to the first alien invasion, so they can prevent the harvest of the Earth from ever coming true.
• In Dragon Ball Online and Dragon Ball Xenoverse, the villainous Time Breakers are out to alter key events in Dragon Ball Z history. You, as a member of the Time Patrol, must help Trunks correct the changes they make.
• In Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, it's the villain's plan - to introduce future technology to Taisho-era Japan to transform it into a world superpower decades in advance in an effort to stave off the horrifying Crapsack World that is Shin Megami Tensei I and Shin Megami Tensei II. Interestingly, despite his plan being smashed to bits, it's implied he did succeed, steering the timeline away from the events of those games.
• The plot of Serious Sam involves the titular Sam going back in time to kill the alien overlord Mental in the year 3000 BC before he can blow up the Earth in 2038 AD.
• Your goal in Super Time Force is to jump through time, correct history's dumb mistakes, and kill stuff that never should have happened.
• It is revealed at the end of The Wonderful 101 that the GEATHJERK army hails from a future where humanity has become a galaxy-spanning empire that has destroyed countless civilizations and that they went back in time to stop this from ever happening.
• Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals has New Game Plus, where Erim/Iris is sent back in time by the Dual Blade in the ending of the first playthrough to ultimately save Maxim and Selan from having to sacrifice themselves on Doom Island.
• In Ghost Trick, your character (Sissel) has several abilities as a disembodied spirit, one of which allows you to enter a recently-deceased person's (or animal's) body and go back to 4 minutes before the person/animal's death. You can then manipulate inanimate objects to attempt to alter that person/animal's fate. Interestingly, both you and the person/animal you're saving retain the memory of the original timeline (provided the person/animal's spirit was conscious at the time) and are able to communicate with you after the fact. The final chapter involves traveling back ten years in order to prevent the whole chain of events that led to multiple deaths and result in an Everybody Lives ending. You also find out that another spirit has already done that, spending 10 years taking The Slow Path to convince you to help after Sissel from the previous timeline refuses. In some cases, you can even "chain" these time jumps, if the death of one person came about the a result of another death.
• The main conflict in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers centers around a Bad Future in which time has stopped entirely, resulting in a cold, dark, desolate world. The player and their partner, Grovyle, were formerly on a mission from the future to prevent the collapse of Temporal Tower, the event that caused time to stop in the first place, until they were separated. When they are later reunited, they finally succeed in saving Temporal Tower and changing the future.
• The plot of Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls involves traveling back in time to four major eras in the world's history to try and prevent endless wars that left the present a Crapsack World.
• Life Is Strange : the protagonist, Max, tries to do that on multiple occasions throughout the story, like saving her best friend's life, save her father from an accident 5 years prior, among others, thanks to her "rewind" power, and later Mental Time Travel. Too bad chaos theory is in full effect, in both cases.
• The Prince of Persia Sands trilogy as a whole is a long deconstruction of this trope. All of the Prince's efforts to undo his mistakes end up either failing or making matters worse.
  • In Sands of Time, using the Sands of Time to undo Farah's death unleashes the time guardian Dahaka, which hunts him relentlessly for seven years leading to the events of Warrior Within.
  • In Warrior Within, he tries to get rid of the Dahaka by killing Kaileena and preventing the Sands of Time from being created in the first place. Unfortunately for him, the Sands are made from Kaileena's body, and he ironically winds up creating them himself by killing her. He is ultimately able to prevent her death by means of a Stable Time Loop and destroys the Dahaka, but by preventing the Sands' creation he entirely nullifies the events of the first game, including the death of the Vizier. This leads into...
  • The Two Thrones, where the Prince's home city of Babylon is under siege of the now alive Vizier, who himself winds up killing Kaileena and unleashing the Sands to claim their power. Towards the end of this game the Prince finally resolves to stop messing with time and start accepting the consequences of his actions. In the end, he defeats the Vizier and Farah survives, but he has to live with the fact that his father is dead and Babylon is in ruins because of the mistakes he made.
• The ZX Spectrum game Time-Gate has the protagonist travelling back in time (through the eponymous Time-Gates) to the year before the aliens invaded, and destroying their home planet to prevent the invasion ever having happened.
• Randal's Monday: Randal has to stop himself from taking Matt's wallet, and instead return it.
• Enter the Gungeon: All of the playable characters (Gungeoneers) try their luck in the Gungeon to find the Gun That Can Kill The Past and attempt to fix their pasts.
• Prisoner of Ice, the sequel to Shadow of the Comet, features this. After the world was overrun by Lovecraftian monsters, H.P. Parker had his trusted friend take his son Yan Parker into the past in hopes of stopping the prisoners of ice before they were awakened. Unfortunately, said friend promptly made a Face–Heel Turn due to witnessing the power of the ancients.
• Glory of Heracles III has the Protagonist stop his past self from causing The End of the World as We Know It by using the Gorgons' blood for the wrong purpose.
  • In the ending of the game, the Protagonist undoes the sins of his original self, Lord Baor.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure reveals that [[spoiler:KeA reset the universe after the SSS were killed by Joachim Guenter and manipulated things so that Estelle and Joshua would join them in the final dungeon and so that Renne would show up to save them from Joachim.
• The opening of Timecrest concerns reversing time in order to stop meteors from falling and destroying the world. The rest of Timecrest 1: Fated Connections is spent exploring why and how the meteors descended, and more importantly, how to stop them.
  • Furthermore, a possible plot to pursue in Timecrest 3: Luthor is to not reverse time to cause Luthor to go through with committing suicide after previously reversing time several times for them. In effect, the world never faces the threat of the meteors since Ezra wouldn't have summoned the meteors in his fight against Luthor since Luthor would have already been dead. That said, the Player still has to go back in time to cause this.
• SD Gundam Battle Alliance takes place in G: Universe, a digital archive of the history of the entire Gundam multiverse. The game's plot revolves around "Breaks", glitches that displace mobile suits and pilots from their proper place and time into a history they don't belong in (for example, Char and the Zeong being displaced into the Second Battle of Jachin Due, while Rau Le Cruset and the Providence Gundam take his place during the Battle of A Baoa Qu), with the player tasked with defeating the displaced mobile suit in order to move its data back where and when it belongs.
• Star Shift Series: Deconstructed. The Terran Republic discovered crystals that can control time and space, but they accidentally shifted to a timeline where the republic became the tyrannical Earth Systems Alliance. While shifting back to previous timeline would get rid of the ESA, the factions that split off from the ESA would disappear as well. The TRS Dauntless crew wants to return to the original timeline, but Novus Federation is against this and tries to force the former to give up on that goal. In contrast, the Outer Rim Coalition's Scrap Springs Division is willing to work with the Dauntless crew despite the possibility of their pasts being irrevocably changed.

Episode or Character Plots

• In City of Heroes, several factions are attempting to do this, but their concepts of "right", usually focusing on self-preservation, are often mutually exclusive.
• Empire Earth: In the penultimate mission of the Russian campaign, the colossal dictator-robot Grigor II is definitely revealed to be no more than a totalitarianist who won't care for anything but the submission of the entire world to the regime of Novaya Russia, even if that means resorting to genocide. This prompts Molotov to defect to the Americans. He agrees to travel in time with Molly Ryan to meet Grigor Stoyanovich before he rose to power, in order to convince him to avoid taking the path that would lead to the dictatorship and the construction of Grigor II. Unfortunately, the latter anticipated them and traveled too to the past, helping the original Grigor to succsesfully stage his coup with future technology. Grigor is impressed by the tales of his successes and those of his robotic heir, and sees no problem in the means, forcing Molotov to kill him to prevenet anything and close the time loop.
• Fallout 2 inverts this; in a non-canon special encounter, the Chosen One goes into the past and destoys Vault 13's water chip, setting up the initial plot for the first game.
• In Chrono Trigger the characters end up warped to After the End and, upon watching a video of The End itself, resolve to stop it happening. They only have one chance because, well, they die if they don't do it right. Also a rare example where the Temporal Paradox part of succeeding is actually acknowledged; a paradox is caused because the heroes learn of the end from records after it happens, and then alter the future so the end which produced those records never comes into being. Chrono Cross is essentially an entire game about a whole cornucopia of consequences resulting from this, none of which are pretty.
  • Lucca gets a more specific version of this: upon completing the sidequest to save the forest, a red Gate opens which lets her go back to when her mother was crippled by getting caught in one of Haban's machines.
• Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and its interquel Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory end with a Cosmic Retcon and Bittersweet Ending in which humans and Digimon never met, erasing a lot of the hardship and damage caused by their presence but erasing all the humans' memories of the bonds they formed over the course of their adventures except for the protagonists. Suedou and Erika end up Ret-Gone (although the latter survives in the Digital World), Ryuji and Yuuko's parents are alive, and the EDEN cyberspace that became humanity's primary means of accessing the Internet and using Digimon is erased.
• The world of Dragon Quest VII used to be a vast and expansive place, but by the time of the game, it has been reduced to a single continent. Your party's mission is to travel back in time to the continents which once existed in the past and stop the various disasters which destroyed them, thereby causing them to reappear in the present.
• In Dark Cloud 2 you had to restore various points in the future that were destroyed in the past by the Big Bad.
• Kain's motivation during the later Legacy of Kain games is to fix the ruined world he himself created by traveling through time, although the plot is so complex and nearly every member of the cast is such a conniving manipulator that the importance of this, while not lessened, is somewhat drowned out. The rules of time travel in this setting make this goal even harder than it usually is; normally, You Can't Fight Fate and going back in time will merely cause a Stable Time Loop, but real alterations can be made by deliberately causing a Temporal Paradox and then acting inside of its effect. Raziel is thus the only being in all of creation with true free will because he is a living Temporal Paradox. A paradox that is resolved in the end when he willingly sacrifices himself to the Soul Reaver.
• Used in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006):
  • In Sonic's story, he eventually ends up time-traveling to a Bad Future, and discovering that it was caused by the death of Princess Elise, very shortly after the date that Sonic had just left. Sonic travels back to rescue her.
  • In Silver's story, Silver is a native of the aforementioned bad future; he travels to the past (i.e. Sonic's time) intending to kill the "Iblis trigger" and prevent Armageddon. However, he thought that Sonic was the Iblis trigger—because Silver's source of information about the past was manipulating him into Making Wrong What Once Went Right.
• The plot of Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time. Subverted in that it turns out to be impossible and/or will only result in tearing the universe apart.
• In Shattered Hourglass, these are actually Karma point events. The protagonist Duran can interact with the lifeforce of a dying person, or reach into one's memories to access the past itself.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's ending, Zelda sends Link back to the beginning of the game so he can avoid his Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moment. Rather than changing the future they're in, it creates a second timeline. The timeline where Link sealed Ganon away now lacks a hero to take care of him, and the gods end up destroying hyrule in a Great Flood for lack of any other option. And the other timeline, where Link didn't lead Ganondorf directly to the triforce? Ganondorf ends up with 1/3 of it and gets sealed away anyway. Net result of attempt to set right what once went wrong: one timeline in exactly the same situation that they were trying to prevent, and one timeline utterly destroyed.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask begins with Link dumped into an alternate reality, unwillingly transformed into a harmless Deku Scrub, and forced to watch helplessly as the world around him goes to hell in a handbasket before its eventual destruction at the end of the third day. Then Link goes back in time, regains his true form, and relives the same three days over and over as he gradually meets and helps everyone the Big Bad has hurt, until he is finally strong enough to stop it all from happening.
• The entire plot of Mortal Kombat 9 centers around an attempt to do this. Shao Kahn ends up winning the events of Armageddon, leading Raiden to send a message back to his past self to try fixing this. He ends up nearly bungling the whole thing. In the end, every single one of the Forces of Light save for Johnny Cage, Sonya, and himself are dead, their souls taken by Quan Chi. Shao Kahn is defeated, averting THAT particular Armageddon event, but Quan Chi has an army of powerful souls at his command now, and Shinnok and the Netherrealm are preparing to attack next...
• Deconstructed in Episode 4 of Back to the Future: The Game, where Citizen Brown doesn't like the idea that setting right what once went wrong means that the prudish Edna Strickland goes on to be a miserable old Crazy Cat Lady in the proper timeline, choosing instead to find a way to make sure that Young Emmett Brown ends up with Edna without her becoming a Knight Templar by making sure that he never develops his passion for science.
• Riven has a non-time-travel variant as the framing device. The linking books the series relies on can be used to modify worlds they link to using quantum uncertainty; if it could have been there but was never noticed before, writing in that it is there will make it happen. Unfortunately, Gehn, who wrote quite a number of linking books, was not actually very good at writing them, so the same quantum-uncertainty mechanics are causing the Ages he wrote to deteriorate of their own accord. His son, Atrus, is much better at writing them, and thinks he can save some of them using these same quantum-uncertainty mechanics, but some are beyond salvaging. Your task is to go into one of the doomed ones to rescue Atrus' wife and capture Gehn to stop his shoddy linking book writing, while he stays and tries to stall its destruction for as long as possible.
• In the first tutorial for FusionFall, the player is accidentally sent too far into the future by Dee Dee screwing around with Dexter's time machine and ends up in a Bad Future where Planet Fuse has nearly overtaken Earth, and has to find a way back to the past to prevent it.
• In Kingdom Hearts III, Sora and the others are wiped out during the final battle after defeating Terra-Xehanort, but Sora is able to use the power of waking to revive everyone and rewind time to just before they died.
• This is the reason for (most of) the Caverns of Time in World of Warcraft. The Infinite Dragonflight are screwing with history and the Bronze Dragonflight are recruiting mortals to help them out, since they're too preoccupied searching for their missing leader Nozdormu.
  • This is the basic premise of Warlords of Draenor, really. While we can't actually change what happened to OUR Draneor (getting corrupted and blown up into fragments called Outland) due to this being a parallel timeline...the expansion pretty much represents this for Draenor. Garrosh goes back to the moment his people were corrupted by demons and seeks to set that right by convincing them to take their own path; while it's a very noble concept at face value, Garrosh uses it to turn the orc clans into the Iron Horde and invade Azeroth anyway. The Draenei (Maraad especially) see going there as an opportunity to prevent what happened in our timeline from happening again. And indeed, our characters intervene at crucial moments to stop MANY bad events that happened on our Draenor from happening here.
  • In the "Rewriting the Battle of Darrowshire" quest chain, which has been in the game since Vanilla and was barely changed with Cataclysm, the Adventurer does a very limited version of this trope. The ultimate outcome of the titular battle (a decisive Scourge victory) cannot be changed, but the player is able to save the soul of Joseph Redpath by defeating Redpath the Corrupted.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, both the Allies and the Soviets in their respective campaigns go back in time to stop Yuri before he can complete his Psychic Dominators. As Yuri's Revenge follows the canon of an Allied victory in the base game, the Soviets need to take a step further to set Right another Wrong (from their point of view, anyway) in their second mission by destroying Einstein's lab and winning the battle of the Black Forest after they jump back - something which is lampshaded in the game itself by calling it Operation: Deja Vu and having the map itself be the same map as the base game's Allied Mission #10 (except you're controlling the Soviet side).
• In A New Beginning, a group of time-travelers from the apocalyptic 26th century try this as part of a last-resort effort called the Phoenix Plan in an attempt to prevent the ecological apocalypse.
• In Bioshock Infinite this happens when twice.
  • First when the elderly Elizabeth in the Bad Future gives Booker a coded note to give to young Elizabeth to prevent the destruction of New York.
  • The second time is in the ending when they realize that in the universe where Booker accepted the baptism in the river he was reborn as Father Comstock, and Booker lets Elizabeth drown him during the baptism to prevent Father Comstock from ever existing.
• Super Robot Wars Reversal gives us an accidental one. Raul and Fiona Grayden come from a timeline where the Mariemaia Rebellion succeeded and an accident involving either the destruction of the ''Ra Cailum or the Nadesico-C shunts them back five years into the past. During their stay, they get to the moment and have a Heroic BSoD over it. However, they both opt to Screw Destiny and help out, saving the Zambot 3 team in the process and leading to the Gundam Double X being the one who busts down Mariemaia's bunker instead of Wing Zero Custom falling apart doing so.
• Whoo, boy, better sit down for this one concerning Star Trek Online; it's a real doozy. At the beginning of Season 11, we're introduced to the Na'Khul. While trying to retrieve the Tox Uthat from the Tholians, the Tholians succeed in using it to destroy the sun that the Na'Khul's planet orbits. Being a bunch of Fantastic Racists, instead of getting help to move their people to another world to rebuild, the Na'Khul throw a hissy fit and vow revenge on the Federation. This leads to all the trouble in the Temporal Cold War. The big problem is this: because of the events that lead to the Na'Khul's world being killed off, it lead to the unification of the major galactic powers and, ultimately, the creation of the Temporal Accords. To allow the Na'Khul to fix their homeworld would mean undoing all of this. Obviously, the Na'Khul don't care - they'll take the Federation down with them while doing this.
  • Temporal Ambassador is an example contained in a single episode — as it turns out the Enterprise-C wasn't returned to 2344 in Yesterday's Enterprise. Instead, they were sent forward in time to 2409, where they got captured by the Tholians. Once the temporal shift occurs early in the episode, you play as your counterpart in the timeline, who quickly gets recruited into a plan to liberate the Enterprise-C and get it back to 2344 for real to fix the entire mess. It also features a cameo from Noye, who in the original timeline ends up with a Make Wrong What Once Went Right goal, but here seeks to set history right for similar but differently targeted reasons.
• While Walker Sloan of Spider-Man: Edge of Time is all for Make Wrong What Once Went Right with his plans to use time-travel to become the founder of Alchemax in the past, the 2099 CEO of Alchemax has this in mind. He plans not only to fix the problems in his own life, but to try and fix everything, calling the timeline a "first draft" and planning to make a "few rewrites". Why, you ask? He's Peter Parker, having lived to 2099 with anti-aging drugs. A century of A Lesson Learned Too Well of the Comes Great Responsibility moral finally took its toll on him.
• In Enter the Gungeon, the player characters are all questing for "The Gun that can Kill the Past", which can let them go back in time and deal with something from the past.
  • The Marine wants to return to the time when he ran away from the Eldritch Abomination that wiped out his squad so that he can kill it.
  • The Pilot wants to return to the time when he was forced to abandon his friend to a warship so that he can save him.
  • The Convict wants to return to the time when her old partner-in-crime betrayed her so that she could fight her way out rather than get captured.
  • The Hunter wants to return to the time when her nemesis from a thousand years ago put her in an inescapable trap so that she could break out of it with the use of Blanks and finish the fight.
  • The Cultist wants to return to the time when he was selected as the co-op character so that he can kill Player One and be the main character.
• This is the motivation for Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army - the Big Bad is a Raidou Kuzunoha from a post-Shin Megami Tensei II future. Using a forbidden skill, he's piggybacking on his ancestress' body and introducing future tech and assorted magic to ensure Japan becomes a world power and avert the horrid Crapsack World that is his native timeline. The problem is that the present people have no idea what he's fighting for - all they see is a necromancer gathering weapons of mass destruction that aren't even supposed to exist for decades, consorting with insane, murderous gods, and using the citizenry as fodder for the creation of demons...
• In Dishonored 2, one of the levels takes place inside the mansion of Aramis Stilton where a Time Crash happened. For this one stage, The Outsider gives you a portable time travel device that lets you travel between the past and present. If you knock out Stilton in the past and ensure that he never witnesses Delilah's rebirth, he does not go mad in the present and the timeline is largely changed for the better, including Meagan Foster somehow having both of her eyes and arms.
• In Soul Calibur VI, it is eventually established that the original timeline, last seen in Soul Calibur V became a Bad Future. Zasalamel and Cassandra ended up receiving information of what would happen in the future via their future selves (in case of Cassandra, her future self has been driven mad by the Astral Chaos) and they take it on themselves to ensure that this future would never come to pass; with Cassandra trying to make sure Sophitia wouldn't need to die and Zasalamel aborting his plan to eliminate his immortality much quicker than usual and continue his original self's plan to guide mankind.
• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is a spinoff of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, taking place before and during the Great Calamity. A Diminutive Guardian arrives from the future to help Zelda and her allies stop Calamity Ganon. When the day of the Great Disaster comes and all hope seemed lost, the Diminutive Guardian summons Sidon, Yunobo, Teba and Riju from the future to save the Divine Beast pilots from their fates. Ultimately, it was the Diminutive Guardian itself who incapacitates Ganon enough to give the heroes the winning edge and seal him away.
• Dragon Quest V: Subverted. When the Hero travels back in time to retrieve the Gold Orb, he tries to warn his father Pankraz about the events that will lead to his eventual death, but he still dies nonetheless.
• According to the AI in Portal Reloaded, Aperture Science falls in disrepair in the future due to a certain rogue test subject. Your mission is to stop them. Of course, you can refuse the mission and escape the facility.
• The Aeon path in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous grants the Commander this power as they gradually transform into a being of pure cosmic order. By traveling to important points in the past, events that took place in the original timeline can be corrected when you return to the present. In the True Aeon ending, the Commander is given the chance to prevent the Worldwound from ever being opened in the first place, but because the one who created the Worldwound would later be responsible for the Commander's presence in the story, doing so will also undo the player character's own existence for the sake of removing a century of demonic invasion from history.
• Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: "Friends To The End" mode has the revisiting of memories of events, but initially the two dumber protagonists forget that and think of it as time travel, and they think of how to fix things before the smarter one reminds them.
• In the Twisted Metal series, a lot of contestants' wishes end up being some variation of this trope. Unfortunately, as with the theme of the games, there is a Cruel Twist Ending every time:
  • In the first game, Captain Spears is a former military officer who lost his men when he made a wrong order and sent them to an ambush. In the official version, he is too caught up in the moment of actually being sent to the past that he ends up being shot while distracted. In the original live-action version, he at least gets the chance to call the order off but is killed before being able to reunite with his men.
  • In Black, Agent Stone wants to avert his fatal mistake of letting his rage get the better of him when attacking a terrorist group, killing a woman and child by mistake. He ends up keeping his cool, saving the family, but one of the terrorists ends up being Not Quite Dead and shoots Stone.
  • In the 2012 game, Daniel Grimm is a gang lord with a Freudian Excuse of watching his daredevil father die horribly when he was a kid. He asks to be sent back in the past to save him, but he's sent back as his Scary Black Man modern self and ends up crashing the car his father and younger self were in when he suddenly appears in the backseat. His past self ends up shooting him in revenge for killing his father in the wreck.

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