Stable Time Loop / Video Games

• Achron has time travel as a major gameplay mechanic so you can set these up yourself. The most common example is to create a base and have it produce an army, then have you opponent attack your base before it builds the army. You can then defend your base by sending back the units that it built in the future. In the final timeline your base survived because it was defended by units from the future, and your units exist because the base survived to produce them.
  • You can even get an even more immediate time loop by sending a mech back in time using a chronoporter. Then, you undo the original build order for the chronoporter and before time catches up, you let the mech build a chronoporter at aboard the same place. Because the chronoport (the action of sending a unit back in time) is bound to the unit and independent of the chronoporter, the mech will then travel back in time with the chronoporter it just built to build the chronoporter to be sent back in time. Amusingly, a Grekim unit can also become its own grandfather.
• In Bastion, activating the Bastion's Restoration Protocol rewinds time. But it doesn't allow Rucks, Zia, Zulf, or The Kid to stop the Calamity from happening again. So it happens again. Fridge Horror sets in when you realize how many loops it might go (or have been) through before something could change and lead to The Kid activating the Evacuation Protocol instead.
• Bayonetta:
  • In the first game, Bayonetta protects a little lost girl named Cereza. Cereza is actually Bayonetta's child self brought forward from the past. When she is returned to her own time, she remembered the person who saved her and wanted to become a badass just like her. This is the reason why Cereza, formerly a scaredy-cat, grew up to become a powerful, fearless witch. Also, Luka gives Cereza a strawberry lollipop at one point, which is the reason why Bayonetta loves them.
  • Bayonetta 2 continues this trend. Loptr needs both of the Eyes of the World in order to attain godhood. The only problem is that Balder, who had the Right Eye, died at the end of the first game. To get around this, he brings Balder from 500 years ago to the present day. After Loptr is defeated, his soul tries to escape, only for Balder to absorb it, return to his original time, become the villain that he was in Bayonetta, and set in motion the events of both games. This leads to his death, which leads to Loptr bringing his past self to the present, and so on.
  • In true Skynet fashion, Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon sees Singularity fail in his last-ditch attempt to eradicate Arch-Even Origin as a child thanks to Jeanne and the Left Eye of Darkness, effectively sealing him in a time loop where he's destined to fail in conquering the multiverse.
• Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has one when you reach the later stages of the Hero's Quest. There's a reason the process that adds one to your Season count is called "Looping" - every playthrough of the story is one of these. The events of Pierce the Heavens begin with you breaking the most recent loop.
• Bioshock Infinite changes up the usual formula by having the stable time loop be the resolution of the plot, not the instigation of it. Specifically, there is a pivotal choice in the game's backstory that creates two branching realities, one of which leads inevitably to the destruction of New York. A character from that reality collapses all the timelines back to their origin and eliminates one of the choices, thus terminating that branch at its root. Most importantly, the character sets things up so that each and every time the adverse choice is made, they travel back in time to eliminate it. Thus, the universe proceeds with the "good" outcome of the choice as if it had been that way from the beginning.
• BlazBlue:
  • The attack of The Black Beast in 2100 A.D. nearly destroyed the world until Nox Nyctores weaponry was developed to fight it. Then in 2199 A.D. One of these Nox, Murakumo fuses with Ragna The Bloodedge, creating The Black Beast, which is pulled back in time to 2100 A.D. The other half of the Black Beast is equally paradoxical: The Black Beast's existence requires the fusion of Ragna and Nu's Azure Grimoires. Ragna's Azure came from the remains of the Black Beast.
  • In the prequel novel Phase 0 it's revealed that the unsung historical hero Bloodedge is actually Ragna sent back to the past with amnesia. Present-day Ragna only calls himself "Ragna the Bloodedge" to honor the name of that hero, whose sword and coat were given to him by Jubei. Which makes the mere existence of the sword and coat an anomaly since it's not clear how either of them were made, they just keep getting sent back in time with Ragna and taking The Slow Path back to the present where they are given to Ragna, over and over again. And speaking of Jubei, that's not even his real name, it's actually Mitsuyoshi, but Bloodedge could never get his name right and kept calling him "Jubei" for some reason. Then, after Bloodedge's death, Jubei started going by that name as way to honor his friend's memory, and then eventually met Ragna, who only knew him by that name...
  • Extend features yet another one, but whereas the time paradox from Phase 0 had some benefit to Yuuki Terumi when it finally broke, this one was explicitly created trying to prevent it from manifesting, and its existence is, to him, purely detrimental. When Terumi tried to assassinate Jin Kisaragi in Kagutsuchi in another world, Makoto Nanaya interfered in the hit and grilled him for his plans regarding Jin, Tsubaki, and Noel — the latter of which does not exist in this world. In his and Relius' attempt to eliminate her, she winds up asking Kokonoe and, later, Tsubaki about the aforementioned nonexistent Noel, which ultimately fucks everything up in that world. In subsequent worlds, Terumi tries to keep her from making things worse for him by sending her to Ibukido, but it's only when the first loop breaks that she arrives... and investigates the Ibukido cauldron. No points for guessing what she does next.
• In Bookworm Adventures Volume 2, EviLex doesn't exist at all, but in reality is a time travelling Lex. It was orchestrated by Bigger Brother to keep Lex busy and to get Lex to give him the Magic Pen.
• In Breath of Fire I, Nina is accidentally catapulted back in time. Before this occurs, Ryu and the others can meet a winged girl with amnesia who looks strikingly like an older version of Nina... After she vanishes, they can jog her memory and re-recruit her.
• The protagonists of Bullet Girls Phantasia attempt to travel back in time, to when the Big Bad the Jet Black Dragon was weaker, in order to prevent it from taking over Midgard in the present. Not only do they fail to do this, they accidentally give its Devyant hordes modern weaponry, which is what gave it the edge over the natives in the first place.
• Chrono Trigger:
  • The entire plot is concerned with a bunch of stable and unstable time loops. One that carefully averts the paradox element is when Crono dies, being completely vaporized by Lavos. Later his friends save him by going back to the moment in time just before he dies to replace him with a lifeless clone. This is not a paradox because they don't alter what anyone in the past witnessed and so don't inadvertently cancel their own actions, but most of the other time loops are not resolved so immaculately. Needless to say, this causes problems.
  • Some of the multiple endings also invert it. The Reptites died out and humanity became the dominant species in the original timeline because Crono and his friends helped Ayla defeat them on their quest to stop Lavos. Defeating Lavos prior to doing this means they never traveled back and helped storm the Reptite's Lair, the Reptites win the war, and in the modern day everyone is now Lizard Folk with humans being a subservient Slave Race. Every early defeat of Lavos, all possible via New Game Plus, results in such outcomes.
• In City of Heroes, the Menders of Ouroboros are a time-travelling group dedicated to keeping the timestream straight. The first one you meet accidentally creates a stable time loop when he rambles on about how you and he solved a problem in a mission you haven't undertaken yet.
• Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time:
  • Cortex goes back into the past to stop Crash from existing, but his attempt only inspires his past self to continue, and Crash accidentally causes the malfunction to the Vortex that ensures he wouldn't be under Cortex's thrall.
  • Dingodile seeing his diner become a franchise in the Snaxx Dimension inspires him to start a franchise in the main dimension. The logic of this actively confuses Dingodile. In the 100% ending, however, it's revealed that Dingodile's aspirations is cut short due to the Dingo's Diner franchise closing over health code violations, possibly breaking the loop if the Snaxx Dimension is truly Crash and Co.'s future.
• Chzo Mythos: The Man in Red's reason for existing is to ensure reality maintains a stable time loop.
• Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal reveals that one of these is in existence. An indescribably powerful nexus of knowledge, including total mastery of space-time, known as the Arc Eternal is revealed as the ultimate purpose of the Creeper, as one method of revealing the Arc is the collection of massive amounts of space-time data, which the Creeper does by spreading infinitely. The main character of Arc Eternal, at least in the good ending, claims the Arc and then uses its powers to set in motion the events leading to his own victory.
• In DoDonPachi: Dai Fukkatsu, EXY, at the end of DoDonPachi dai ou jou, tries to go back in time to prevent the Blissful Death Wars—that is, the events of DOJ, and destroy the cause of the wars. Not only does she fail, but in doing this, she also causes the Blissful Death Wars in the first place! If there's any saving grace in all this (due to the unclear meaning of the ending monologue), it's that your fighting simply prevented the wars from degrading into something even worse.
• Dot's Home:
  • Dot unwittingly time travels to the past, when her Grandma Mavis and Grandpa Karl were buying what would become her home. Dot calls out to Mavis, but she doesn't recognize her since she hadn't been born at the time, so to hide that she's her future granddaughter, Dot introduces herself as Dorothea, who was given her name by "[her] grandma". Mavis thinks it's a nice name, implying that Dot time traveling gave her the idea to name her future granddaughter that.
  • When Hank and Amos describe their plan to make their own radio show to Dot, she tells them that they invented the "podcast", to Amos' confusion. They then get the idea to call it that in 1992 if Hank decides to stay in his apartment.
  • All of the advice Dot gives to her relatives in the past end up becoming the reason Grandma Mavis is struggling with having to sell the house to pay the bills. When Dot returns to the present, Mavis explains to her the struggles the family went through to give her a better life, and Dot's advice to them ultimately influenced their decisions.
• In Dragon Quest V: The Hero as a kid meets up a young man in Whealbrook who is interested in seeing the Gold Orb you're carrying. Said orb was later destroyed by Ladja before the first Time Skip. You learn that the Gold Orb is needed to raise the Zenithian Castle to the skies from underwater. You then visit the Faerie Palace, travel back in time using a picture, find your younger self, and switch the decoy orb with the Gold Orb. The orb Ladja destroyed was a fake, and the young man early in Whealbrook was your older self. It's also possible to try and warn your father Pankraz about the events that will lead to his eventual death, and although he agrees to "take it to heart" he still dies nonetheless.
• Magic in Drakengard and Nier results from a cross-universal bootstrap paradox. Caim, Angelus, and the Queenbeast end up sent to our world in the modern day and introducing magic to it, setting up the events of the Nier series. Later, during the war with the aliens, a city engaged in bioweapon research and production ends up sent to the distant past of the Drakengard world, at a point in the history of Medieval Europe where its timeline has not diverged from our own, introducing magic and monsters to that world, making it so that eventually Caim, Angelus, and the Queenbeast can introduce it to our world — where, depending on your perspective, it came from in the first place.
• Escape from Monkey Island:
  • There is a puzzle in which you must navigate Guybrush Threepwood through a swamp with time-bending properties. About half way through, Guybrush meets his future self on the other side of a fence. The two of you have a conversation which ends in your future self giving you a few (apparently useful) items and going on his way. Later, when you're on the other side of the fence, you must recreate the conversation you had with your future self with your past self, give him the items your future self gave you, then go on your way. If you get it wrong, you cause a time paradox and have to start over. This means that those objects that Guybrush keeps giving to his past self in each iteration have always existed.
  • Occasionally, you may be given a gun by your future self. You can use the gun to shoot your future self and carry on as normal. When you meet your past self, you yourself will eventually be shot.
• Escape From St. Mary's: Your explorations from the school reveal various cases of vandalism. When you go to the past, you turn out to be responsible for every one of them.
• Fallout has the Player Character trying to find water for Vault 13 after its water chip is broken. It ends with the PC staying in the post-apocalyptic Earth and heading off to start a new life. Fallout 2 has a random encounter in which the player, now controlling a descendant of the character in the first game, travels back in time to just before the first game and ends up in Vault 13. The only way to return to your own time involves breaking the Vault's water chip...
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy, the story begins when the Warriors of Light are sent to the nearby Temple of Chaos to kill the renegade knight Garland. As Garland is dying, the four Elemental Fiends of the game magically send him two thousand years into the past, when he becomes the demon Chaos, and sends the four Fiends to the still-the-past future to seize control of the four Elemental Crystals. The Fiends take roughly four hundred years to obtain all the Crystals and use them to wreck the world until the present day, when the Warriors of Light fight Garland, slay the Fiends, and travel to the past to confront Chaos and die fighting him. The game ends when the Light Warriors kill Chaos and end the stable time loop, which in turn renders their exploits Ret-Gone.
  • This is essential to the plot of Final Fantasy VIII. Because the main party kills Ultimecia in a partially time-compressed realm, she is able to give her powers to Edea, thirteen years in the game's past, before she perishes. This is what makes Edea the perfect choice to possess for Ultimecia's plans, and causes the main conflict in the present that leads to the need to destroy Ultimecia. Additionally, after Edea inherits Ultimecia's powers in the past, the present-day Squall explains the concept of SeeD to her, thus inspiring the creation of the mercenary organization he grew up in and setting up his own role in the events of the game. The Stable Time Loop is further illustrated by the futile efforts at one of the cast members to Set Right What Once Went Wrong; she ultimately concludes that the past cannot be changed. That said, when time uncompresses after Ultimecia's death, Squall is returned to the "present" and he and everyone else in the main cast (including Edea) get to go on living the rest of their lives otherwise unaffected by the loop.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2:
    • Dajh names the chocobo chick "Chocolina" after the quirky merchant of the same name. Where did she get her name from? Dajh, because she is the chick. She just happens to exist everywhere and at every moment in time, because she asked Etro for the ability to help Serah and Noel anywhere (and anywhen) during their journey.
    • The Proto-Fal'Cie Adam. The artificial Fal'Cie was reprogrammed by someone from the future to become malevolent, murdering it's creators and ruling over humanity. Who reprogrammed it? It's future self who was in turn also reprogrammed by it's future self. Eventually the whole event is erased from existence anyway.
  • In Final Fantasy Legend III the party is warned by their Elder that people in the Past are looking for the Talon Units. In said Past they meet the said Elder and ask where they can find Talon Units. Past Elder also is thinking about naming a town and asks for a name.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time: A thousand years before the game starts, a shockwave from the future causes all the crystals to vanish from the world. Larkeicus, the villain of the story, gained immortality from these crystals and also used them to develop crystal-powered technology that he built a civilization upon, which naturally fell apart when the crystals vanished. A thousand years later, Larkeicus enacts a plot to build a tower as part of his scheme to prevent the shockwave that caused the crystals to vanish. Turns out the tower he built was the cause of the shockwave in the first place.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The Alexander primal is an ontological paradox Mind Screw. The goblins summoned it using a robot cat (created by Alexander) and a book an NPC in our time wrote about it, these are sent back in time during one of the boss fights. A failed summoning in the past was the player characters travelling back in time (to drop off the book and the cat). The goblins observed this failed summoning and used it, along with the book and the cat, to summon Alexander. When it's defeated, the character that created the object that summoned Alexander to begin with is sent back in time centuries along with her fiancee, and they become the founders of their tribe (and their own ancestors). The instructions to create the object that summoned Alexander is sent back with them.
    • Another occurs in Endwalker that ends up shaping the entire setting. Seeking answers to the cause of the Final Days, the Warrior of Light ends up being led by Hydaelyn into time traveling thousands of years into the past, before the world was sundered by Hydaelyn. While they initially intended to just be an unseen observer, co-incidence leads to them having much more direct involvement, to the point that they end up telling their story to Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, Hermes and Venat, all people who would interact with the Warrior of Light in the future as enemies and allies in various forms. All five of them would end up being witness to the events that would eventually lead to the final days, but Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus and Hermes all end up getting their memories wiped of the events. However, Venat still remembers everything, which influences her actions so that she would eventually become Hydaelyn, sunder the world, and set into motion events so that the Warrior of Light would become her champion and eventually be lead to the past. In this case a different and far more limited method of time-travel is used. It's strongly implied that the potential Bootstrap Paradox is averted in this case; not only is Venat not particularly shocked at her role, suggesting she would have thought of it on her own, but if she wouldn't have it would cause at least one Plot Hole back in Shadowbringers: in the Crystal Exarch's Bad Future, the Warrior of Light dying from Black Rose didn't immediately cause a Reality-Breaking Paradox, so a version of events must exist where you never go back but the Sundering still happens.
• Futurama: The Game has the entire plot, which is a giant Shoot the Shaggy Dog story about trying to prevent Mom from conquering the world by buying Planet Express, and dying while failing to do anything other than set up a seemingly random joke at the start.
• Implied and eventually confirmed in God of War (PS4) and God of War Ragnarök to be the case for the existence of the World Serpent, Jörmungandr in Midgard at least a hundred years before he was fated to be. According to Mimir, when the Serpent clashes with Thor at the climactic battle of Ragnarök, it results in Yggdrasil itself splintering and sending Jormie into a time before his own birth. Ragnarök eventually confirms this to be the case, though the actual event of the Serpent's temporal slip is largely a Meaningful Background Event. When he arrives in the past, he grows to his colossal size and acts as a source of help to the son of Kratos, Atreus who is also known as Loki, even protecting him during another important battle. This allows Atreus to be present during Jörmungandr's "birth" when he and Angrböda place a Giant's soul into a soulless serpent body, gradually causing it to increase in size. The newly "born" Jörmungandr is then brought to Asgard during Ragnarök and clashes with Thor, resulting in Yggdrasil itself splintering and him being sent into the past where he meets Atreus, and so on.
• In Glory of Heracles III, Cronos creates a Stable Time Loop to punish the main character for the sins of his past self, Lord Baor. Having been turned into a giant green monster by Hades, Cronos sends the Protagonist back in time to Mount Atlas, where his past self and his party slew his monstrous self from the future. The Protagonist breaks the Stable Time Loop by not fighting his past self's party.
• The end of the second stage and the beginning of the eighth stage of Gradius V are both set in the same timeframe and same battleship, with the past and present versions of the Vic Viper running through segments of the stage alongside each other. The game records the actions of your 'past' version to replay in the second run-through.
• The Henry Stickmin Series ultimately ends with the reveal of this: the Omega Ending of Completing the Mission shows the Center for Chaos Containment sending back in time the box containing whatever Henry used to escape the penitentiary in Escaping the Prison, thereby setting the whole series into motion.
• Towards the end of Heroine's Quest, you encounter a time-portal in the Big Bad's castle, with your future self emerging. She hands you a stone, says something, and hurries off. Later, you emerge from the same portal and encounter your past self - if you do not do exactly the same as your future self dictated, you cause a temporal paradox that writes you out of existence. What's more, some of the things you do on the other side of the time-portal include planting a tree and gem that you used earlier in the game in the past, so they will be there for you to use them.
• The Jak and Daxter series is one big stable time loop, with the first two games being both prequels and sequels to each other. At the end of the first game, Jak discovers a huge portal through time. When activated at the start of the second game it unleashes the Metal Head race into the world, and Jak and Daxter are immediately sent to the distant future. There Jak discovers that he was actually born in the future, and helps his younger self go back into the past to be raised safe from harm so that he can become his old self and defeat the Metal Head leader. The vehicle they use to ride through the huge portal was created by Keira in the future based on the specifications of the vehicle she found in the past — which is the vehicle from the future.
• Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] has one in the form of a Start of Darkness. Xehanort's heartless, the Big Bad of the first game, goes back in time and brings his teenaged self to the future to witness and aid his older selves' various evil plots. When he returns to his own time period, his conscious mind will not remember what he learned, but the knowledge will be embedded in his heart, driving him to take the actions that will lead him to that future.
• Legacy of Kain: Kain was reborn with vampiric unlife due to the Heart of Darkness being implanted in his chest. The Heart was originally within the chest of Janos Audron, last of the angelic, non-human Ancient Vampire race. A human Vampire hunter of the ancient order of the Saraphan killed Janos and ripped his heart out. The hunter was none other than Raziel in his original human life. Raziel then slays him, slaying himself and becoming the original cause of his mortal death in the first place, but around two thousand years removed in time. The unseen, unstable original timeline then has Raziel absorbed against his will into the Soul Reaver blade. The timeline then stabilizes somewhat for a while, when after a genocide of the human Vampires Kain is resurrected from death using the preserved heart of Janos, the infamous Heart of Darkness. A whole slew of time paradoxes then ensue, resulting in Kain refusing to sacrifice himself and thereby damning the world and electing to rule over it's corpse as a god-king. After a possible infinity of reiterations of this timeline, a random version of Kain then peers into the timestreams, becoming fully aware of not only the time paradox, but also of the Elder God's existence, the fact that it has been a parasite upon the world and all the souls living upon it, and the final truth that had he sacrificed himself in the first game, he would not have saved the world, but merely slowed down its inevitable decay. Using this knowledge, he makes a show of betraying Raziel, who had been resurrected as a vampire lieutenant centuries or even millennia after his immortal future wraith self slew his own past self in the first place. Kain then threw the crippled Raziel into the abyss, mimicking the events of possible infinite past versions, but with a new agenda. It was the only way to free Raziel from the Wheel of Fate and thus grant him TRUE free will. A whole series of time-traveling events then take place across many eras of Nosgoth's history, often coexisting with Kain's past actions, until the aforementioned retroactive suicide by Raziel takes place. Kain then saves Raziel from his fate within the sword. This sets a whole new course of events in action, and it is so unstable at first that reality itself attempts to reject its very existence, complete with creepy and psychedelic effects as existence itself shudders in the wake of the paradoxes. Eventually Raziel willingly chooses to enter the Soul Reaver blade, which results in enlightening Kain to the ultimate truth of all things and finally stabilizing history. The series ends on an agonizing cliffhanger as Kain watches his young self refusing the original sacrifice in the first game, causing all this to happen in the first place. It goes much deeper too, and is incredibly complex.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
    • Link meets a man in the future who is angry that someone in the past used the Song of Storms to wreck his windmill. This teaches Link the Song of Storms, and he goes back in time to use it and wreck said windmill. This drains the well that the Lens of Truth is hidden in, which Link needs to enter the Shadow Temple and defeat Bongo Bongo. However, that well is also Bongo Bongo's prison, and Link draining it in the past is what weakens the seal enough for Bongo Bongo to break free and attack Kakariko Village in the future.
    • Subverted by the ending of Ocarina of Time. The series' official chronology◊ reveals the Time Loop that would have resulted here is so incredibly unstable that the timeline split instead into three separate ones (Fallen, Child, and Adult) with them leading into respectively A Link to the Past, Majora's Mask, and The Wind Waker.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages
    • Defeating the Great Moblin in the present causes the Gorons of Rolling Ridge to give you a Bomb Flower as a reward. You then give said Bomb Flower to the Gorons in the past, who use it to destroy the rocks that collapsed on the Goron Elder while also promising to use its seeds to grow the patch of bomb flowers that the Great Moblin had taken control of in the present.
    • A Goron in the present gives you a vase from his ancestor. You give it to said ancestor in the past so he'll have something to pass down as an heirloom. This means the vase came from nowhere, and is infinitely old.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
    • The plan to completely defeat Ganondorf involves Rauru sealing Ganondorf under Hyrule Castle for over 10,000 years until Link and Zelda come across his tomb. This results in Zelda being launched into the past, which starts the series of events that result in Ganondorf's sealing, his eventual return, and Link defeating him for good.
    • Zelda and the Master Sword also play into one. Without knowing what he's done, Link sends the destroyed Master Sword back in time after entering the Zonai Temple of Time, whereupon, it (unbeknownst to the player) immediately reappears due to it being lodged in the head of the Light Dragon who emerges in the clouds. The sword went through a period of long linear time to return to Link's present and heal. The dragon itself is also an example—Zelda was sent back as far as the Master Sword, and she transforms herself into the Light Dragon to wait the eons it takes to heal the Master Sword and return it to Link in his present.
• Little Nightmares II seems to end this way: after Mono is suddenly betrayed by Six, he ends up isolated in a small room for several years, becoming the game's Big Bad, the Thin Man, who will then presumably fight the next Mono.
• Mirai Imouto: Misaki travels from the future to the present, and tries to find a way to prevent her brother, Hiseo, from dying due to his heart condition. One of the reasons she wants to prevent his death so much is because in her past (the story's present), her brother spent most of his time before his death with some random girl (future-Misaki), and present-Misaki grew up into future-Misaki remembering that she wasn't able to spend much time with Hiseo before he died.
• In Mortal Kombat 1, one of Geras' Fatalities has him create a time loop. He opens a portal to the future, and tears the head off his opponent's future self, which he then uses to bludgeon his present opponent. The Fatality then ends with a portal appearing, through which past Geras reaches to tear the opponent's head off.
• In the original flash version of No Time to Explain, you are watching TV when yourself from the future, with armor and a laser gun, bursts through your wall. He is dragged away by a giant lobster, and drops his laser gun. You use it to save him. When you defeat the giant lobster (and included alien mothership), yourself from the future gives you his armor, and tells you to go into the time warp and warn yourself from the past. You do. And are dragged away by a giant lobster. Guess who tries to save you...?
  • The full release (non-flash) version of the game is even weirder. You still go back in time to try to warn yourself from the past, but remember what happened to future you, combat roll behind your past self, and kick him into the claws of the crab monster. There's a momentary pause to see if this does anything to the timeline, but you seem to be fine, and so the game begins.
• Ōkami:
  • The protagonist's past self, Shiranui, travels to the future. She saves Amaterasu and friends from a spell that holds them motionless and Ammy was too weak to break, but at the cost of a mortal wound. She returns to the past, dies, and is sealed. When she's awakened as Amaterasu, her powers are considerably weakened, which is why she needed to be saved in the first place.
  • In Issun's retelling of the legend of Nagi, Nagi dressed himself up as a maiden before leaving to slay Orochi. In the actual events, Amaterasu and Issun have to dress up the unconscious Nagi after accidentally knocking him out.
• Ōkamiden: Chibiterasu meets a mermaid early in the game and she mentions that she knows Chibi from somewhere, but he sure doesn't. Later in the game, you travel back in time and Chibi runs into the mermaid again, but this time he knows her and she doesn't know him. They separate and she doesn't interact with Chibi until the time they met before/would meet next.
• The indie game Original War is all about this, with the Americans and Russians sending soldiers into the distant past to fight over the game's Phlebotinum. Whoever wins the war keeps the Phlebotinum, but near the end of the Cold War the losers send a strike force back in time to steal it...
• Phantasy Star Online 2 provides several time loops, thanks to a time-travel-heavy story:
  • At the end of Episode 1, the Player Character defeats the rampaging dragon/darker hybrid Hadred. Part of Hadred's body tissue is sent back in time, where it is found and studied by ARKS, which results in the dewman race. The time loop here, though, only really applies if you started the game as a dewman.
  • The last chapter of Episode 2 features the player going back in time ten years to learn the true identity of the amnesiac Matoi, and how she ended up where she was at the start of the game. What happened was Persona, a version of the PC from an alternate Bad Future, went back in time to Mercy Kill Matoi before she could succumb to her corrupted photons. The only reason Persona can get close is because Matoi mistakes them for you, wherein she lowers her guard and Persona stabs her. Matoi opts to have her staff, Clarisa, purify her, at the cost of her memories. You're forced to flee, but Matoi gets caught in your Timey Wimey Field, which drops her off where she was at the start of the game. If you didn't go back in time, none of these things would have happened.
    • During the same time travel, you get to meet a young Zeno, who watches as you wipe out enemies in Naberius with ease, and proceeds to follow you around asking for lectures on how to be strong like you, which you eventually oblige. Fast forward to the beginning of Episode 1, where Zeno teaches you what he learned from his mysterious unnamed teacher.
  • By the end of Episode 3, a stable time loop is the current ad-hoc solution to a seal for the Profound Darkness. Persona sacrificed themself to become the new avatar for the Profound Darkness. The ARKS show up and engage it, ending with a duel with the possessed Persona. After knocking them about a bit, Persona manages to regain some control of the Profound Darkness, sending it back in time to the point at which is emerged.
  • The Grand Finale of the main storyline in episode 6 reveals that the entire game's story has been a time loop started by the player character themselves. With the Primordial Darkness bearing down on them after defeating Shiva and no possible way or hope to defeat or resist its possession, the player is forced to travel back to the beginning of time and become the original Akashic Records, which would then be turned into the player character by Xion and begin the story all over again. Its heavily implied that this loop has been repeating for a long time, and only by the player going above and beyond in their strength and resolve (indicated in game by attaining an S rank in the final battle against Shiva) is the loop finally broken and the Primordial Darkness destroyed for good.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus:
    • A bootstrap paradox is created with the Porygon evolutionary line. Porygon's species is an Artificial Intelligence created in Kanto 20 years prior to the events of Pokémon Red and Blue, however, like the player Porygon appears in Meiji-era Sinnoh through distortions in spacetime and its line is registered to the first Pokédex.
    • Another occurs in the postgame when the other characters wonder aloud what the future holds, prompting the Player Character to explain the Pokémon League and Contests to them.
    • Speaking of the postgame, it turns out Volo had Giratina tear open the Space-Time Rift from the main game, and now they plan to destroy the universe and create a new one, prompting Arceus to send the Player Character back in time to stop him with their impressive Pokémon-catching and -battling skills by Hisuian standards.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:
    • After completing the main story of The Indigo Disk, the player can travel to the Crystal Pool with Terapagos to activate an event bringing Sada/Turo from the past to the present. The player then gives them Briar's book, giving them the information they need to complete the time machine and the AI in addition to Koraidon/Miraidon's name, inciting the events that take place before the game.
• In Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, the Prince continuously encounters a strange creature through his travels. As it turns out, the strange creature is actually the Prince himself, transformed into "The Sand Wraith" after he found the mythical mask that could be used to change his fate, he then had to go back in time and meet his past self in all those locations. The kicker? The last time the two meet, instead of The Sand Wraith dying, which happened the first time you saw it, this time you kill your past self and resume the story in the same part as your past self, but you're really your future self. Get it?
  • The main plot uses this as well. The Prince goes back in time to kill the Empress before she can create the Sands of Time, not realizing that killing her is what creates the Sands in the first place. Thus, the Sands exist because the Prince went back in time, but the Prince went back in time BECAUSE of the Sands, which would never have existed if he hadn't gone back in time, which is how the Sands were created, and so on and so on. This leaves the player wondering which event caused which?
• Randal's Monday: The ring is causing this by rewriting events in past Mondays into the current one, dealing with inconsistencies as they come up.
• In Robopon, Cody is the one that saves Majiko and the world from Dr. Zero, Sr., in the second game, about twenty years before the events of the first. The younger versions of Zero Sr.'s children, Zero and Zeke, are present to see their father (and the older Zero Jr.) defeated. Dr. Zero Jr., then became an evil scientist to live up to his family name, which in turn is responsible for bringing him into conflict with Cody in the first game. When the end of the second game comes along, Cody fights and defeats Dr. Zero Jr., followed by Dr. Zero Sr. shortly afterwards, with the young Zero and Zeke present.
• R-Type Final has a stable time loop which can be encountered in one of the three endings. Remember the Bydo R-Series fighter you meet at the beginning of Stage 1? It turns out to be yourself. In the Final Stage B, you re-enter Stage 1, only as a Bydo. And you have to mop down your former allies and eventually fight against your first ship, R-9A Arrow Head.
• In RuneScape, this is part of how the quest "Recipe For Disaster" works. Specifically, in the Evil Dave subquest, when you have to make various soups, then have Dave taste-test them, even though to his perspective, the events of the quest happened earlier. When you step into the time-field to give Dave his soup, the player tells Dave specifically to remember how it tastes.
• Sam and Max Season 2 has the player create at least two stable time loops. The first involves taking a boxing glove from a character's present self and giving it to his past self — one would initially assume that the boxing glove is the same one from Season 1, but it can't be, since it turns out to be on an infinite loop. The other time loop involves traveling into the near future — so near as to be the next episode — and picking up an object, which causes the player character to be interrupted by someone calling from outside the window, asking for that object. The player character automatically tosses him the object, and receives another in return. In the next episode, the player character becomes the person outside the window, and must do what he remembers he did — an action that makes no sense without prior knowledge, even to the game's player.
  • Then, in Season 3, Sam and Max have to use the astral projector from the Devil's Toybox to alter the actions of their ancestors Sameth and Maximus, to get the Devil's Toybox from Egypt and into the basement where they found it. The only way Sameth and Maximus did it in the first place was with information they wouldn't know at the time; not getting the box would probably destroy the universe.
    • There are other things. How do you know that the vampire elf needs to bite Jurgen the Vampire Hunter in the past? Because you've met Jurgen before in the present, as a vampire.
• Issue #6 of The Secret World features players being asked to use a rare piece of Third Age technology known as a Time Tomb to venture into the past and find a means of safely containing the artifact the Atenists have stolen; however, the Time Tomb needs a guide to make sure it stops at the right point in history, so Säid the Mummy provides you with a golden scarab amulet to help direct the machine - a keepsake that he doesn't remember acquiring, but presumes was very dear to his heart at one point. When you finish your mission and return to the Time Tomb, you're unexpectedly confronted by Säid's younger self, who allows you back into the machine - but not before pickpocketing the scarab from you!
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant ends with the character Karin Koenig being sent back in time some 25 years as a result of her journeys with the main character, Yuri Hyuga. There, the first person she meets is Yuri's father, and it's strongly implied that she goes on to become Yuri's mother.
  • And this raises the question of where Anne's Cross came from.
  • In the good ending, Yuri kills himself, letting himself be impaled on a rock spire, to avoid having his soul destroyed by the Mistletoe's curse. With his last thought, he sends himself back to the beginning of the first game. As he waits for the train, there are hints that this time he will save Alice from what killed her the first time. Yuri seems aware of the stable time loop ("Here comes that train again."), which raises questions of its own.
• Shadow of Destiny: At one point early in the story, Eike watches a performer doing tricks in town. Later, Eike would have to travel to the past to obtain an item from his past-self while wearing the performer outfit.
• Occasionally present in Shin Megami Tensei games. In Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, the EX Mission The Madness of Yggdrasil has you first meet a trio of Disir in the second dungeon, who task you with defeating the rampaging Yggdrasil and recovering the time powers it stole from them. However, the tree is too powerful and immediately knocks you out, allowing a mysterious figure to butt in. This person defeats Yggdrasil and allows you to escape. In the fifth dungeon, you find a dormant Yggdrasil and the grand time demon Norn, who identifies itself as the combined form of the three Disir you saved earlier, and reminds you you still have to save yourself back in time by returning in time to the first battle by preventing Yggdrasil from killing your past self. Norn is strong enough to cancel the demon's stolen powers, sending it into an unbreakable loop in which he never wins.
  • This way is how the heavily-regulated time travel is supposed to work with the Time Tourists in Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, in that the Akarana Corridor can only be used as a stable time machine if and only if the result of the travel does not affect the possibility of the traveler themselves existing, otherwise they get RetGoned out of existence. To avoid this, the travelers are reduced to a spirit, allowing them to view history without the possibility of interference. However, the villain finds a loophole, namely, affixing his soul to his ancestress, preventing him from being dragged back to a future that no longer exists. Once you break the link, history has diverged far too much to allow for his existence, and he is dragged into the eternal vastness of the space between timelines.
• Singularity: Played with. All those tracks that tell you where to go next? You laid them. Your ultimate goal ends up being breaking yourself from the infernal, stable time loop for good.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Princess Elise has the blue Chaos Emerald as a lucky charm. She loses it and it's found by Silver. Silver goes back in time and gives it to her. The problem? It doesn't exist before Elise gets it, or after Silver goes back in time, and it's never created or destroyed. Also, it means either the Earth should have been destroyed by the other Final Bosses, or it was actually an extra Chaos Emerald all along, and the real seventh Emerald never appeared in the game. The events of the entire game were, however, erased from existence in the end.
  • Sonic Generations implies a slightly more subtle one depending on how far you read into the aftereffects of the game's time travel plot. At the very least, Classic Sonic learns the Homing Attack by watching his future self perform it, which explains its appearance in Sonic the Hedgehog 4. Additionally, the 3DS version has Classic Sonic picking up the Sonic Boost from Modern Sonic. Sonic Forces (and Sonic Mania by extension), however, instead establishes Classic Sonic as the Sonic of another dimension as opposed to simply being Sonic's past self, possibly as a result of Generations, and Mania is likewise treated as the direct sequel to Sonic 3 & Knuckles instead of Sonic 4 (at least where Classic Sonic is concerned).
• The Infocom Adventure Game Sorcerer features one. At one point, your future self appears and gives you the combination to a locked door, and demands your spell book. After you've unlocked the door, you have to travel back in time and give the combination to your past self, and get the spell book from him. (You can't carry anything with you when you go back in time.) The time travel spell is named "golmac" as a Shout-Out to the "gold machine", the time machine in Zork III. It's fun to do silly things like screaming or singing when your future self appears, then watch how they're described when it's your past self doing them.
  • Its sequel, Spellbreaker, features a two-in-one: you have to establish two Stable Time Loops in two different locations (with time limits on each), or else be wrung from existence by the ensuing paradox should you try to leave the hourglass. Early on in the game, you find a magic zipper that contains the GIRGOL spell and functions as your Bag of Holding; going back to that location in the past, you find a sack in its place along with the same GIRGOL spell, and have to copy the spell onto a blank scroll and swap the two (and all the contents thereof) before the rising water kills you. Elsewhere, there's a disused cell containing a moldy spellbook, entirely illegible save for one useful spell; when you return there in the past, you have to put your spellbook where you found the moldy one in the future (memorizing as many spells from it as you can first!) and leave the room precisely as it was (or will be) before the guards arrive.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: During an early cutscene during a New Game Plus, possession of a certain item sends Gig and the main character 250 years back in time, to shortly after Lord Median killed the Master of Death, Vigilance (the previous incarnation of Gig). The pair of you destroy Median's armies and cause the Master of Life, Virtuous, to murder Median, causing the fall of Median's empire that is a part of your own timeline's backstory (and giving Virtuous the idea for fusing the main character and Gig 250 years in the future). When the main character later dies, his or her soul, as well as Gig's, is sent to Drazil, who causes the original creation of Gig from the newly deceased Vigilance. Drazil then turns the two of you into two of the world eaters that are subsequently sent back to Haephnes with the newly minted Gig to cause mass destruction — which are destroyed by the main character and Gig 250 years later during the game's main storyline. Thus, the alternate timeline version of you two not only set in motion the events of the main story and are inspirations for your own creation, but also become two of your own worst enemies, and get killed by yourselves. Whew.
  • Not only bizarre, but also Squick of possibly Selfcest overlapping with Ho Yay. In one of the endings where you play as the heroine, you travel the world together with [[spoiler: one of the aforementioned World Eaters, romance subtext included. It's still vague whose soul becomes whom (fans generally assume Gig became Raksha while Revya became Thuris, but another theory is that Drazil waited the two souls to fuse together before splitting them apart. So you get either you romancing a half of your reincarnated alternate-dimension self or you romancing your reincarnated alternate-dimension partner, but you can call him Gig. But, hey, at least it proves that even Gig can love!
• The remake of Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter adds a brief scene after your character steals a spaceship, showing some sort of pod materializing where the ship was a few seconds ago. This pod is actually a Time Machine that your character uses in Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, and one of the places he uses it to go to is the first game (where a bunch of monochromatic bikers dis him for being pretentious with his 256 colors). Also, at the start of Space Quest IV, a young man who introduces himself as your son from Space Quest XII saves your life. In Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, you meet the woman who matches the picture of his mother he shows you at the end of Space Quest IV. If you get her killed, you will be retroactively erased from existence, as she died before being able to give birth to your son and thus he would have never existed to save your life in the previous game.
• In Spellforce Rohen is both the Big Bad and Big Good of the game thanks to a time paradox. As a young man, he travels back in time and attempts to recreate The Convocation, a spell that could grant its caster unlimited power, but nearly destroyed the world the last time it was cast. As he grows older, he has a Heel–Face Turn and tries to stop his younger self from casting the Convocation. In that time he becomes embroiled in the plot to stop his younger self's schemes, setting in motion the events which lead to his own murder and the success of his younger self's time travel scheme.
• Star Trek Online:
  • Episode "Klingon War", missions "City on the Edge of Never" and "Past Imperfect". This is Cryptic's explanation for the part of the prophecy of the Kuvah'magh that says "You will follow in my footsteps before I have made them." Ambassador B'Vat kidnaps Miral Paris and takes her back in time so that he can use her blended human/Klingon DNA to cure the Augment virus afflicting the Klingons and get them their ridges back. This leads to the Klingons becoming War Hawks again, leading to the current war, which leads to B'Vat's shenanigans.
  • The Foundry mission "Relics" has you rescue a Human Popsicle, teach him the sun-centric model of the universe, and send him back to his own time, where he instructs Copernicus on the model, allowing humanity to explore space, form the Federation, and let you rescue the Human Popsicle.
  • The Foundry mission "Divide ut Regnes", a Fix Fic for the much-maligned official mission "Divide et Impera", has you setting out to fulfill one by traveling back in time to just after the mission. You snatch the Undine impersonating Admiral Zelle, she takes a head injury, and you drop the catatonic Undine off at Admiral T'nae's office. All this to explain some Gameplay and Story Segregation, i.e. why Admiral Zelle is still standing there after going with you on the mission and infiltrating the Romulan Star Navy.
  • The 2015 Delta Recruitment event had any new Player Character get visited during the Justified Tutorial by their future self from 18 months in the future, and told to gather data for the upcoming Iconian War. At the end of the "Breen Invasion" Story Arc, you go back in time to give yourself the message. And then at one point during the "Spectres" Story Arc, a second Stable Time Loop is nested inside this one when the player character collects a data recorder in the present, and then in the next mission travels back in time to the 23rd century and plants the data recorder. Lampshaded by the PC when they plant the recorder, with a comment that it will keep track of things for the next 150-odd years "until I pick it up an hour ago."
  • The final mission of the Iconian War, Midnight, reveals that the last 200,000 years have been in a time-loop: your character, as well as Sela and Kagran, is sent back in time to just before the fall of Iconia in a bid to stop the twelve Iconians who escaped then from doing so. While there you find out that the Iconians of that time were a peaceful people, and work to help them (either out of sympathy or to get them in one place so you can get them all, both possibilities exist) while Sela insists on sticking to the original plan partly to get revenge for the Iconians causing the Hobus supernova that destroyed Romulus. This leads to twelve Iconians escaping and one developing a grudge against Romulans in particular and promising to eventually destroy their world.... It's probably best to not think too deeply about it, given that Sela herself comes from temporal shenanigans.
  • The entire Temporal Cold War turns out to have been caused by a web of these. To name but one example, in "Sunrise" the Tholians destroy the Na'Kuhl sun (turning it off rather than blowing it up), which leads to the Na'Kuhl attacking Tholian hatcheries, which is what prompted the original attack. The Tholians at least learn from this mess and try to introduce an amendment to the Temporal Accords to ban time travel outright.
• In the ending of Stranded Deep, you restore a damaged seaplane and try to fly back to civilization, only to fatally crash into the plane from the start of the game, causing the accident that stranded you in the first place. There is no explanation, and no other hint at time travel.
• Super Robot Wars 30 invokes this for Mazinkaiser: in the mission you get it, Koji returns to the Photon Power Lab and works on various schematics when, a few minutes later with Dr. Hell and Infinity bearing down on Dreikruez, Mazinkaiser appears and Koji drives Dr. Hell away. When asked how he built Mazinkaiser so fast, he admits he didn't — he guesses he built it years into the future and sent it back so it can be there to stop Dr. Hell.^note It should be noted that Mazinkaiser is an optional unit and if you miss the mission you get it in, you miss out on it and nothing is said about it
• Sunset Over Imdahl, a freeware game made with RPG Maker, contains such a loop the plague, the one that killed all of your loved ones, the one that you were sent back to try to stop? You were the carrier. A chill's running a marathon down your spine, isn't it?
• Tales of Phantasia: By coming to the past, meeting Edward D. Morrison and telling him that they travelled to the past to defeat Dhaos, Cless managed to convince the researcher that his thesis on time travel is worth finishing. Effectively this means that if the heroes wouldn't have came to the past, they wouldn't have been able to actually come to the past in the first place.
• TimeSplitters Future Perfect:
  • One of the earliest examples is also one of the most memorable — you are given a key by your future self that you need to progress, and later pass the key on to your past self, leaving its initial existence unexplained.
  • Furthermore, at the end of You Genius U-Genix, when you find Dr. Crow, Cortez explains the entire plot of eternal life to the main villain before the main villain has any chance to learn about it. Cortez seems to believe this is a version of Dr. Crow from the future, not knowing it was the only Dr. Crow that had not learned of the plot yet, effectively kick-starting the problem. Younger Crow shows up only moments later, but Crow has already learned of the plan for eternal life, removing the necessity of younger Crow to explain it, and leaves with younger Crow's time machine. Cortez then shouts "DAMMIT!" at the top of his lungs, having it be loud enough to transcend time (he is in 2052, and it is heard in 1969 by Harry Tipper).
  • At the end of What Lies Below in 1994, old Dr. Crow arrives from the future to give his younger self a time device. Then, during the scene in 2052, young Crow gives his old self a copy of his time device while escaping with his own. It's implied that young Crow reverse-engineered the time device that old Crow gave him in 1994, creating the copy which he passes on to old Crow... which would later be the 'original' time device that he himself would copy later... uh, earlier. Much like the key from earlier in the game, the time device's initial creation is left unexplained.
• In Titanfall 2, Cooper is tasked with investigating the source of an explosion that destroyed an IMC research facility using a special device that lets him jump between the present, when the facility is in ruins; and the past, shortly before the explosion. The researchers were testing a new superweapon, and panicked at news of an intruder popping in and out of sight all over the place, forcing them to test the new superweapon immediately, which goes haywire and creates the explosion that Cooper is investigating.
• Near the beginning of Tomb Raider: Legend there is a flashback to Lara's childhood in which she set off an ancient device. Her mother then pushed Lara out of the way, looked into a ball of light and had a confused conversation with a mysterious figure (who the players can't see or hear) before disappearing. At the end of the game Lara inadvertently opens up a time portal and it is revealed that she was the person her mother was talking to at the start.
• The plot of Tombs & Treasure II is that the player characters are searching for Professor Imes, who went missing while exploring the ruins of Chichen Itza. One of the ruins is "The Tomb of the High Priest". The ending reveals that the professor went back in time and became the High Priest.
• Tormented Souls: One room contains a VHS projector that, when a tape is inserted, allows you to physically enter the projection and explore the room shown on the tape during the time of recording. The game starts with protagonist Caroline waking up in a bathtub with one eye missing. Near the end of the game, she encounters a door opened with two widely-spaced retinal scanners which are intended to be used by a pair of identical twins. The solution is to find a tape of Caroline unconscious in the bathtub, enter it, and have her remove her own eye to prop up in front of the other scanner. Can't get more identical than yourself!
• The Infocom Interactive Fiction game Trinity contains both a major and a minor loop.
  • The minor one involves an umbrella lost by a woman in London that you retrieve; when you go back in time to just before the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, you give the umbrella to a girl, who will grow up into the woman you met in London.
  • The entire game is one; you go back in time to sabotage the Trinity test (which would've powerful enough to have destroyed most of New Mexico), create a Temporal Paradox because without atomic weapons, you would have never been born, so the universe resolves the paradox by making a small explosion every time an atomic weapon is detonated, and the game ends with you repeating your actions in the beginning. "Small" explosion being a relative thing of course. They still are enough to take out a city — in other words, the main character in Trinity stops the creation of a superweapon that could destroy a whole state and instead creates the 'smaller' atomic weapons that still are quite powerful.
• Mr. Grimm's ending in the 2012 reboot of Twisted Metal presumably shows the beginning of a loop: his wish from Calypso is to go back in time and see his father again before his father died doing a stunt. He's teleported into his father's truck, distracting the latter and causing him to crash and die that way instead before Mr. Grimm is shot to death by his past self.
• In Vandal Hearts, the NPC Leena is sent back in time, and is then revealed to be the party member Eleni, who had Easy Amnesia until that point. The loop aspect comes in with the character's pendant, given to the earlier version by the later version.
• In Wild AR Ms 5, it is revealed that heroine Avril is stuck in one of these. She is forced to continually travel 1,000 years into the past to set in motion the events of the game... but not before she sets herself up to awaken during this time period so she can ensure things play out how they should, and she is sent to the past once again. She can never leave this loop, as it may have cataclysmic consequences, and she'd much prefer her beloved to be happy. Although all the traveling and slumber gives her Laser-Guided Amnesia, she always remembers everything before she makes her Heroic Sacrifice.
• There seems to be one in The Witcher: The magical boy Alvin shows the ability to teleport himself to safety when in great dangers, but not having direct control over where he appears several times during the game. The last time he simply vanishes and is never heard of again. However, the Grand Master and founder of the Flaming Rose order seems to know Geralt way and repeats words that he had said to Alvin before he disappeared. He also has the same amulet as Alvin does, but it appears much older and worn. Apparently Alvin not only teleported through space but also time and his experiences during the war between the Knights of the Flaming Rose and the elves inspired him to found the Order in the past.
• The Wonderful 101:As revealed in the final battle the GEATHJERK Federation was funded by a group of aliens survivors whose planets were conquered in the far future by the Greater Galactic Coalition, the space-faring human armada. The organization traveled to the past with the objetive of wiping all humankind to prevent this future from happening. Ironically, GEATHJERK's invasion was the reason behind the development of the technology that led to the creation of the Coalition in the first place.
• The key to Karazhan used by players in World of Warcraft is acquired when they perpetuate a stable time loop centered on an object. After collecting the fragments of Khadgar's broken key, they take it to Medivh to be repaired. Medivh cannot immediately repair it and so instead gives the player a spare; the key he is repairing will be given to Khadgar to be broken in the future and collected by the players to be repaired by Medivh yet again.
  • The entire point of the quests in the Caverns of Time is to ensure that time remains stable. The Infinite Dragonflight are doing their best to change the history of Azeroth for their own ends and it's up to you to stop them. Canonically you are victorious and their efforts are ultimately futile.
  • There is a quest in the Dragonblight where Chromie sends you to Nozdormu's shrine to help him against the Infinite Dragonflight, and during the fight, your future self appears to help you. The next quest is to go back and fight that same battle again, this time with you helping your past self. Don't ask how it's supposed to work out if you choose to complete the first quest but not the second...
  • In the finale of Cataclysm, Nozdormu, the leader of the Bronze Dragonflight attempts to send the player back in time 10,000 years but finds his powers blocked by an Infinite Dragon in the future named Murozond. The sequence of events after Murozond's defeat eventually leads to Deathwing's destruction and Nozdormu (and his fellow Dragon Aspects) becoming mortal. Then, in an effort to subvert his mortality, Nozdormu becomes Murozond and interferes with his past self so that the events leading to his depowering never happen. As Nozdormu says once the players slay Murozond:
    Still, in time, I will... fall to madness. And you, heroes... will vanquish me. The cycle will repeat. So it goes.
• Xenosaga: The entire universe is one of these, put in motion by Big Bad Wilhelm to prevent the destruction of the universe.
• The Zero Escape games use this as a part of the main plot. In the first game, Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the second Nonary Game is modeled perfectly after the first Nonary Game by two of the people that partook in the first one, in order for protagonist Junpei to send the final puzzle's solution to a 9 years younger Akane, trapped in an incinerator that's about to activate unless she solves it. After that, 9 years younger Akane realizes that in order for Junpei to be able to give her the info, he has to go through the second Nonary Game, so she goes ahead and masterminds it, using the future knowledge her younger self gained of the various outcomes of the second Nonary game, perceived a branching timelines, to recreate the conditions that enabled her survival, existing in the meantime as a sort of walking Temporal Paradox. Notably in timelines where the group gets closer to the incinerator and the exit door past it, the present Akane starts getting fevers and hotter temperatures, and the various group members involved with the first Nonary game get memories of her having died inside the incinerator, as present Akane starts undergoing Cessation of Existence due to being in a timeline that doesn't lead to the Golden Ending when Junpei can send her the solution her younger self needed to survive. As a bit of a Rewatch Bonus, Present Akane will sometimes give cryptic and somewhat tangental conversations to Junpei that are actually being spoken through him to her younger self, indirectly advising her that the outcome they're both looking for does exist without letting Junpei understand the deeper involvement he has in events too early.
  • Phi and Delta from Zero Time Dilemma are living Bootstrap Paradoxes. The two twins were sent back in time from 2029 to 1904 by their parents, Diana and Sigma, who were trapped in an underground bomb shelter as a result of a sadistic "Decision Game," which Sigma participated in to stop the outbreak of a deadly virus called Radical-6. After they were sent back, Phi was in turn sent to 2008 and lived her life normally until twenty years later, where her consciousness was thrown into 2074. She went through training with the physically-67-but-mentally-22 Sigma, not knowing he was her father, and the two honed their Mental Time Travel abilities. She and Sigma then SHIFTed their minds back to 2028 in order to stop the outbreak of Radical-6, only to find that the game was arranged by Delta, who had lived to be 124, to ensure the creation of a timeline where he and Phi were born, and one where a separate, more deadly apocalypse did not occur. And on top of it all, the one who raised her was... another time-traveled version of herself.

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