Timey Wimey Ball / Video Games

Timey-Wimey Ball in video games.

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• God help anyone trying to understand the way time travel works in The 3rd Birthday. Sometimes, changing the past causes complicated butterfly effects that lead to other characters being alive. Other times, it causes people to become paradoxed out of existence, Back to the Future-style. Other times it causes people to become temporal ghosts unable to interact with normal events. Whether other characters can remember previous timelines seems essentially random.
• Completely averted in the indie RTS Achron. The time travel is completely consistent, despite the game handing the players tools to: change the rate time flows around them, give orders to units in the past, send units into the past using time travel, and create time paradoxes... in competitive multiplayer. Bonus points for the system still managing to be fairly easy to learn.
• Back to the Future: The Game confuses the series' time travel mechanics even further, when Marty and Doc inadvertently create a timeline where Emmett Brown never creates the time machine in the first place (and in fact never becomes "Doc" Brown). While Marty is unaffected by the changes in the timeline (so long as it doesn't result in his erasure from existence, as usual), Doc actually disappears from the DeLorean once they land in 1985. The DeLorean doesn't start to disappear until Marty managed to get the 1931 timeline mostly straightened out, but only after another Doc Brown travelled back from 1986 to pick up Marty, and it took days for the thing to finally vanish.
• Deconstructed in Bastion. The narrator gets several serious cases of deja vu retelling the story of The Kid to his audience, and one of the game's endings directly lead into the beginning of New Game Plus.
• To say that this trope pops up in BioShock Infinite is like saying there's some water in the Atlantic Ocean. So you're hired to retrieve a girl from a floating city run by a racist madman who believes himself to be the American Jesus. Seems simple enough. Then you find out the girl can rend spacetime, go on trips to multiple time lines, find out the girl is the daughter you sold away in one possible world, and that the bad guy is a possible you.
• While intentionally confusing, time travel in Bayonetta is usually consistent, tied in loops. The same cannot be said for Bayonetta 3, which heavily implies the character the player is playing is Cereza from the first game. Originally simply assumed to be Bayonetta's younger self returned to the past, the game establsishes the existence of multiple universes, adding an element of the alternate-timeline model of time travel.
• Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has Looping, which allows a ninja who fails or dies during a mission to basically say "No, wait, that didn't happen, let's try again." All ninja have this ability. During The War That Broke The World, observations of the ninja forces showed them inexplicably moving perfectly, dodging and evading every attack and striking true each time. This has, predictably, caused a lot of damage to the fabric of reality, as the name of the aforementioned war will attest.
• While Chrono Trigger was generally consistent about how its time travel worked, there were a few odd instances.
  • Somehow Marle paradoxed herself out of existence, despite time travelers not being directly affected by any other changes they'd made during the game. For instance, you can save Lucca's mom, but Lucca still remembers when she was crippled instead of having all her memories changed. Or when the future Robo came from was erased from existence without affecting him. It is possible that the difference for Marle is that her disappearance isn't the result of her direct actions but people reacting to her. Since she's otherwise not a direct party or initiator of the change, her protection doesn't otherwise kick in.
    • For Lucca, it's uncertain if she remembers her mother being paraplegic. After saving her and returning to the present, you can visit her and see her walking, but nobody (not even Lucca herself) comments on this.
  • The Timey-Wimey Ball also applies to game mechanics: One can open a chest in the future, return to the past and open the chest again to get two items from the same chest.
  • This also means that it is possible to beat the optional dungeon at the end of the game 3 times. However, if you start by beating the earliest version of it the newer versions will also be empty.
  • Lavos exists in a time bubble, so you can kill its shell in a later period and then visit it through the Bonus Dungeon in an earlier period, and the shell will still be dead. Defeating Lavos' shell doesn't prevent it from destroying the world using said shell, though. Lavos is an Eldritch Abomination from space, so it doesn't play by exactly the same rules as the Entity and the Time Gates.
  • According to the staff members, they never quite got a consistent set of rules down for time travel until they had already written themselves into a corner, so they just went with what they had.
  • The game also tries to handwave the issue by having Robo later posits that their time travel isn't the work of Lavos, but that of another nameless entity who seeded the portals to where the cast would be needed - which is why the portals all lead to major events in Lavos and the Planet's history. Said entity likely allowed Marle to erase herself accidently because this would draw Crono and Lucca into the portal after her. The same entity is also implied to be why Lucca gets a private one time portal to go save her mother. As such any discrepancy can be chalked up to the Entity's doing or its own choices.
  • Chrono Cross tries to patch things up by using parallel realities as the ultimate outcome of fiddling about with temporal mechanics, and then showing the physical effect of a catastrophic temporal paradox via the Time Crash (wherein a time experiment pulled a city borne from the "good" future back to the past, and its opposite number from another alternate reality was ripped from its native timeline as cosmic counterbalance; the "time refugees" created the archipelago the game takes place in, and ultimately things happened leading to an alternate reality where the "bad" future is still set to occur.)
• The Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series — seriously, the series by now has something in the range of 2 separate timelines from the first game, two from the second, two from that game's expansion, and then three from the third game, with a further three paths from THAT game's expansion. Even more brain-busting, Red Alert led to Tiberian Dawn by way of Allies winning both Red Alert 1 and 2 — Red Alert 3 is made by way as a divergence at the end of Red Alert 2. Add to that the events of Yuri's Revenge which is its own separate divergence and has the nice consequence of there being two "commanders" (the player) in different places at the same point in the timeline, although the divergent timelines are merged at the end.
  • The most major divergence in temporal mechanic is the backstory of Red Alert 1 and 3. In 1 Einstein goes back in time, kills Hitler before he can enter politics and thus averts World War 2, and returns to an otherwise unchanged future - his assistant who didn't time travel asks him about Hitler. The implication being that this Einstein isn't from the timeline the game itself takes place in, or that some sort of Delayed Ripple Effect was at play. Red Alert 3 begins with Soviets traveling back in time to similarly wipe out Einstein, only to return home to a completely different timeline that's already changed.
• Dark Souls: The Player Character is told from the beginning that time in Lordran is inconsistent; everyone has their own "world" (i.e. timeline) wherein their own pasts and futures proceed in the standard way, but each of these worlds is technically separate from every other. Occasionally, two or more worlds can overlap temporarily and their inhabitants interact. The catalysts vary — people can leave messages for one another, including "Summoning Signs" that allow other travelers to request their aid, while other times these overlaps just occur naturally. Alternatively, certain "Orb" items can be used by players to invade other worlds to kill the hosts.
• Dark Souls III: Not only is the previous "each player has their own timeline" mechanic still in effect, but the realm of Lothric has absorbed elements of other realms of the past as a side effect of the resurrection of the Lords of Cinder. This includes having Anor Londo appear in a place that makes absolutely zero sense for it to appear in. The Untended Graves and the Dark Firelink Shrine therein are alternately suggested to be in the present, past, or a possible future in different ways. Then there's the Dreg Heap, a giant amalgamation of rubble from all eras just haphazardly piled up on top of each other, which might be in the distant future or it might be an alternate plane of reality. The Ringed City DLC also introduces the Plain of Ash, which is suggested to be the ultimate far future in which the end of the world is happening... or it might be what the world actually looks like now, with everything else being an illusion?
• Day of the Tentacle, is extremely wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. The game runs on San Dimas Time to allow the characters to flush small, inanimate objects to each other through time via their time machines. When the time stream is altered, any changes are visible to the characters and happen with a "magic" effect and sound, and at the end of the game, the characters travel back in time to yesterday to turn off the machine that caused the Big Bad to become evil, thus causing a huge paradox and defeating the point of them even disembarking on their adventure in the first place. But that's okay. Doctor Edison's original plan (not taking into account the diamond breaking and the trio ending up in different eras) was for them to simply go back in time and turn off the aforementioned machine.
• Justified in the fourth Deponia game as what kind of time travel rules you are following depends on the method of time travel, for example one character gets mocked by other time travelers for having a deterministic time machine.
• In Destiny, time travel happens but the exact nature of it is... iffy. The Vex superintelligence seems to greatly enjoy the benefits of time travel, being able to casually traverse various timelines, pulling units, materials, and even energy from different points in spacetime, to the point that their basic weapons yank points of energy from other random parts of time and space. They even have the ability to retroactively control spacetime and decide if something exists.... or if it ever existed in the first place in certain locations. Other pieces of Vex technology include machines that allow users to actually travel through time, seeing the future or viewing alternate timelines. On the other hand, the Traveler and the Guardians seem to be distinct in their ability to ignore changes in timelines and reality-alteration, to the point that the Guardians are able to outright deny temporal changes within the Vex Vault of Glass using their Light.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest V has a literal Timey-Wimey Ball. As a child, your character finds a golden orb which doesn't seem too important. A bit later, you meet a stranger who asks you if he can have a look at it. At one point, the leader of an evil cult destroys the orb for no apparent reason at the time. After a timeskip and many hours of gameplay, your character, now an adult, finds out that the golden orb was really the power source of a floating castle. You then receive a fake golden orb, go back to the time of your childhood through a magic painting and secretly exchange the orbs with your younger self and return to the present with the real one, meaning that the cult leader only destroyed the fake.
  • Dragon Quest VII is centered around traveling to different times and places in order to restore the world... Good luck with keeping the different time lines straight.
• The activation of the god-golem Numidium in the conclusion of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall allowed for several mutually-exclusive endings. The story-writers decided the simplest answer to this situation was for all of them to be true; the lore-writers followed suit. Cue the Dragonbreak, a moment in history where the Numidium's activation was so powerful it broke time. Time followed every possible path the player could follow, each time ending with Numidium's destruction... and then time snapped back together and every event became part of the new reality.
  • This has resulted in interesting paradoxes, including the existence of both the Worm God and Worm King, when they are both Mannimarco and should only be one or the other.
  • Generally, Dragon Breaks are closely related to the lore's concept of "Hero" (all Player Characters in the series are considered Heroes), an individual that is Immune to Fate, which allows the world's fate to continue despite the myriad ways the Hero can affect the game world (often in contradictory ways in different playthroughs).
• Escape from Monkey Island:
  • One puzzle involves a time-travel maze where, at one point, you encounter your future self (and, later on, your past self, in exactly the same situation only controlling the other Guybrush). Taking an incorrect course of action (usually saying something wrong as the future self) creates a "paradox" that throws you back to the start of the maze. The puzzle goes a long way towards demonstrating the problems with a Stable Time Loop.
  • There's also the three items you get from your future self, and have to give to your past self. Where do they come from? Where do they go?
  • "I guess you are more likely to shoot yourself." Cue the Swirly Energy Thingy.
• Despite only reading about the past rather than visiting it, Eternal Darkness uses a rather... unconventional form of this in the ending of the third play-through. Near the start of the first one, you picked one of three artifacts which would end up being the Big Bad. In the second play-through, that artifact was gone and you picked from the remainder; the ending was basically the same as if you had picked THAT artifact first, but the voice-over states that "something seems to remain". The third one was the same, leaving a single option; the third ending shows that all three events happened simultaneously, and were in fact the only way for Mantorok — the only even quasi-good member of a pantheon of four godlike beings that exist outside of time and space — to destroy his hideously evil counterparts. This opens up the New Game Plus and allows for very satisfying cheats, but the ending in this final "joined together" timeline states that Mantorok itself is still sealed, rotting, scheming...
• Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a case of this once you get into the multiple time-streams. One specific example is that a solution to being trapped in an insane building by a computer trying to kill you is to scream at Hope, who is in the original timeline in the distant past and will see the video and not create the insane computer.
• Final Fantasy XIV does not dabble overmuch in time travel, with most of its inclusion of the game being centered on Alexander, the goblins' primal. Alexander has the ability to see across time into different futures, as well as see different outcomes to the present as a result of changes in the past, as part of his purpose to forge a "perfect" timeline. In the end, however, he determines that the current timeline is the best timeline out of all possible outcomes, and as such sets into motion a series of events to create multiple Stable Time Loops to keep its interference in the world to a minimum. In Shadowbringers, the survivors of a Bad Future created through a combination of the destruction of an alternate dimension and a Deadly Gas attack on Hydaelyn use Alexander in combination with the Crystal Tower, a creation of the Allagan civilization, to help a scholar who had slumbered within said Tower travel across time and space to the distant past of said alternate dimension and Set Right What Once Went Wrong. This could be considered an extension of Alexander's will to preserve the current timeline.
  • By comparison, the Tower's use as a time machine in Endwalker is easier to wrap your head around...until you factor in the above and start working out the exact time travel rules in place. It's possible that the Primal Alexander himself allows for more screwing of the rules than normal, but if so it's a little odd that the ancient Ascians who created the strongest Primals couldn't get their heads around it.
• Fire Emblem: Awakening has some minor, weird cases of this. Midway through the game, you can start recruiting the main cast's future children, who all time-traveled to the point of the main quest. However, one of them ended up three years earlier than the rest of them for completely unexplained reasons, technically making him the oldest of the bunch. Plus, Morgan, the Avatar's exclusive child, is speculated to have come from a different timeline than the rest, which would have to be the case with some of the possible pairings (particularly if the Avatar marries a 2nd-gen character). To add to the confusion, various dialogues and DLCs (particularly "The Future Past") imply all of the above-mentioned time-travelers would be more accurately described as Dimensional Travelers.
• The Legacy of Kain series is extremely guilty of this trope as a central aspect of the tangled plot. At the most basic level, history is described as linear and self-correcting, because You Already Changed the Past and You Can't Fight Fate. However, throw in some kind of Temporal Paradox and history can be changed through sheer force of will, albeit with consequences that even omniscient beings are unable to predict.
  • Relatedly, Deuteragonist Raziel is a Paradox Person, described as one of only people with genuine freedom of choice, because his very existence is owed to a rather messy Stable Time Loop. His signature weapon, the Spectral Reaver, is formed from the insane soul of his future self, and is destined to eventually devour his (present) soul and merge with the physical Reaver sword to create the completed Soul Reaver, which Kain later discovers as a fledgeling in the original game (and which Raziel himself destroys in the second game, granting him the Spectral Reaver in the first place). Furthermore, Raziel eventually ends up slaying his past self in the third game, a human vampire hunter who Kain resurrects a thousand years after the fact to set all of these events in motion. Throw in a couple of ambiguous prophecies, and poor Raziel becomes the pawn of several competing factions conspiring to twist the course of history in their favor.
• This seems to be par of the course for The Legend of Zelda as a series. Even time travel elements that "work" often contradict those in other games, or even the same game... many of which in turn contradict each other. It seems that the effects of time travel in the Zeldaverse are pretty much determined by how convenient they are to the plot...
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • The ending created three timelines◊ (not, as previously guessed, two): Link is defeated, the timeline when Link is sent back to his childhood and Ganon never takes over, and when Ganon takes over but is then defeated by Link as an adult.
    • The Spirit Temple in Master Quest has a switch only accessible in the future that drops a chest only accessible in the past.
    • Link learns to play the Song of Storms on his ocarina from the Windmill Guy, who's ticked because "some Ocarina kid" came 7 years ago and played it, messing up the windmill. Guessed who the Ocarina kid is? And how he learned the song? That's right, from Windmill Guy, 7 years in the future. Of course, by itself a mere ontological paradox isn't enough to claim this trope — it is after all a very common hazard of Stable Time Loops — but when you combine it with the timeline split...
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: The game features the Harp of Ages, which allows one to travel back and forth through time without creating alternate universes. The Harp's owner, Nayru has the same ability but for some reason suffers from a Delayed Ripple Effect.
    • A Chain of Deals in Ages involves getting an antique vase from one Goron in the present, who claims it's a cherished family heirloom passed down through generations. Your next link is to give it to his ancestor 400 years in the past, who promises to cherish it and pass it on to his children. ...Just let that one go.
    • Just like with the Song of Storms, an old Goron legend comes up during the story of a boy named Link who saved their tribe's elder from a horrible fate in ancient times. How'd he do it? He used a Bomb Flower from hundreds of years in the future. Given to him by the same Goron who told him the legend in the first place.
    • The map is not consistent: most of the time, there is a ripple effect/timeline alteration, but some instances are only plausible with a Stable Time Loop, such as a dungeon that gets opened with a special object in the past and that, in the present, becomes another dungeon, visited earlier in the game.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
    • Link is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop that lasts for three days. Whenever the loop starts over, his actions in the previous loop are erased. There are no time travel duplicates, which erases the possibility of another Link running around doing things you've previously done. Instead, they simply don't occur unless you go and do them again. Despite this, once you defeat the final boss, all the cycles you've completed are somehow merged together without explanation and everyone is saved, rather than just the people you helped in the final cycle. Even if you speedrun this doesn't make any sense since the game cannot be fully completed in a single cycle (one sidequest in particular has to be done at least twice in two different cycles with slight variations for 100% Completion). This was probably just done so that the game could have a happy ending, but it seems to break the game's own rules about how Time Travel works. Maybe the Goddess of Time did it.
    • When you travel back in time, Link loses all his consumables (rupees, arrows, potions etc.) but keeps all the gear he has acquired and can even regain certain things if he's lost them (like if Takkuri steals your sword). This doesn't make much sense no matter how you slice it, i.e. if Link is physically traveling back in time then he should take everything with him, but if he's performing some sort of Mental Time Travel then he should take nothing with him.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
    • When hit, timeshift stones revert the area around them to several hundred years in the past. Oddly, however, any change you make in the present near one of these stones will still be there in the past. And then, near the end of the game, Link uses the Triforce to kill Greater-Scope Villain Demise in the present. However, Ghirahim kidnaps Zelda and uses her to free Demise several centuries in the past. Link follows him back and seals the past Demise within the Master Sword, which he leaves in the past Sealed Temple. None of this is shown to have had any effect on the timeline when Link, Groose and Zelda return to the present in the ending. The funny thing is this could have worked as a Stable Time Loop had they trapped Demise in the Sealed Temple again instead of in the Master Sword.
    • The first time you visit the Sealed Temple, you can see the crystal Zelda eventually seals herself inside which is created later in the game, but in the past. The Master Sword, however, doesn't appear until the end of the game, even though that also happens in the past. Also, near the end of the game you gain the ability to travel between the past and present at will. You can do this without consequence, even though Demise has been freed in the past and would presumably have wrecked havoc on Hyrule and Skyloft without Link to stop him. He does say he would give Link time to prepare before their final battle, but you'd think after several hundred years he'd have gotten tired of waiting.
  • In Hyrule Warriors, it's thanks to Cia twisting space-time that characters and elements from different eras and alternate timelines, which would normally not be able to interact with each other, are able to do so. Phantom Ganon is responsible for doing the same in the Wind Waker arc in Legends.
• Life Is Strange is pretty good about their internal rules. Max can rewind a short time (At most a few minutes) while she remembers what happened before, this is the 'first' time for everyone else. (This allows her to use 'future' conversations in the 'present.' This is also how she can change decisions in one area, but as soon as she leaves, she can't. It's too far to rewind.) However once you move beyond those rules, it starts getting confusing. Starting with how she freezes time once without explanation and never done again. Time Travel through photographs is completely unexplained. As is the fact that she is 'replacing' her double from that timeline. (though she keeps the memories of 'her' timeline) and she somehow had a vision of the tornado at the end of the game before she got her powers. And one of the two endings heavily implies she wasn't supposed to have the powers in the first place. In fact, several characters theorize that her powers CAUSED the tornado. Despite how she saw the Tornado BEFORE she got the powers, and her powers activated by accident trying to save someone's life. The ending is divisive.
• MapleStory actually uses this term during the Silent Crusade (considering it's unclear how time travel works in-universe or whether it can actually cause changes, makes it fit):
  "I found some other timey-wimey dimensional place! It was neat! Oh, also the Goddess of Time was there!"
• Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. This was lampshaded at one point, where doing something in the past gives E. Gadd an idea in the present, and he notes how paradoxical it is.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, set about 40 years before Metal Gear Solid, killing Ocelot, EVA or Big Boss creates a Temporal Paradox and causes a Game Over. But no paradox is caused by killing Raikov, even though he shows up later in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops.
• Might and Magic II has a couple of Time Travel quests that work completely differently. In Lord Haart's quest, you kill two people to take their relics back to the present. This quest is repeatable, so the change doesn't seem to stick. The other quest is a separate Fetch Quest to bring some objects to King Kalohn in the past, which changes history on a large scale and results in King Kalohn being king a hundred years later, with significant repercussions for the endgame.
• Time travel is central to the premise of Millennia: Altered Destinies. The Player Character is a human recruited by a mysterious alien race known only as the Hoods to alter the history of the Echelon Galaxy to prevent the hostile Microid race from conquering it. With the XTM ship, the player is able to perform space/time jumps around Echelon and make certain changes to ensure the successful rise of four alien races, so they end up resisting the Microids and provide you with the replacement for the parts for the intergalactic drive to return home. The XTM has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, so the changes don't affect you, except for the historical database specifically designed to avert this (so you can see what's been changed). One of your enemies are the Hoods themselves, who have previously attempted to make changes to the galaxy's past. Your greatest enemy is your Evil Counterpart, an alternate version of you recruited by the Microids to ensure their dominance. Like you, he has his own XTM, is immune to timeline changes, and can travel to any planet in any time period, ruining your hard work. It's the only part of the game that runs on San Dimas Time. Additionally, if you arrive to the time period he screws up, you can chase him off before he can do the damage, but the timeline will not necessarily be restored to what it was (even though it should). Also, the game is not very consistent as to your communications with your agents on the four races' homeworlds. Sometimes, the agent will react to your second call as a follow-up, while other times, he will react as if it's the first time you're calling him in this time period, allowing you to make a different choice from before. The game originally had a Nonstandard Game Over happen if you manage to screw up the timeline so much that you can't undo the changes (via an extremely powerful time ripple that destroys your XTM), but then they realized that this can never happen in a game about time travel and removed the option.
• In Minty Fresh Adventure, Colgate can encounter Derpy, who's trying to deliver a letter to her, and the Doctor, who wants Colgate to not read said letter. The letter is Minuette's application for the position as a dentistry receptionist, from six months into the future, thus suggesting that Colgate will succeed in her quest to become a dentist. There are four endings depending which encounters you do; if you meet both, the Doctor will happily chide Derpy for nearly destroying all space and time just to give Colgate a little motivation.
• There's No Time to Explain how time travel works before your future self gets grabbed by a monster and you have to go chasing after them.
• Ōkami manages this. First of all, you travel back in time to defeat Orochi with the help of Shiranui, your past self at full power, your grandfather, or yourself later in the game depending on your view of the Space Time Continuum. Next, Shiranui comes forward in time to help you beat the first part of the boss fight, only to get mortally injured in the present, then going back in time to die. Then, Chibiterasu, a son of Ammy, goes back in time to help his mom beat Orochi from nine months ago, thawing out his grandfather/mother at full power then going back in time 100 years in the past and... Yeah.
• The Prince of Persia Sands trilogy is one massive example of timey-wimey craziness.
  • At the end of The Sands of Time, the Prince entirely reverses the events that just took place, making it so the events of the first game don't happen. This seems to have created a paradox by the start of the second game.
  • In Warrior Within the Prince is being chased by the Dahaka in the present, a timeline guardian who is trying to ensure that the timeline proceeds as it was meant to. He is not chased in the past. The Prince inadvertently creates a Stable Time Loop when he kills Kaileena and creates the Sands of Time, the very thing that he was traveling back in time to prevent, discovering that he has already changed the past, just as he was fated to do! At this point, he then is chased in the past as well, as he still needs to be killed for unleashing the sands. Then, he discovers a way to co-exist with himself in the same timeline, which he uses until his normal self in the past timeline is killed, allowing him to remove the Mask of the Wraith. He then returns to the past to attempt to actually change his fate.
  • At the end of the second game, in the Golden Ending, he has killed the Dahaka and successfully prevented the Sands of Time from ever being created, causing a true disruption of the timeline.
  • In The Two Thrones, the Prince discovers that his paradoxical actions in Warrior Within mean that the Vizier was never killed and war has been unleashed on his homeland. The Vizier captures and kills Kaileena, once again unleashing the Sands of Time and effectively repeating the events of the first game in a different setting. The Prince eventually kills the Vizier, seals away the Sands again and seems to have learned from all his futile time-travel, as he leaves the end of the game be with no further meddling, happy with the one actual change in his life that he actually got to stick, Farah's survival.
• Radiant Historia is all about using this trope, Tricked Out Time, and most other Time Travel Tropes in a quest to ensure the Golden Ending. The most confusing aspect is that while there are two separate timelines, making changes in one somehow influences the other, leading to things like helping someone recover from severe depression in one timeline so he won't try to kill you in the other one.
• Episode 204 of Sam & Max, "Chariot of the Dogs", focuses on Time Travel. This is Sam and Max; any time travel plot WILL bring in to play every time travel concept as fast as it can for the parody.
  • Several stable time loops are created, including one that is required for getting Sam and Max to the time machine in the first place and another that comes into play in episode 205. However, as if completely ignoring the idea of stable time loops, much of the puzzle solving revolves around completely altering the time stream just so that you can fix a problem created by Max's personality the moment you start time travelling.
  • One section even has Sam and Max accidentally letting themselves from the first season take their time machine, effectively rewriting everything the player had done in the past year, AFTER a needed macguffin to advance the plot was taken out of the time stream.
• Second Sight plays with the trope. When John Vattic finds his way to the records room to find Jayne dead, he seems to flash back to the point when she is supposed to have died to save her, eliminating the reason he flashed back at all. This happens a few times in the game, to the point of Mind Screw. However, what's really happening is that the "past" the player is experiencing is, in fact, the present, and the "present" is a premonition caused by the protagonist's latent psychic powers emerging. It's pulled off extremely well.
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant: A Timey-Wimey Ball in the good ending sends the main character back to the beginning of the first game with the implication that both of the first game's endings are canon. It also sent Karin back in time to meet Yuri's father and become Yuri's mother.
• Shadow of Destiny is a hell of Stable Time Loop / Screw Destiny contradictions that the protagonist's Complexity Addiction doesn't help at all.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). Shadow's story depends on a You Already Changed the Past Stable Time Loop (Mephiles breaking out of the Scepter of Darkness in the present is the direct cause of Shadow traveling to the past and sealing Mephiles in the first place). Meanwhile, in the Future… Sonic directly contradicts this by traveling from the Bad Future to the present and successfully Set Right What Once Went Wrong (by preventing the death that was a direct cause of the Bad Future). Due to his interactions with both Shadow and Sonic, Silver's story uses both sets of time-travel rules, depending on the scene. Even if there hadn't been a Reset Button Ending, the temporal paradoxes probably would have caused the whole plot to erase itself anyway.
  • Even that's not correct anymore, because Sonic Generations centers around the Time Eater, a creature that can take places out of time. One of the places he takes is Crisis City, the Bad Future version of 06's world. Even though, '06 never technically happened and shouldn't feasibly exist for the Time Eater to be able to access the events that happened in it, it somehow does, meaning that '06 does exist, but doesn't exist, simultaneously. Also, you play Crisis City where '06 fits in the timeline, not adjusting for the fact that Crisis City technically comes from a future that presumably took place well after the events of Unleashed and Colors. Fair enough, since Sonic first visited Crisis City in that order, but it still adds another layer of Timey-Wimey to everything.
• Tactics Ogre, despite its Chariot and Wheel of Fortune Tarots, averts this entirely. Although the World Tarot lets you relive the other chapter paths, thus opening up the possibility for a Timey-Wimey Ball, the final events in Coda suggest that this is not time travel, but merely Denam's imagination.
• In Tales Of Majeyal this is how unlocking the Chronomancer classes works. When exploring the Daikara mountain range you can enter a Temporal Rift optional dungeon, which consists of alternate versions of other areas populated by weird extra-temporal monsters. Defeating the bosses unlocks the Temporal Warden class for future games. When you enter the Daikara when playing as a Temporal Warden you are attacked and killed by your future self. The Grandfather Paradox then kills your future self, un-kills you, creates the Temporal Rift, and unlocks the Paradox Mage class.
• The Talos Principle: Shepherd, being trapped in the Tower outside the normal bounds of the simulation, is somehow able to communicate with previous generations and give them advice.
• The action-adventure game The Time Machine runs into a more literal version of this. Time is like a flat plane in the setting, and by travelling to the future, Wales causes his time and the future to become tied together by the time machine itself, pulling time together into a whirlpool of sorts that starts destroying time as he knows it. Which makes absolutely no physical sense, but serves to explain why returning to his previous time(and thus putting himself and the Time Machine back in the time where they belong) prevents any further damage to the time plane.
• TimeSplitters Future Perfect relied on Stable Time Loops for plot progression; for example, early on in the game Cortez receives a key after holding a conversation with himself through a grate in the ceiling ... then later, holds a conversation with himself through a grate in the floor and drops himself the key. And then in the game's conclusion, Cortez changes the past, stopping the Time Splitters from ever being created, complete with his Present being changed from a ruined battlefield to a beautiful landscape, with no real effect on him, or anyone else from his time. This utter disregard for consistency is all worth it for the scene where Cortez is stuck in a vault with security systems trying to kill him, which the player plays through several times, thanks to the Stable Time Loops, and even gives himself the password, seemingly picking it out of thin air.
• Ultima I has you stop the evil and immortal wizard Mondain by travelling back in time and defeating him before he became immortal. Doing so should remove the centuries of tyranny and oppression from history, as well as cause a grandfather paradox (why would you go back to defeat Mondain if he was already defeated long ago?), yet everyone remembers everything.
• World of Warcraft got a big scoop of this when the Caverns of Time were introduced.
  • Ingame, this is the home of the Bronze Dragonflight, Guardians of Time, which need the players' help against the Infinite Dragonflight which are trying to mess up the timeline. But really, it's just an excuse to let players reexperience some of the key moments in Warcraft history, although in a different way (instead of Thrall escaping captivity with the help of a human girl causing distractions, the players need to bail him out by force). If you screw up, the Bronze Dragons just hit the Reset Button until you get it right. The Doctor may have used the TARDIS for sightseeing, but the Bronze Dragonflight runs a travel agency.
  • And in patch 4.3, players get to travel back again, via the Caverns of Time, to the events in the War of the Ancients, to retrieve a magical artifact. However, the events of another novel are centered around said artifact, meaning they logically would be retconned. Given that the events of that novel are what indirectly led to the rise of Deathwing, who is the main reason for recovering the artifact in the first place ... confusing doesn't even begin to describe it.
  • The existence of Murozond is one big example. At some unspecified point in the future, Nozdormu, Dragon Aspect of Time, will go insane and become Murozond, who creates the Infinite Dragonflight and wrecks havoc on the timeline with the goal of bringing about a Bad Future. Nozdormu himself is aware of this. He is also aware that this will lead to his death and that Murozond will ultimately fail to change anything, having both been granted a vision of his death by the Titans and personally witnessing it happen to his future self in the End Time. Murozond's dialogue in End Time implies he is indeed the same Nozdormu we interact with in the present day, and not an Alternate Timeline version of him, as he berates his younger self for "not know[ing]" his reasoning back then. Yet somehow, he still seems certain enough he will succeed to try and change the timeline anyway. But then Nozdormu loses his Aspect Powers in the Dragon Soul raid, which takes place after we're sent to the End Time but before Nozdormu becomes Murozond. Murozond does not seem to be weakened by this in End Time. Despite all this, Nozdormu is certain he will eventually become Murozond and there is nothing that can be done to stop it... Even though all he'd need to do to prevent it is not attempt to change something he already knows he'll fail to change if he tries.
    • Murozond was taken down by a 5-man group with some assistance from his past self. Malygos and Deathwing, meanwhile, required 25-man raid groups plus extensive backup. It's safe to say that Murozond was weakened by the whole depowering thing. Additionally, Nozdormu was told by the Titans that he must not change the circumstances of his death under any circumstances, so simply not doing anything that could turn him into Murozond is unacceptable.
  • Warlords of Draenor, the expansion pack announced at BlizzCon 2013, takes place in a Draenor heavily affected by the Timey-Wimey Ball. Garrosh escapes from prison, flees into the past of Draenor, stops the Orcs from drinking Mannoroth's blood, and introduces modern technology, creating a new "Iron Horde", changing the destiny of every major player on Draenor (and even the world itself). The only change to modern Azeroth, however, is that the Dark Portal changes from Green to Red, linking to the new Draenor, not Outland. How Azeroth is completely unaffected is thus far, unexplained (though one can assume Twisting Nether Timey-Wimey stuff.)
    • Word of God is that Garrosh traveled to a different timeline altogether; namely an Alternate Universe where Garrosh was never born.
• A major part of the storyline in Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is Adol and Dana having Mental Time Travel visions of each other's situations, millennia apart. After a while, Dana starts doing things in her time period to help Adol, who is thousands of years in the future. Which means that at several points in the game, Adol finds himself blocked by the terrain, only to have an enormous tree suddenly appear that has grown in an manner that opens a path the next morning. This happened because last night, Dana had a vision of Adol's circumstances thousands of years in the past, so she planted a tree in that general area, which then grew to the size and shape needed to help Adol over the course of several thousand years. The tree was not there yesterday because Dana hadn't had the vision yet despite being in the past, so she hadn't planted it yet. But the tree is there today because now Dana has had the vision of the tree being needed but not there, so she planted it in the past. You got that?

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