Time Travel in Games

[Vincent Chase]

Time Travel has been featured in plenty of Videogames to date, most notable RPGs. There have been a lot of games also about ‘Time Shifts', when a person either:

1) Arrives in a different planet at a different stage in development (AKA The Star Ocean Theory).

2) A person is thrown into a One Way shift, going to only one place and one time, like in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Chrono Cross.

Time Travel is when the ability to go back through the ages happens nearly at will. If you've ever read The Time Machine by HG Wells, you would see that the doctor had a machine that could go through any time period in human history. If you must, see the movie (but it's crappy).

So, first, do you believe that Time Travel is possible? I personally do. You have to think about the universe, 15 billion light years and expanding at the speed of light (You cannot go faster than the speed of light, because theoretically you could leave the universe!). Not because equations which calculate all of that math are logical to me, but because if you consider that Light travels at about 299 792 548 meters per second, and it takes at least 15 billion years to cross the universe, that's a whole lot of big empty space. Surely there has to be a race out there that has mastered time travel, because it is foolish to think that we human beings are the only logical beings out there.

Do you like Viki? Whenever Viki sneezes, she always ends up in a certain place during an important struggle within the history of the series (She's up to something...). Do you think that there should be another time traveling character? I'm aware that Suikoden III featured Young Viki, but maybe, like Yuber and Pesmerga being the supposed ‘representations' or Chaos and Dharma in the world, and Hikusaak's Circle Rune being symbolic of Order, maybe Viki is representative of Disorder or Spontaneity? It's just something I'm throwing out there, but I think maybe another time traveling character should be introduced (and if it turned out to be Jeane, I wouldn't mind).

Alright, now I am going to talk about Time Travel, and how the philosophy of it works in a few games. There are Spoilers on the games below if you haven't played them. I'll just say that I clearly haven't played every game with time-travel in it, so if you have a few that I don't know about, feel free to drop them in this thread.

1 ~ Chrono Trigger

Story: The story begins in the Kingdom of Guardia in the year 1000 AD. Crono and friends are visiting a fair, when one of them gets sucked into a time warp by Lucca's invention. Crono follows her to 600 AD, where the people think she is the missing Queen of Guardia, and because she had been found history was changed. After escaping Guardia through a portal they come to the world of ruin in 2300 AD, because Lavos, the Destroyer from the heavens, killed the world in 1999 AD except for a fraction of humanity. After that the team decides it must go back in time and defeat Lavos, even if it means altering the unalterable course of human history. And so begins one of the greatest stories ever told.

Much like the ‘sequel', Chrono Cross, the game deals with how actions that alter history and change fate for all people if time is crossed. The world in Chrono Trigger was destroyed in the future, but humanity still survived in packets. Going back in time, from the start point in 1000 AD, to 65,000,000 BC and finally to defeat Lavos in 1999 AD, and fixing the wrongs he did and ultimately saving the planet for the future, they deleted the future of the humanity that would have lived if Lavos still destroyed earth. The effects of their actions are seen in The Dead Sea/Sea of Eden in Chrono Cross.

2 ~ Dark Cloud II

Story — Max and Monica must stop the time-erasing work of Emperor Griffin by rebuilding towns. Eventually they are able to travel forward enough to fight Emperor Griffin, and Max's Mother, who he remembers from his childhood, is from the future and came back to save her husband from being killed, but fell in love with him. That was pretty much what everything in the game hinged on.

For the most part you were only traveling back and forth on individual levels to build the future of the town which the Emperor had destroyed, unlike the first one where you were just building the town. The more houses you had, the greater it looked in the future, and once you got 100% you were able to unlock the event and proceed with the story. Eventually, you get strong enough to get to Emperor Griffin 25,000 years in the future. Once that happens he kicks you back to your own time and takes his true form. Here, you have to collect some special items and then bring them to a ceremonial site to perform a ‘Chrono Union', an extremely far-fetched idea (like I care) that would bring Emperor Griffins Palace into your time. That is really the only big hole in the time travel plot in Dark Cloud II.

So in summation what do you guys think of Time Travel? Not just in games, in books, movies, art and all other forms of media it can be put into. I think when it's executed with a cool curve in the story and other factors that accompany it (like Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross), but if it's bad it's kind of lame (DCII really dropped the ball with it at the end). Games that feature shifts in time, from one period only with a way there as well as a way back can be put on the same level (FYI my favorite game, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a ‘time-shift' game), as long as it's worked into the story well. I never played Onimusha III, or whichever one Samanosuke gets transferred to Paris, but I heard that was awesome. Tell me what you guys think of Time Travel in Videogames.

[Deleted User 1]

Yeah... time travel does feature in many role playing games as it somehow makes thing more interesting, long and a little bit more complex... which also adds on to excitement of time controllong pwoers mwa ha haa...

[Ranadiel]

[Keriaku]

Two games that feature time travel, most notably Final Fantasy 8

(Spoilers below)

In Final Fantasy 8 After defeating Ultemicia, Squall is sent back in time when the group lived with Edea in the orphanage. Ultemicia appeared, dying and Edea decided to take on her powers, so Ultemicia could rest in peace, and that's what starts the time loop in the game, where for the rest of the game Edea has sorrceress powers, and Squall/party eventually fight Ultemicia because of it, meaning if Squall/co hadn't fought Ultemicia, Edea never would have gotten powers, but if Edea hadn't gotten powers, then Squall prboably wouldn't have fought Ultemicia at all, so it's an endless loop.

(End Spoilers)

Also the other game that's whole story revolves around Time Travel is Shadow of Destiny, I think it was one of the launch games for PS2 (Meaning it was really short) But I thought it was a good game (It's a puzzle game, not RPG)
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Inspired by everything

[Leb]

Any well-adversed scientist or mathematician will tell you that there's not even any real way to begin a discusssion on trying to research the idea of time travel (they've done documentaries on it, and you can hear from some of the great minds of our time). It won't be possible 1000 years from now, nor will it be in a million.

[Sage]

First, I'd like to say time travel is possible in a sense, but it's one way. According to special relativity (which I'm currently studying in class) as you go faster, time dilates or becomes longer. I won't go into details (unless you really want to know) but suffice it to say that if you travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light for say 20 years, you could end up hundreds of years in the "future" in your reference. However, you can't go back. So no video game has done this correctly and it would be very boring if they did.

I do like Viki except for the fact that her magic can backfire as would be expected for her character.

I do like the games mentioned that I've played and Onimusha 3 is my favorite of the 3.
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[Benit149]

Final Fantasy VIII's time travel was horribly executed, but the other games mentioned here have somewhat restored faith in time travel if it's done right. I guess I forgot those games in the "Which games do you hate most" thread. Another media I can throw in is a B movie I watched an MST3K episode of called Time Chasers. Highlight below if you want to know what happened.

Our main hero, Nick Miller, somehow invents a time machine in his airplane using a Commodore system and a big floppy disk (this was made in '93-'94). He invites a reporter named Lisa and an ugly dude in pink from Gen Corp to test out the plane, and they eat lunch in a restaraunt (of the FUTURE!) while discussing Nick's invention being sponsored by Gen Corp. Lo and behold, the CEO of Gen Corp, J.K. Robertson, is a sick dude bent on controlling the future, thus Nick and Lisa must stop him. They found this out by going back to the same place they were before in the future, but it's become a wasteland (a very ghetto one, mind you).

And now the "adventures of the average people" begins as Nick and Lisa decide to take Nick's plane to convince Nick in the past to NOT give his invention to Gen Corp. Magically, J.K., seems to read their mind and follows them to the past, where Future-Lisa is killed and Past-Lisa discovers the wreckage as the same as Past-Nick's plane, with HER body inside it. Yes, things get a little confusing from here on. Sorry.

Now the fun part begins as Future-Nick is captured by Future-J.K. and decides to take him to the year 1777 during the colonial wars to kill Nick... in Gen Corp's own time travel plane. Magically, Past-Nick seems to read Future-J.K.'s mind and takes his own plane to 1777 to help his future self fight J.K. Future-Nick and Future-J.K. kill each other, but Past-Nick returns to his time in the future and never sells his invention to Gen Corp. And thus, time has been saved... but not our sanity.

So yes, the storyline above not only gives time travel a bad name, but explains why Time Chasers was a B movie that should remain in the past within some abandoned vault. Pardon the pun. :D

Back to games... of the games mentioned, I've only played DCII and Chrono Trigger. One thing that didn't make sense in DCII was that Max and Monica built the lost villages in the future, and they were restored in the past. Um... wouldn't it make more sense to restore it in the past, return to the future and advance the plot like that? I just don't see it, apart from an off-tangent scene where Gaspard uses all of the artillery in his airship to shoot down two defenseless kids, and yet Max's dinky robot manages to make it fall. But I digress. :roll:

Chrono Trigger's take on time travel was the best executed that I've seen, even though I'm not terribly keen on the Chrono series. Your party members are from different times, yet they work as one to defeat a creature that has affected everyone, no matter what their timeframe is. It's like having Conan the Barbarian, Wyatt Earp, King Arthur and Luke Skywalker team up to stop a monster that somehow affected all of their times. *shrug* I thought it was neat.

The party's actions all affected time somehow, yet it wasn't impossible to keep track of like my summary of Time Chasers. The possibilities of fighting Lavos at any time, even during the fair with just Crono and Marle, further enhances your decisions and how time is affected.
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"Luca Blight, patron saint of population decrease." -- Benit, MST149

Benit149: First Lady of Addervon, Princess of Slight Fever, defender of the Nameless.

[Ranadiel]