ToP's colossal plot hole (spoiler)

[Cless]

I just don't get it. ToP's storyline is broken as hell.

Original timeline: Four heroes battle Dhaos in the past, but instead of being killed, he flees ninety years into the future, where he is sealed by the heroes' descendants. Ten years later he is awakened. Morrison decides the best course action is to send Cless and Mint back to a time just before the original heroes battled him, to get strong enough to come back and destroy him. Okay, great...

Now, it all falls apart in the past. Edward Morrison dies. Cless and co. do battle against Dhaos in the past, and just as in the original timeline, he flees. But this time...he apparently flees to a completely different era.

At this point, how can they possibly return to the original present, or even anything resembling the original present? The game only ever mentions time traveling, not dimensional shifting. With past Dhaos fleeing to a different era, how can you explain this? If he had just fled ninety years into the future just like he did originally, you could make a pretty easy, reasonable explanation. But that doesn't happen. When you get to the present, Dhaos doesn't even recognize as fighting them before, and after you fight him, he dies. He didn't flee again. His body lies there and does not move, and is finally crushed by a collapsing ceiling.

Even if he did flee ninety years and fled after being defeated again, there'd still be a plot hole, but one not nearly as severe as this.

With a time travel story, you're bound to run into paradoxes. But this seriously has to be one of the worst ones I've ever seen.

[me_001]

I don't think it's a plot hole. I think that because Cless and Mint was sent to the past because of Dhaos #1, he can't sease to exist or else Cless and Mint wouldn't have had any reason to go back in the past. And since Dhaos #2 time travels to a different era, he exists as a completly new being. Well, that's my theory anyway...

[Goshi]

My take:

The Dhaos that flees in the past actually goes to the future and becomes a different Dhaos while the one in Present is the original Dhaos. The one that was defeated by the four heroes. Since the new Dhoas retreated in the past before the four heroes could slay him, he was never sealed.

I'm probably wrong though but this seems like the only logical explanation =/

[Kevassa]

Keyword: SNES PLOT 

[Kajitani-Eizan]

indeed, this is an issue :/

when you have time travel, you must necessarily have dimensional shifting. because the moment you arrive in the past, the timeline branches, and now continues along timeline T* instead of timeline T like it originally did.

when they return to the present, why do they go back to timeline T instead of timeline T*? i suppose it's because that's where they came from, so that's where they have to return to. fair enough.

but then when the guy from the future came back to warn them, why did he go from T* future to T present? and then why did they go to T* future instead of T future (which would be peaceful, with no dhaos around)?

the issue is that they seem to take the branching timelines route for the start of the game and to explain how dhaos is still alive even after killing him in the present, but then they seem to switch to the immutable timelnes system later on. that, or they have a weird space-time concept where the original cause of the distortion acts as a nexus, forcing other time travelers to visit that point until the time travel issue is dealt with, or something. very confusing.

now let's say dhaos escapes to the present, recognizes you from the past, and then escapes from there to the future. this means everything happens within one consistent (though non-immutable) timeline, and is thus not only AOK, it's simple. one has to wonder why they didn't go this route.

[Joseph]

I've always assumed that Present Dhaos was the one who time-jumped to the future. Always remember Rule #1 about death in fiction: If the body is never recovered, the deceased are liable to make a dramatic return. Since no one did any post-mortem on ol' Dhaos, we can safely assume that the collapse of the shrine didn't do him in.

Let's also not forget that Dhaos didn't exert his full power in either the Past or Present confrontations. He clearly had a Plan B the whole time. Otherwise, he would've gone all Demon on Cless & pals.

[UraRenge]

CLESS, YOU CAN'T DO THAT! THE FUTURE WILL BE CHANGED! YOU'LL CREATE A TIME PARADOX!!

in all seriousness though, this is mind-boggling.  I mean, why couldn't they make it easy on us and just give us a grandfather paradox like Chrono Trigger did, so that everything resolves itself through the creation of a stable time loop?

I dunno, I always assume that everything someone does during time travel is exactly what they were supposed to do, otherwise the timeline would collapse in on itself.  Like the professor said:

You mustn't interfere with the past. Don't do anything that affects anything, unless it turns out you were supposed to do it. In which case, for the love of God, don't not do it!

[habilain]

Actually, this is a variation on the grandfather paradox. A Grandfather Paradox is where the act of time travel invalidates the circumstances which caused the time travel, which is pretty much the situation here.

As I remember it, ToP seems to be using "Temporal Merging" for resolving temporal paradoxes. Basically this means that the two different timelines are merged together when the party returns from the past. It obviously isn't fully explained how this happens exactly, but it does seem to be what happens. So either there are two conflicting timelines which both happen and are both valid (the past isn't changed, but there is a new past in addition to the original past, and both of these join up in the present - which, when time travel is involved, makes as much sense as saying that you can have two different futures from the same present), or history is altered in such a way that it becomes feasible (for example, Dhaos becomes twins so that both pasts can coexist).

Kaijatani's explanation ("Many Worlds" for those who like the names) doesn't quite work. Specifically, Totus: In the altered future it's been rebuilt, but in the altered present it was never destroyed. As to Chrono Trigger... it used a variant on "Timeline Corruption", which changes history directly, including the history of the time travellers to some degree. Again, not something that works in ToP.

Man... time travel hypotheses makes my head hurt.

[Datschge]

Where is that image with all those different possible timelines (posted by Cyllya before if I remember correctly) when we need it?

Edit: it was done by Waterlilly and posted by ikaw_daw_ako actually, reposting the image:

[gyozilla]

ToP doesn't use a singular timeline, so the Grandfather Paradox issue is gone. Maxwell in ND1 specifically talks about that paradox and that time travel causes you to end up in parallel timelines. So as far as ToP is concerned, it works under branching/alternate timelines.

Original Past Dhaos -> Present Dhaos.
Alternate Past Dhaos -> Future Dhaos.

Original Dhaos:
4207 Battles Edward, Alain, Carole, Winona. Hops to 4294.
4294 Sealed by Tornix, Miguel, Meryl, Maria.
4304a Unsealed, kills Tornix and Chester
4304b Unsealed, KILLED by Cless and co.

Alternate Dhaos:
4202 Battles Cless and co. Hops to 4354.
4354 Sends meteors through time to 4304b to try to stop Cless and co. from being recruited to the Future.
4354 Killed by Cless and co.

Dhaos is more or less free from time. In a sense he can be outside of time, and only binding him with the Eternal Sword could keep him from jumping.


Yeah, there's the issue of being able to not just return to the original timeline, but also return to the alternate timeline. The Present is original while the Future is back to alternate. I guess this can actually be explained in a gimmicky way. Cless and co. travelled to the Present using Thor's time machine. It specifically uses wormholes. Cless and co. and Harrison travelled to the Future using Thor again. You can argue that Thor's wormhole machine can connect to desired timelines. How the Morrison family's time travel skill and the Eternal Sword fit into all this is unclear. It might be the same system or not.


I guess the real problem is still rather, since ToP is stated to work under a branching/alternate timeline system, why does it mix elements from the original with the alternate (a merging of sorts like Kaji and habilain mentioned)?

In the Future (which is alternate), the Town of Miguel is named after Cless' dad. But is he just famous because he's Cless' dad (the guy who defeated Dhaos in the alternate), or that he was part of the team who sealed Dhaos (a result of the original timeline only)?

Also, in original Present after Cless and co. kills original Dhaos, Harrison comes from alternate Future to recruit them and meteors fall from the sky. This was alternate Dhaos in the Future or outside of time sending meteors through time (supposedly called a METEO, an advanced arte of Meteor Swarm) to stop them. How can Future Dhaos of alternate timeline send meteors to the original? Can they be bridged under the same idea as Thor's machine?

[Kajitani-Eizan]

\How can Future Dhaos of alternate timeline send meteors to the original?

clearly, future Dhaos has the Maelstrom Cannon. good thing cless and co. stopped him, or else THE WHOLE UNIVERSE WOULD HAVE DIED.

[Craymel]

After trying to wrap my mind around the mess that is the LOZ time line, when ever I find severe plot holes due to time travel I just breath and come to terms with the fact that it's another case of poor writing.

[UraRenge]

After trying to wrap my mind around the mess that is the LOZ time line, when ever I find severe plot holes due to time travel I just breath and come to terms with the fact that it's another case of poor writing.

it's not so much poor writing as it is the fact that the very concept of time travel is inherently flawed.

[Cyllya]

Yeah, both the many worlds theory (branching time lines) and the "normal" time theory (single time line, gets erased/changed when past is changed) both have plot holes when applied to ToP.

But, Cless, I think your post mixes the plot holes of both together, so it looks even worse than it is. According to the theory that has Dhaos travels to the future period after Cless et al. nearly gut him in the past (and one of him died in the mausoleum), there are multiple time lines, and nothing Cless and Mint did in the past changed the original, which they can go back to. If you're going according to single time lines, Dhaos survived in the mausoleum and traveled to the future from under rocks.

Whether or not Dhaos actually died in the mausoleum is totally up to question. The closest hint we have is that he does time travel away from it in the anime, but the anime changed plenty of other things about that game (never mind the rest of the plot).

The characters are under the impression of a single time line. In ND1, a character who ought to know this stuff says the world uses multiple time lines. In Tales of Phantasia: Katararezaru Rekishi, Dhaos says he can only use space-time travel one more time, which means he wouldn't be able to time travel out of the mausoleum (he used his one last time in the past) and therefore we must be going with the multiple time lines theory. Symphonia works better with the multiple time lines theory.

The merging thing seems to make the most sense but...

They really should have picked a theory, stuck with it, and explained it in the game somewhere.

it's not so much poor writing as it is the fact that the very concept of time travel is inherently flawed.

Nah. It's quite possible to write a plot-hole-free story involving time travel by using either the Many Worlds theorem* or stable time loops.

*Supposedly what ToP used, according to ND1, but ToP failed at it.

I didn't think CT had stable time loops? (At least not for all time travel effects?) But maybe I'm wrong. Some good examples of stories using it without time travel related plot holes are The Dragonriders of Pern, Harry Potter, and Animorphs.

Also, in original Present after Cless and co. kills original Dhaos, Harrison comes from alternate Future to recruit them and meteors fall from the sky. This was alternate Dhaos in the Future or outside of time sending meteors through time (supposedly called a METEO, an advanced arte of Meteor Swarm) to stop them. How can Future Dhaos of alternate timeline send meteors to the original? Can they be bridged under the same idea as Thor's machine?

I still like to think the meteors were a totally coincidental natural phenomenon that the characters blamed on Dhaos because they blame everything on Dhaos. But if he did cause them, that's evidence for multiple time lines. (The meteors fell so close to Yggdrasill. Surely Dhaos wouldn't have risked that if he was dependent on a future form of the same instance of Yggdrasill.)

[UraRenge]

Nah. It's quite possible to write a plot-hole-free story involving time travel by using either the Many Worlds theorem* or stable time loops.

You can handwave anything in a story if you do it right.

Now, what I mean is that the scientific theory behind time travel makes no real sense when analyzed.

I'm lazy, so I'll let Cracked do the talking for me

Hundreds of stories have been written on the subject of time travel, and just about every one of those stories involves some kind of catastrophic disaster, or at the very least, an unhappy ending.

Of course, a lot of physicists think that it's not possible at all, and that the very existence of the universe proves it. Also, if they invent time travel in the future, where are the time travelers?

But there's one lingering theory about the possibility of time travel that kind of makes a lot of sense, and that's that it's not possible until we actually build a working time machine. Maybe you can only travel back as far as the technology actually exists, and after that it's all hovering skateboards and flying steam trains.

Of course, there are plenty of ways in which the universe can f*ck us for daring to violate that most fundamental of laws, cause and effect. We can't even imagine them until we know the first thing about time travel, which we don't. But some speculate that the very attempt to travel back in time could result in the world exploding, imploding, collapsing, shrinking into a singularity, or simply disappearing.

But because we strive to bring you only the weirdest of possibilities, so consider the chronological collapse scenario.

In the distant future, when the stars have burned out and the planets have wobbled out of their celestial orbits, the descendents of humanity will be staring extinction in the face, and if they have access to a goddamn time machine then it's likely they're going to say "f*ck this shit" and just return to a more comfortable point in history.

A flood of refugees from the future might set up home in the present and flourish, until the world ends again and they decide to do what worked last time. And again. And again. Effectively, the moment we switch on our very first time machine, our universe is going to be home to approximately infinity refugees from the future. You do the math.

This actually brings up another plot point.

Who here watches Red vs Blue?

Do you remember when Church went back in time to try and change the past, but he kept f*cking up and actually causing all the events that happened in Blood Gulch?  Fast-forward to the part where all those Churches are in Sidewinder, with new ones constantly showing up because they failed.  Eventually the last Church showed up, because he was apparently the one who ends up doing the right thing and not getting blasted into the past again like all of his past selves did.

Anyway, here is my question:  When Dhaos jumped forward in time to escape, why didn't Cless and co. instead jump backwards, to just a few minutes before Cless and Mint originally arrived in that time frame, then keep repeating the process until they had enough Clesses and Arches to one-shot Dhaos before he could escape.

Of course, if Timecop was any clue, meeting yourself tears the universe a new hole.

[Rhapsody]

But because we strive to bring you only the weirdest of possibilities, so consider the chronological collapse scenario.

In the distant future, when the stars have burned out and the planets have wobbled out of their celestial orbits, the descendents of humanity will be staring extinction in the face, and if they have access to a goddamn time machine then it's likely they're going to say "f*ck this shit" and just return to a more comfortable point in history.

A flood of refugees from the future might set up home in the present and flourish, until the world ends again and they decide to do what worked last time. And again. And again. Effectively, the moment we switch on our very first time machine, our universe is going to be home to approximately infinity refugees from the future. You do the math.

All I can think when reading this is: "Dey turk errr jerrrbs!".