Cocoon (maybe spoilers)

[Loony BoB]

I think it's a cop out to say that. You can have a time travel storyline and still have it make sense without gaping plot holes.

I don't think you can, personally. I'm a firm believer of "If you're going to take a time travel story seriously, you're doing it wrong."

Well the point is about having it make sense, not having a story that you personally enjoy. I also like time travel stories where you go back and forth (though not FFXIII-2's 'everything is a paradox' bullcrap), but that's not the only way to do it. As long as you define clear rules and stick to them, you can do time travel right.

The Time Traveler's Wife is the best example of how to do it right and still be a good story. Everything in that book happens as it happens and going back in time doesn't change it. The other method is to have alternate dimensions for each time change, which is done in Star Trek and X-Men. Some of it may be ludicrous, but it at least makes logical sense in context. It's easier to make this work in a novel or comic than in a game, though.

When it gets into alternate dimensions then it's somewhat understandable that it could work, and I think I touched on the Star Trek kind of time travel story being the kind that I'm not getting at - I'm talking about the 'fixed' dimension time travel as is seen in Doctor Who and sort of in FFXIII-2. I say 'sort of' because FFXIII-2, just to make matters even worse than they already were, allows for multiple dimensions AND fixed timelines. So there is 400 AF and 4XX AF, for example, and you can travel to both dimensions at any time and still change a fixed timeline, which is just so wrong it's cringeworthy.

I agree with you in that dimension traveling can work better in film and book form than it would in game form.