Time traveling in video games was a new thing? The first Final Fantasy had time travel. There were other NES games with time travel and earlier SNES games than ToP. Chrono Trigger didn't invent time travel storylines in video games, it just did it better than most (including ToP), and probably was one of the first where you could travel around through time at will, but I don't think you can do that in ToP anyway, so I don't really know what you mean.