Time travel is a recurring plot element in the Tales series. It is an ability that allows visiting different time periods.
Description[]
Time travel is used by various parties to achieve their goals: antagonists tend to change the course of story to prevent certain scenarios they suffered, while protagonists generally use it to stop antagonists from enacting their plans that turn detrimental to the state of the world. This ability is often used to transport items of various types to different timelines to help combat threat to the world's timeline. A common thing shared between time travelers, mostly protagonists, is limiting information that they are indeed time travelers as it could cause more complications in the timeline. However there is generally very little penalty, if any, for "misplacing" people from their time as they are returned to their original points in time after defeating the final boss.
Appearances in Original Titles[]
Tales of Phantasia[]
In the opening of Tales of Phantasia the Demon King Dhaos escapes from four nameless warriors through time. However, his escape turns to be short-lived as his weakened state allows four other warriors to seal him using two pendants. Ten years later, Cress Albane, Chester Burklight, Mint Adenade, Arche Klein, and Claus F. Lester travel through time to stop the unsealed Dhaos.
Tales of the World: Summoner's Lineage[]
A large part of Frayne K. Lester's quest is to summon the Heroes of Space-Time from the past to deal with the present threat of Xex. Their living selves are brought forward in time.
Tales of Destiny 2[]
In Tales of Destiny 2, the holy woman Elrane has a power to alter timeline through the use of Lens; one such alteration is reviving Leon Magnus who assumes the name Judas and hides his face beneath a bone mask. Kyle Dunamis and Reala travel through time and correct various disturbances across the timeline.
Tales of Xillia 2[]
While there is no time travel in traditional sense, Tales of Xillia 2 has its world in the clutches of Origin's Trial which creates alternate universes, known as "fractured dimensions", of the real world, known as "prime dimension". The Spirius Corporation secretly works on erasing fractured dimensions as they threaten the stability of the prime dimension as those alternate versions of the real world immensely increase the amount of miasma generated by the impurity of humans.
As fractured dimensions work differently from time travel, despite some of them having their time set several years forward or backward from the prime dimension, they are governed by different rules. The most important rule is about an ability of existence of both prime and fractured self in a fractured dimension at the same time, but only one version of self can exist in the prime dimension.
Likely as allusions to fractured dimensions' "alternate timelines" nature, they are the result of the power granted by Chronos, the Great Spirit of Time, with the core of a fractured dimension being known as "Time Factor" in Japanese and "Divergence Catalyst" in English.