After I was inspecting the pile of shit that was Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Rebirth.
The tropes I mentioned are already given the negative stigma thanks to hacks like Nomura and co. for being so obsessed over Time Travel and Multiverse shenanigans without putting effort on the narrative of the games they make and the thing about time itself, that their stories doesn't make any sense, in other words, utter hot garbage. And that they're bad at writing.
It isn't just 7R, FF13 for example, has the character named Yeul, a goddess of time, said at one point, and I shit you not, this isn't trying to oversimplify shit, straight from the horse’s mouth.
"If you change the future, you're changing the past"
If this isn't make you consider a huge redflag, don't worry, there are a shit ton of it which I won't explain it because it's a lot to digest, to put out simply, it's a shit game.

The point is, the tropes in question got a huge flack because of reasons above, but also, shoehorning to other media, making most of the events which had put blood and tears into, absolutely nothing. Since you can just use a deus ex machina to get what you want easier, but most, the characters needs to be retarded to push the contrived plot forward, downgrading the value of storytelling.
Regardless if the media in question, fits in or not, even if it has magic.

Holy shit, are we psychic linked or something?

I was JUST thinking about Final Fantasy 7 Remake/Rebirth and its timeline multiverse shenanigans. And about an hour ago I was rewatching the scene from Chrono Trigger where Lucca travels back in time to prevent her mother's legs from being crushed.

More specifically, I was thinking about how the time travels and multiverse in FF7 Remake/Rebirth were just a cheap marketing scheme in the end. Fans were teased with there being some potentially radical changes to the story, but we're now 2/3 finished with the trilogy and most of the same stuff happens just in a completely bullshit, confusing, "different" way.

Anyways I never really liked time travel in fiction. Unless it's a series specifically built around time travel, like Back to the Future or Chrono Trigger, inserting it into long running series mostly leads to bad results. It almost always complicates the plot, makes for some stupid batshit moments, and adds questions of "why didn't they just do this if they could time travel?"

I still think Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is still one of the best JRPGs of all time. The story kinda falls apart at some points, and sometimes feels like a schizo retelling of the original, but I think what's good is very enjoyable.

I think adding time travel and/or multiverse to a story that was not explictely about them from the very beginning is a writer's cardinal sin. It CAN be done tastefully, but most of the time it comes off a crutch to get out of corners or to keep milking a story beyond its logical end point.

The flaws of time travel are apparent (it breaks the story's logical flow by allowing past events to be undone, and it's almost always a confusing clusterfuck), but multiverse might be even worse. Why should I care about a story's characters when there are infinite selves of them who might be even better or who survived when the others died? It cheapens characters' lives by making them not unique. Why should I stick with THIS universe and not with one that might be more to my liking? That's already the point of fanfiction.

It's fine to have interesting "what-if" stories every once in a while, but trying to connect them all through some grand multiverse is unwarranted. The concept of an infinitely branching, infinitely growing universe is also stupid and raises too many questions in regards to multiversal threats (e.g. if Ultron became multiversal in one universe, why aren't there infinite other Ultros who also did that?)

It can be a lazy excuse for retcon/bad writing but if done right then it can be engaging, like Vampire Hunter D, as a good example.