Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[Iscah]

The direct answer to this would be that there is insufficient evidence to back the claim that you cannot travel between Timesteam A to timestream B and then back to timestream A in terms of FFXIV, especially since the writers have used multiple different ideas as to how time travel works in FFXIV.

I have written previously (and do not have time for the full essay today) that I don't believe they have used multiple ideas – or at least, those multiple ideas can operate within a single consistent set of rules about how time travel works.

TL;DR the time traveller needs to know what happened in the past before they have a hope of changing it, because they need to change the outcome of events they know should happen. G'raha was prepared for this, we were not and could not be.

That can of worms being that half the time, the story treats the WoL as the promotional WoL who is a unique character who we have no say in.

The other half of the time, the WoL is treated like the adventurer from FFXI, wherein we get a wink-wink, nudge nudge that the WoL is us, the player.

You see it during The Rising. You see it when having conversations with, "The Wandering Minstrel." You see it especially in the Iroha crossover Fate events, where you also get the notion that your WoL is somehow intertwined with your adventurer from FFXI.

I think you're stitching together something that isn't there.

A two-minute fourth-wall-breaking conversation per year that is explicitly outside the character's reality and a one-shot crossover event based on FFXI are not proof that "half the time" the writers want to treat us how they treated the FFXI character (if that is accurate).

Even the Iroha event isn't a fourth wall break, it just tries to draw a line between the player's XIV character and their hypothetical XI character.

The closest might be the (IMO over-laboured) business of characters in Endwalker asking whether your journey was good and meaningful, but even then it happens primarily within context of the character, and any "they're really asking us-the-player" is a secondary implicit reading.

The character does not and should not spontaneously acquire knowledge simply because the player knows it, and this has never happened so far.

In a game series that started with the idea of changing fate within the context of a time loop, having a similar theme to challenging fate appear again and again, it really makes Endwalker stand out like a sore thumb. The one time fate can't be changed. The one time fate shouldn't be changed.

Are you talking about 1.0 or earlier FFs? Either way it's nothing that I'm aware of in this game as I know it.

In any case this isn't the first and only time we've had a stable time loop story in FFXIV. Alexander was all about the time loop having to play out consistently and ultimately that we needed to stop time from being altered by an enemy who wanted to overwrite events in their favour.

Elpis doesn't stand out to me at all. It was logical from the moment they talked about going there that this would have to be a case of not disturbing the timeline, just observing events that had already happened, and gaining knowledge of unrecorded history because we need to know that history to save the present.