Videogames of my life - Chrono Trigger
If you are passionate about RPGs then you likely have a title that has been engraved into your heart. The title you can always come back to and enjoy it like it’s still the very first time, that title that you know so well you might as well play it blindfolded.
There’s a couple of titles like that for me, but among them there’s one in particular that has a very special occasion recurring this year, and even if I’m a bit late on the clock for that, I still wanna take some time to dedicate a little homage to one of my absolute favourite RPGs!
Happy Birthday Chrono Trigger!
March 11th, 1995: the date in which this milestone in gaming history landed on the Super Famicom in Japan. The game was produced a team of talent that can only happen once in a lifetime: Yuji Horii, Dragon Quest’s director, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy’s director, Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball’s author, Yasunori Kitase e Nobuo Uematsu at the soundtrack and Masato Kato in one of his very first roles as a writer.
With the body of talent on display here, there’s really no surprise that Chrono Trigger is still remembered and celebrated as one of the greatest videogame works ever, to some is even a once in a lifetime event. Masato Kato tried to continue the work on the universe with Chrono Cross but it couldn’t manage to garner the same level of praise as its predecessor.
So what’s in this title that makes it so special to people to the point that even a sequel doesn’t seem feasible? To the point that, for some people, it doesn’t even need any sequel or remaster or remake? A game being so perfect that its original incarnation on the SNES is the only one that should matter?
The only way I can answer that is by telling you my experience with Chrono Trigger.
How did it all begin?
Being European I wasn’t lucky enough to be able to play Chrono Trigger at launch, just like many others by Squaresoft, this game was only published in North America. Chrono Trigger was one of many games that I was only able to experience thanks to emulation: I still remember the first time I was able to see it in action. I was at a family friend’s house and I was awestruck from the beginning. The environments looked gorgeous, the characters were really well animated and once I saw the time portal appearing for the very first time, I knew I was hooked… I HAD to play that game.
Keep in mind all of this happened around 2004-ish. Nowadays we are lucky to have this game easily accessible on Smartphone and PC, we had to wait until 2009 when the game finally came out in europe for the Nintendo DS! Emulation is always a very much discussed topic because of how much of a grey zone it is, but I honestly think it’s extremely important for us to have that option in order to discover some classics that otherwise we wouldn’t have any access to. That emulator not only made me discover Chrono Trigger, it was also my gateway to the Mana series which I still love to this day… But that’s a story for another time.
About the plot
The story begins in the year 1000 AD in the Kingdom of Guardia. A boy named Crono is due to attend the Millenium Fair to meet his childhood friend Lucca who is giving an exhibition of her latest inventions. Along the way he meets with a mysterious girl named Marle and friendship immediately sprouts between them.
However, no one could’ve ever anticipated that Marle’s necklace would kickstart a chain reaction, tearing the fabric of space and time and transporting Marle 400 years in the past, when the girl volunteered to test out Lucca’s newly invented teleporter. It’s during one of these time travels that the group of friends will make the discovery of a dark future for the world and they’ll try anything in order to prevent it.
Time Travel is a narrative device that should be used very cautiously, but Chrono Trigger manages to handle it with extreme care. The rules of time travel are quickly established very clearly; There’s always a lot of attention, during the trips between the different periods in history, to never leave a trace of paradoxes that could potentially ruin the flow of the narration.
The story is mainly a mystery, a research for the answer to “What’s causing this apocalypse and how do we stop it?”, with the group doing everything in their power while traveling from period to period and putting together the pieces to the puzzle and trying to shape the future for the better. Everything is carried by a very quick narrative pace, that doesn’t leave any room for fluff, and the very exceptional cast of characters.
Lucca, a genius with a passion for science, she is the most motherly and altruistic of the group, Marle is the peppy rebel who is also the driving force of the group, Frog is the proud warrior turned into a frog, in a quest to rediscover his worth and what makes a true hero, Robo, a robot from the future who is going to discover the true meaning of life and humanity and last but not least, Ayla, the powerhouse cavewoman who’s very happy to lend a hand if that means facing a worthy opponent.
You might be asking yourself…haven’t I forgotten someone? Someone extremely important....? Oh right, how silly of me, I haven’t talked about Crono! Unfortunately being a silent protagonist he doesn't have much leeway for a more in-depth personality other than being the hero that does the right thing. But I feel this is where the expressive pixel art of the game really shines when defining his character and attitude in the most important moments. During the Millenium fair there are lots of little secrets and hidden actions that you can do just to have the game judge your attitude at a future point and scold you accordingly. It's a neat little touch that leaves an impression.
Regardless, I cannot help but think of what could’ve been if Sakaguchi got his own way instead of Yuji Horii and had a Crono that was actually able to communicate with dialogues. It could’ve been the cherry on top of an exceptional party.
At every step of the way, every revelation, every development, every new time period that was shown, I was literally glued to the screen, anxious to find out what was waiting for me in future events. To make everything even more unforgettable is the soundtrack by Yasunori Mistuda. Every single musical piece of this game is a masterpiece, whether it would be a happy day at the fair with your friends, the peaceful atmosphere of an enchanted kingdom, the sadness of a girl trapped in the chains of her fate or the awakening of a hero that found his strength to fight one more time. This is one of those soundtracks that will stay with me my whole life.
About the Gameplay
It’s hard for me to remember if this was the first time I was even introduced to turn-based JRPGs. I of course knew about the genre’s existence, Final Fantasy was everywhere during my childhood even though I was never able to play it on the Playstation. I was more used to fast paced games, but I quickly got used to what a game like Chrono Trigger was asking of me, something less blunt and reckless and more tactical and thoughtful… at least in the early stages!
Chrono Trigger follows the well tested formula of both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, while at the same time introducing some little tidbits here and there to make itself stand out compared to the other: first of all is the complete lack of random battles, enemies are visible on the map, and most of them can be easily avoided. It also allows the player to play more with the environment during some battles, for example an enemy with a wooden hammer can have his weapons burnt and made useless if hit with a fire attack.
Another fun detail is the impact of enemy positioning on the battlefield. Enemies in Chrono Trigger aren’t static; they will keep moving around and their positioning is very important to keep track of during combat. One of the first battles you ever fight in this game is the great Robo Gato, who teaches us from the very beginning that attacking him while close to our characters, will result in an immediate counter attack, while if we wait for him to be further from us he won’t have a chance to retaliate.
I know it might sound like very simple stuff nowadays but this was the very first time I saw something like this and this game takes advantage of a lot of little details with enemies animations: a different stance from the enemy might result in a different reaction, hit an enemy with a magic attack instead of a physical one and he will retaliate in different ways; even two enemies being close together during battle might result in a new kind of attack and thus you have to constantly on the lookout for them.
And I still haven’t mentioned a key component in making these battles so satisfying… combo attacks! Every character in Chrono Trigger has a set of techs that will be learnt the more they get used in battles and the best thing about these techs is that they can be combined into double or even triple techs! This is the gameplay part that I always loved the most about Chrono Trigger. The first time I saw Crono’s cyclone combine with Lucca’s flamethrower to create a fire cyclone I was ecstatic!
I haven’t seen anything like that before in a game and that led me into trying every single possible combination just to see what kind of crazy magic would’ve been shown, it’s basically tradition for me at this point, every time I replay Chrono Trigger, I have to unlock all of the techs. It doesn’t matter if I don’t end up using some of the characters, I still have to see them all.
This game is one of the best at making every single character useful in some way! My favourite team is Crono, Robo and Ayla, pure brute strength at the cost of some support skills, but this doesn’t have to be your priority, you can experiment to your heart’s content, find your comfort zone or just use your favourite characters, there are no wrong choices in team composition here. Actually, if you played this game endless amounts of times just like me, please let me know what your favourite party composition is, I’m really curious!
In Conclusion
I think I lost count of all the times I played Chrono Trigger, I tried every single version available, and to this day I still go back to it on the regular. I know this game so well that I was basically a talking guide to some of my friends that were playing it for the first time. It's almost a meme making fun of me for how well I know this game and…honestly I probably deserve it a bit!
The more time passes the more I happen to see people begging for a remake or a remastered for this game and every time I feel more and more conflicted about it. This game is already a classic and a masterpiece in its current form, a remake can surely expand and enrich the narrative, offering more nuance, giving more space to some characters and scenarios, it might even give Crono a voice… At the same time though, I feel there’s really no need for that to happen, let’s just make this current game more readily available to everyone so that it could be easily played and enjoyed. I really feel this game is already perfect just as it is.
If you’re curious about it don’t hesitate to try it, it’s available on both Steam and Smartphone, so you’re not lacking when it comes to options, and who knows, maybe one day Square will finally decide to release it on consoles. This is a game that every fan of the genre should try at least once, because games like these are really only one in a million.
Thank you Chrono Trigger, cheers to another 30 years together!
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| Art by Lily |
I know I left some stuff out and some fans might wanna know how I feel about certain moments of the game so, everyone follow me to the…
SPOILER SECTION - Proceed at your own risk
Most of you have probably noticed by now that I willingly neglected to mention a certain character in the plot section, so I think it’s high time that we talk about Magus, the first time I ever saw a villain join the hero’s party.
During his childhood he was known as Janus, one of the sons of the queen of the kingdom of Zeal, a city floating in the sky which was prosperous thanks to the discovery of magic, which helped them in creating their own utopia. But as always happens in this kind of story, their own hubris ended up being the reason for their downfall. Queen Zeal was blinded by the power of magic gifted to them by Lavos, and one day she asked more than what she could handle, thus the kingdom fell and Janus’s sister Schala also died that day.
The tragedy of his backstory is fascinating, and it certainly gives more significance to his mission, which becomes more than just a chase for absolute power, and it’s at that very moment that the games gives us a choice: do we wanna face him for the very last time or we want to spare him? If we choose the latter he would then join our party! The first time I played the game I ended up facing him because I couldn’t even imagine that it was possible for him to join us, and once I tried the other option and found out it was a real shock for me. Magus is also a very strong character gameplay wise, maybe the strongest in the entire game, unfortunately as a way to balance that he cannot combine his techs with any other character in the party, accentuating his lone wolf nature.
Magus I feel is one of those things that could be improved a lot in a remake: you can still keep him as an optional character but giving him more substance and interactions with the rest of the party if you choose to recruit him, especially since it would be logical to assume that Frog wouldn’t be happy about him hanging around and it would be fun to explore that dynamic of a forced coexistence for the greater good.
Whether or not you decide to recruit him it’s totally up to you, and it’s honestly nice for the game to give you the choice instead of forcing you to bring him along for the ride if he's not a character you’ll want in your party.
Another scene that left me completely speechless was Crono’s death! Usually the main character is an irreplaceable and untouchable member of the story, and to see Crono after so far in the story, in a point that could’ve reasonably been the climax of the game, being completely vaporized in his first match against Lavos… it’s an indelible image in my mind.
Did you ever have those moments that left you stone faced, speechless in front of a screen? To me that was one of those! And it’s not something that’s handled lightly, everyone in the party is impacted by this event, grieving for him, and even if the game does give you a chance to bring him back to life you can still finish the game without resurrecting him! Yes, it does feel wrong to end the game like this and the ending you get is predictably sad… but how many games give you this type of choice? It does really highlight how strong the group bonding really is.
Which leads me to the most iconic scene which is always the first thing that pops into my mind whenever this game is mentioned, the camping scene in Fiona’s forest. This is the climax of a wonderful sidequest where the group is helping a girl named Fiona in preventing the forest south of Guardia to be turned into a desert in the present.
One single great moment of peace where all the characters stop and reminisce about everything that happened to them during the game: the origin of all the time gates, the possible entity that seems to guiding them to saving the world, everything encapsulated by one of the most gorgeous and evocative pixel art in the entire game… And as a cherry on top, the culmination of the relationship between Robo and Lucca.
Not only they’ve been able to see each other once again after 400 years, since Robo decided to help Fiona in the past thus forcing poor Lucca to fix him up one more time, but during that night, Lucca finally gets the chance to face her greatest trauma, which led her to become the scientist she is today… The incident that caused her mother Lara to lose her legs.
Whether you manage to prevent the tragedy or you fail in changing the course of history, Robo will be there waiting for Lucca to return and offer her comfort, if you end up failing he even offers Lucca to donate his own legs in order to help her mother to walk again. It’s one of the most touching scenes ever put in a videogame for me.
I could go on and on, praising this game, with all the epic moments for Frog, the whole different endings you can get depending on when you decide to defeat Lavos and all the little flourishes and touches in the good ending… But then this blog post will end up being like 20 pages long.
So all that’s left is to leave it up to you, share with me all your favourite Chrono Trigger moments, what left an impact on you the most, you favourite characters, whether or not you ended up recruiting Magus, if you feel a remake is needed or you think the original game is perfect this way. I can’t wait to read your answers!
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