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A video version of the review can be viewed below.
DEVELOPED BY: Square Enix
PUBLISHED BY: Square Enix
YEAR PUBLISHED: 1995 (SNES), 1999 (PS1), 2011 (iOS), 2018 (Steam)
CONSOLE: Windows (Steam)
Time is a concept that has fascinated me since I was a child. Whilst some argue that time is a human construct, it remains a function of our lives that has existed even before we came to be, and will continue to exist once we expire. As our lives are so fragile and so short lived in the grand scheme of the universe, it’s not uncommon for people to wonder about the possibility of time travel. Imagine if you could go back to correct a mistake that you made in the past in order to better your future.
There have been many attempts through various forms of media to embody the experience of time travel, and gaming is no exception. Though there have been a number of games that have attempted to tackle this topic, at its peak I don’t think any have covered this theme quite as well as Chrono Trigger. Released for the Super Nintendo in 1995, it is considered by some to be one of the greatest games of all time. It may help that the project was developed by three of the most prominent figures in the games, anime and manga industries of the time: Hironobu Sakaguchi the father of Final Fantasy, Yuji Horii the creator of Dragon Quest and Akira Toriyama the manga artist famed for his contribution to Dragon Ball and Dragon Quest. Dubbed the “Dream Team” the project was destined to prevail.
Chrono Trigger has been ported to the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo DS, iOS and the PC (via Steam). I must note that at the time of its release, many considered the Steam port to be a mess. The graphical upgrades created jaggy pixels in the chipsets, and the characters all looked blurred and washed out. The menu interfaces were gigantic and touch based, and the text font was very unappealing. Since many people complained, patches were implemented that now allow people to play the game in its near original form. Some of the changes made were kept intact, but I think that they aren’t all that bad. I’ll discuss them in more detail a little later. For the purpose of this review, I played Chrono Trigger via Steam, set to the original graphical settings.
In Chono Trigger you take on the role of Crono. Crono isn’t a hero by any means. In fact, he’s just a boy living with his mother in the peaceful kingdom of Guardia. The game starts off much like a regular 90s child’s routine. Imagine. Maybe you stayed up too late the night before, so you’re sleeping in. Mum comes in and rips open the curtains, sending a deluge of light slashing down upon your face. “Wake up, sleepy head!” she chastises you. She knows you’re a night owl by nature, but also understands that you wouldn’t want to miss one of the biggest festivals of the century. In this unassuming way, the character is immediately relatable to the player. I know there have been some occasions when I was woken up in the exact same manner as a child. It also helps that Crono is a mute protagonist which further lends to the ability to project yourself onto him.
After sluggishly getting out of bed Crono heads to the Millennial Fair of the Kingdom of Guardia. At the festival he runs into a girl — literally — who introduces herself as Marle, and decides to accompany him for the day. After partaking in various activities, Crono and Marle stop by the sideshow of one of Crono’s famous inventor friends, Lucca. It appears that none of the crowd want to take part in a demonstration of the new machine that she has built, so Lucca urges Crono to try it. The machine transports Crono from one pod to another, much to the delight of the crowd. Marle, not wanting to miss out, decides that she wants to have a go. However, when the machine is powered on it reacts strangely to the pendant that she is wearing, ripping a hole in the fabric of reality, consuming her. Realizing that maybe Marle isn’t who she originally said she was, Lucca urges Crono to follow after. Here the adventure begins.
Travelling back in time and realizing that Marle is actually Princess Nadia of Guardia Kingdom, Crono and Lucca are able to set right events in the past that consequently made Marle cease to exist due to her presence there. After returning to their own time and returning Princess Nadia to Guardia Castle, Crono is accosted and put on trial for her kidnapping. It’s interesting how the game plays this out, as the actions of the player from the Millennial Fair will determine whether Crono is found to be innocent or guilty. For example, if you helped a stray cat back to its owner, the owner will vouch for Crono’s character. What I found fascinating about this trial is the cause and effect theory that is used to determine its outcome. On a micro level, this is what the whole game is really about. Inevitably, regardless of whether or not Crono is declared innocent, he will be scheduled for execution. This echoes the macro level theme of the game, as a whole. Despite what we do in our lives, and despite the changes we may try to make, is our eventual destruction inevitable?
Eventually in a distant future, Crono and his friends discover that the post-apocalyptic landscape is actually their own world, many years in the future. By coincidence they happen to witness captured video footage of the point of their world’s destruction and this sets their resolve to try and find a way to stop this eventuation. I must note that whilst it is possible to achieve the outcome of stopping this event, the ending placed into the DS Remake of the game, and events in Chrono Cross, the sequel, suggest that whilst the world didn’t get destroyed, the people that Crono and his friends tried to protect will soon perish anyway, even if it’s not in the same way.
During the course of the game, Crono and his party can travel to a number of eras along the timeline of the planet, from the Prehistory era of 65,000,000B.C. where the world is in its primitive stage, right through to the post-apocalyptic future of 2,300A.D.. Each of the different time periods have their own storylines, and affect each other in varying ways. For example, in 1,000A.D. there is a race of people called Mystics who despise humans and thus inflate their store prices when you attempt to buy anything from them. This is due to a war that occurred in 600A.D.. However, if you remove the leaders of the Mystic’s army in 600A.D., then the 1,000A.D. Mystics become peaceful and will allow you to buy goods at the normal rate. I think the game did a great job of reflecting the “butterfly effect” changes across the different timelines from the past through to the future. One of the things that I liked about the time travel system was that nothing seemed out of place or anachronistic in each respective time period.
The cast of playable characters in Chrono Trigger is limited to just seven, with the three characters I previously mentioned from 1,000A.D., and an additional four: Frog, a soldier of Guardia Kingdom who was turned into an anthropomorphic amphibian. Robo, a metal construct from the far future. Ayla, a cave woman from the distant past, and another character who plays a pivotal role as he appears in multiple eras and can optionally be recruited. Whilst usually smaller parties are great because it allows for character interaction and development, I felt that this was one of the game’s weaknesses. Due to the way that the game is programmed, characters will not interact with each other, but rather produce a variant of dialogue based on who’s in the party at the different plot events. For example, when you take Ayla with you, most of her dialogue is primitive conversation that doesn’t really move the plot or her character forward. Most of the interaction and development, rather, happens between non-player characters and the party. This doesn’t make the game bad, by any means, however it limits the amount of development the party has, especially within their interaction with each other. I feel like I must mention this as the game is often toted as being one of the best games ever, but I felt like this is an area that could be improved upon. That’s not to say that the characters are as dull as trying to guess the winning racer at the Millennial Fair. Far from it. In fact, the character that has the most development was Frog. We see his past, his present, and how he overcomes the situation that he’s been placed into, growing not only as a soldier, but also as a person.
When traversing the different areas of the game, Crono and his party will need to fight a variety of monsters. Whilst most games of the Super Nintendo era would have random encounters to initiate battles, in Chrono Trigger the enemies appear on the field map. In some cases it’s possible to avoid a battle by avoiding the enemy, though some battles are scripted and the enemies will ambush your party. Rather than the battle taking place on a different screen, the characters and enemies will fan out into their positions on the same screen that they are encountered on. What I really enjoyed about this was that characters and monsters would observe the rules of nature when moving within the battlefield. If there is a cliff, or a hole in the ground, or an obstacle, the character will make their way around it before initiating their attack. It’s clear that a great level of detail went into the programming of the characters and enemies so that they obeyed these laws. It made the game seem more alive to me, and was a detail that I really appreciated.
Battles are conducted using the Active Time Battle system from the Final Fantasy series where characters need to wait a predetermined amount of time, dependent on their speed, before they can attack. Characters can attack, use Techs, or items. In the case of Techs, Chrono Trigger has the option of Double and Triple Techs. If two or three characters are ready to take their turn and have compatible techniques, they can be combined to create a more powerful move. These are all predetermined, and you will learn these at the end of a battle where two or three compatible members are present in the party. Many of these techniques are visual eye candy, and stand up even against today’s standards of pixel art.
In battle, the HUD will display the characters health and MP stats at the bottom right side, whilst their action box will pop up along the bottom when it’s their turn. Hovering over the characters are also the ATB gauge, and their HP gauge which is an update to the iOS and Steam version of the game. I have previously seen someone complain about the HP gauge being unnecessary as the character’s HP is already displayed down on the bottom right, however I disagree. In the event when you are choosing a spell or an item to use, you cannot see the character’s HP as the technique or inventory screen takes up the whole row. If you are fighting a boss and are waiting for another character for a combo attack, or waiting for an enemy’s attack animation to finish, having the green HP bar over the characters gives you a good indication of whether a character needs to be healed, or if you can wait and heal later. Though the game was never difficult for me, I appreciated that battles often had a strategic element to them as some monsters would consume others to restore their health, whilst other monsters needed to have a certain spell used on them in order to render them weak. Discovering the best and quickest ways to dispatch the different enemies was an aspect of the game that I really enjoyed.
Chrono Trigger was released late into the lifespan of the Super Famicon, and this really shows in the quality of the pixel art. I really appreciated even the smaller details that were included to breathe life to the world, such as the twinkling of running water in a stream, or how the lead character would shake their head when they were walking into an object, as if to chastise the player controlling them. Additionally, if a character is left idle on the world map they will eccentrically try to get the player’s attention. These details really made me feel a connection to the world and the characters.
Some of the key scenes are punctuated with anime cutscenes that serve to better express the situations. I think that the majority of these work well within the plot, however there are some other scenes that I would have liked to see illustrated in the same way. These cutscenes first appeared on the Sony PlayStation version of the game, which were grainy at the time. I am happy to say that the quality of the scenes are now very crisp.
The music was mostly composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, with the assistance of Hironobu Sakaguchi rounding out the soundtrack after Mitsuda became too sick to work. The tracks all fit the environments and eras that they were composed for. I also really appreciated that some areas were completely absent of music in favor of ambient sounds, particularly places like the Guardia Prison and Truce Canyon come to mind when talking about this. If I had to pick a favorite track it would be a tie between the theme that plays inside Guardia Castle, and the theme of the Kingdom of Zeal. The former captures the courage and pride of the nation of Guardia, and the later embodies the mysteriousness of the enlightened people who reside on a mass of land floating in the heavens.
The Steam version of Chrono Trigger includes all the updates that were made to the Nintendo DS version of the game, so I was able to try one of the new quest lines, the Lost Sanctum. Whilst I can appreciate that Square Enix put new content in the game, I question the design choices of this quest line in particular. For starters, it only correlates between two time eras; 65,000,000B.C., and 600A.D.. Even in this limited scope, some of the writing is very sloppy, and changes aren’t reflected accurately. For example, at one point in the plot you discover that there is a rival tribe that has decided it wants to eat all the villagers, so Crono’s party decides to stop them. If you don’t continue the quest there, and go to 600A.D., the villagers are still healthy and hale indicating that either they managed to fend for themselves, which is unlikely, or it was a development oversight. Many of the quests give rewards that are obsolete compared to equipment obtained via other quests that were already in the base game. The new quests are all fetch quests that have you returning time and time again to the same areas, trekking through the same enemy encounters. I thought the design choices of the game were wonderful until I had to slog through this side quest. If you are thinking of taking it on, I wouldn’t suggest it unless you’re a completionist and are completely bored, with nothing better to do.
The game has a New Game Plus mode, and was actually one of the first games in the genre to do this. If you choose New Game Plus, you will restart the game with all your equipment and levels, minus your money. By tackling a new game you can take on Lavos earlier in the story, and based on this can attain up to thirteen different endings for the game. There is a new ending that came with this version of the game, obtained by also completing another side dungeon called the “Dimensional Vortex” and defeating a harder version of the last boss. This can only be tackled in New Game Plus. I didn’t do it myself as I am not a fan of the New Game Plus mechanic, as usually once I have beaten a game, I want to move onto the next one. Sadly, I have finite time in my life for games, compared to when I was a child. If only I could time travel to the past so I can play more games with the boundless time that I had up my sleeve. If you do like replaying a game, though, then this game certainly has replay value.
Does Chrono Trigger truly deserve the title of one of the best games ever made? I think so. The colorful cast of characters and locations are definitely ones that will stay with you long after you have beaten the game. The themes contained within also echo modern existentialism theories, and further cement themselves in the psyche. If you have not yet had the pleasure of playing this game, I would recommend that you try to find an opportunity to play it.
Beat Byte Bravo 