By: Joshua Volkers
Now, for those of you who don’t know what this game is, let me do you a favour and give you a few details about its development, background, and story. Chrono Trigger is one of three games on the original Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) developed by the company SquareSoft (now known as Square Enix) that are not only considered to be three of the best games on that console, but three of the best games ever. The other two are Secret of Mana, an action RPG, and Final Fantasy VI, a turn-based RPG, both of which have already had their 20th anniversaries in 2013 and 2014, respectively. To put things quite simply, Chrono Trigger can be seen as a combination of the two games, as its combat is turn-based but you’re not forced into random encounters like in FFVI - you can see the enemies in front of you and can choose to whether or not to fight them about 50% of the time. That’s gameplay and development in a nutshell, but now we get to story.
This game has an incredible story that showcases why videogames are a legitimate form of art. It has its moments of silliness, but it works as a great source of levity. You play as a character named Crono (you can call the playable characters what you want, but the default name is Crono), a silent protagonist who lives in an alternate version of our world and goes to a Millennial Fair in the year 1000 A.D., where he bumps into a girl called Marle and meets up with his friend Lucca. Lucca has invented a teleporter (again, alternate version of our world, so by 1000 A.D. for these guys they have technology such as teleporters) which reacts to a pendant that Marle has by turning into a time machine. Marle gets sucked into this portal, you follow her back in time to rescue her, and from there you are set on a journey to prevent the destruction of the planet in the year 1999 A.D. by a giant creature called Lavos. The journey to get to Lavos and stop it crosses several different periods in time, and is bizarre, strange, sometimes disturbing, sometimes scary, heartfelt, trying, but above all, fun for the person who’s playing.
Delving any further gets into serious spoiler territory, so we’ll stop there. Try to really absorb all of what I just said just there. Doesn’t it sound interesting? Of course it does, because the people behind this game are geniuses. Take note, this is a Japanese game, so it’s perhaps different from what a lot of people play today, but I think that if you do play this game, you notice that a lot of things from this one game have carried over to today. Anyway, the group of people, dubbed the ‘Dream Team’, behind this one game all come from esteemed franchises: Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy; Yuji Horrii, who created a separate series called Dragon Quest; and Akira Toriyama, who created Dragon Ball. All of these creative minds together produced this wonderful gem, and thus led us to talk about it today.
On top of all of that, Chrono Trigger delves into many different themes and has a well-developed cast of likeable and complex characters. There are many instances in which the game is religiously symbolic with the character of Crono as a Christ-like figure. The game also deals with the destruction of civilization due to man’s folly, what it means to be truly human, and so much more. It really is this strange yet wonderful mix of genres and ideas, which is really where its charm lies, in my opinion. And not to mention its technical achievements, such as recording data from actions you’ve made in the game to have a result later, like a trial you’ll have a few hours into the game, the outcome of which is decided in part by your actions. It’s the first game to have such an innovative set of multiple different endings, depending on where you are in the story. It also is the first game to coin the term "New Game +", which allows you to restart the game with all of your previous items, equipment, and level. New Game + had sort of been around before, but Chrono Trigger is the first one to make it mandatory to see all of the content it has to offer. Remember, this is on 16-bit cartridges, which equates to a few MB of memory space on the average smartphone. They managed to do all of this despite those limitations, even with those limited graphics and, the music.
Oh dear heavens, the music! The music in this game is awesome! Again, 16-bit cartridges hold very little data, so trying to create music like that is like trying to draw with crayons, I once heard someone say. Well, those metaphorical crayons created the masterpiece known as the soundtrack for Chrono Trigger. Each piece of music fits in at the right moment, and makes the game that much better. An example of it is below; now, keep in mind that this game was on the SNES, so it’ll sound different. Once you get past that though, you’ll realize how awesome the music for this game truly is. Listen!
Now, after all of that talk, time to score this baby. Note that I played the iOS version of this game, which is not nearly as good as the Nintendo DS or SNES versions, or so I hear. Having played through the port’s constant crashes myself, I can easily testify to that. I give the port a 7/10, but the actually game itself gets a full 10, because it’s a classic with only the smallest of problems. So please, if you were swayed by what I have said here, go get this on DS, as it adds new content that wasn’t in the original, but if you have a SNES and want to play the game on there- go ahead! It’s still a very popular game, so I have no doubt you’ll be able to find it through Amazon, or even eBay in a worst-case scenario.
Like a lot of other things I’m passionate about, I could have written about Chrono Trigger for several more pages, but for the sake of time-efficiency, I’ve got to end it here. So I hope that you enjoyed this very different article, and I’ll see you all next time. Stay strong Titans!
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