Chrono Trigger
Super Nintendo
Nostalgia Factor:
Despite being an all-time classic in the minds of many gamers, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with Chrono Trigger. As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, I grew up with a Sega Genesis as a kid. As a result, I missed out on this game in the 90s when it was big. Almost all of my grade school pals had a Super Nintendo. I had to listen to them talk all the time about how great Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger were, and it always made me feel left out. I wanted so badly to go out and get a Super Nintendo for myself. I never did until I was much older, though.
I ended up playing and beating Chrono Trigger around 2008, but I don’t remember any of it. This was during the heavy drinking phase of my life. I also played A Link to the Past around the same time, and I don’t remember any of that either, for the same reason. In fact, I don’t remember a LOT of what happened back then. Playing Chrono Trigger now in 2019 was like playing it for the first time.
Story:
As an old-school JRPG, Chrono Trigger's storyline is just as important as its gameplay. While I don’t think that the game’s storyline is as great as, say, Final Fantasy VII’s, it is still pretty good. What makes this game unique is that it revolves heavily around time travel. Different things you do in the past can affect how the game plays out when you travel into the future.
Things start out simply enough. You take control of a young man named Chrono. He wakes up one day, excited to go visit his friend Lucca’s science exhibit at the big Millennial Fair taking place in town. Lucca’s experiment is meant to act as a transporter of sorts, kind of like you see on Star Trek. Beam a person from one platform to the other. During the demonstration, things go horribly wrong.
A rift in time is opened, and it sucks in a passerby, a girl that Chrono just met. The rift closes behind her. You find out that the girl who disappeared (Marle) was the King’s daughter. Oops. Lucca does some tinkering and is able to recreate the time portal. Lucca and Chrono jump in, in an attempt to find Marle and bring her back.
The effects of messing with the timeline quickly make themselves apparent. In the past, Chrono and Lucca visit the royal palace and find Marle, who vanishes before their eyes. See, Marle looks exactly like one of her ancestors, a girl that was kidnapped by bandits and had to be rescued from them. Because the royal family in the past thinks that Marle IS the princess and is present in the castle, they never go looking for the real kidnapped princess. As a result, the real princess is killed by the bandits and Marle’s bloodline dies out and she is never born. Heavy stuff.
Stuck in the past, Chrono and Lucca come to the conclusion that they have to find and rescue the real missing princess and restore the timeline, which they do. This restores Marle, who reappears out of nowhere. Their job done, the heroes try to return home, but more bad stuff happens. They accidentally shoot themselves too far into the future, which is a bleak and desolate land. Humanity is nearly dead, killed off by a powerful creature called Lavos.
Destroying Lavos and stopping him from eventually destroying humanity becomes your new goal. You and your party have to travel through different time periods, discovering the origin of Lavos and trying to gauge when he is at his weakest to kill him (which is in the past when he first shows up). A fun thing about this game is that you can actually attempt to kill Lavos at almost any point you want. You’ll get massacred because you aren’t tough enough if you do this too early in the game, but hey you can always try.
There are many other time traveling quests and missions that you have to undertake in the meantime, but I’m only here to recap the essentials. Your first time through, you don’t want to fight Lavos too early. You want to play all the way to the end of the game before you take him on. Killing him officially ends the game and opens up New Game Plus. When you start a New Game Plus, you start with all your fancy equipment and you keep your high levels. Because you start out the game at a high level, you can feel free to challenge Lavos immediately. Beating him while there are still plot threads dangling about changes the game’s ending. In fact, I hear there are about 20 different endings you can see depending on when you choose to challenge him. While this is a freaking awesome feature that adds a lot of replay value to the game, I got places to be and things to do and plenty of other games to play. I only played the game and beat it one time. If I ever pick it up again in the future I will probably start from my New Game Plus and check out some of the endings. But not now.
Gameplay:
This is a very traditional turn based RPG. You can select to either attack, use an item, or use magic each turn. Combat takes place using an active time counter, so be sure that you are prompt when making your selections. Take too long, and the computer can sneak multiple attacks in while you are still making a selection. You usually have three people in your party. I like to keep people who are strong both physically and with magic attacks in my party, along with one healer.
What I like about combat in this game is that the battles are not randomly generated. You can normally see enemies on the map, and then decide whether you want to attack them or sneak by. Sometimes enemies will hide and pop out at you, but once you beat them, they’re gone. This is a HUGE addition to this game. I’ll use Final Fantasy VI as an example why. I’d enter a new area, take two steps, and get attacked. After the battle, I’d walk around for a few seconds and then I’d get attacked. After that battle, I’d walk around for a few seconds and get attacked. On and on it went. While this is typically how RPGs work, that doesn’t mean I have to like it. If anything, I think it actively discourages exploration, particularly in more challenging areas. In Chrono Trigger, I was free to explore to my heart’s content.
Aside from the battles not being randomly generated, most of what you see in Chrono Trigger you have probably seen in other RPGs. You have towns and villages where you talk to NPCs. There are stores where you can buy or upgrade items. There are treasure chests out in the field that contain helpful stuff. You gain EXP when you defeat enemies in battle, which helps you level up and become more powerful. If it wasn’t for its name, this game could have easily passed for a Final Fantasy title.
Graphics:
This game truly looks fantastic. Just because it is old doesn’t mean it has to look bad. I think it has held up wonderfully over the years. The characters are all well-designed. They may look a little pixelated if you zoom in on them, but I think they are nicely drawn and very charming and expressive. The landscapes are varied and dynamic, featuring many iconic set pieces. Like I said, I didn’t grow up with Chrono Trigger, but I still recognize many of the locations from the game. The Millennial Fair, Zenan Bridge, the Dactyl Nest, the ruined future, Lucca’s house, the campfire. All of these are iconic locations that even people who aren’t fans of the series may still be able to recognize.
Everything is so bright, colorful, and full of life. If I had to compare this game’s graphics to those of Final Fantasy VI, which came out just a year earlier, this game definitely wins. You could even argue that the graphical style holds up better than later generation RPGs like Final Fantasy VII and VIII. 24 years after this game’s release, and it still looks good. I think it will still look good in another 24 years, and another, and another. Chrono Trigger’s graphics have a timeless appeal.
Sound:
While Chrono Trigger may look better than Final Fantasy VI, I can’t say that it sounds better. Sure, there are a few pleasant or “nice” tunes in this game, but none of the game’s music stood out to me as being particularly memorable or iconic. When you look at Final Fantasy VI (I hate to keep comparing these two titles, but they were made by the same people and came out around the same time), that game has loads of memorable, iconic musical tracks. I am not sure if I could identify more than two or three Chrono Trigger songs. Not to say that the music is bad, I’ve just heard better. Much better.
The game’s sound effects are fine. No complaints here. Final Fantasy vets will recognize the high pitched beep sound the game makes when you navigate menus. I can’t say anything else really stood out to me as far as the game’s sound. Chrono Trigger is a very good game, but its audio is one area where I found it to be a little bit lacking.
Overall:
I came into this game after reading all of its glowing reviews and seeing it ranked highly on many people’s top RPG lists. Heck, it even cracked the top 5 on several peoples’ top GAMES list, period. The bar for Chrono Trigger was set very high for me. There are so many opinion pieces out there stating that this is one of the best games ever made. So is it?
I have mixed feelings on the subject.
There is no denying that this is a good game. In fact, I would even say that this is a REALLY good game. It charmed me right from the very start. The story, the characters, the graphics, the music (even if I can’t remember much of it), and the controls all came together to create the definitive 16-bit RPG. Everything that you want an RPG to be, this game is.
The first ten hours or so of Chrono Trigger, I had an absolute blast with. I was having a much better time with this game than I was with FFVI when I first started playing it. To me it was so much more fun, colorful, and charming. I was really digging the game’s storyline too. I’d say my enjoyment of the game started to slow down the first time I got lost.
I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I had stopped playing for a couple of days because I was busy. When I came back, I couldn’t remember what was going on or where I was supposed to go next. I talked to all the characters in my vicinity and came up with nothing. I visited a bunch of locations in the area and came up with nothing. I returned to The End of Time (which is basically the game’s time traveling hub) and came up with nothing. There is even a character who hangs out in the End of Time who is supposed to give you clues and help you when you are stuck, but all he would tell me is “come visit me if you need help!” Well, I need help now, you shithead! Screaming at the TV didn’t make him change his tune however. I traveled to different time periods and I STILL couldn’t find out where to go next. I had been trying to beat the game without the help of an online guide, but after several hours of wandering around aimlessly I was forced to cave in and look for help.
Turns out, I had to travel to the middle-ages and go to the castle, where I had to go to the kitchens and talk to the cook, who would give me food to deliver to the troops on the front line. Then the battle would move on, and I could advance the plot. A somewhat obscure task, especially after being away from the game for so long. But the kicker is, I had already talked to the cook earlier in the game and he didn’t have anything important to say to me. How TF should I have known I’d have to return to him in order to get the game’s storyline rolling again? I wasted so many hours when an NPC could have easily, EASILY pointed me in the right direction. This isn’t the only instance of something like this happening for me. I got stuck like this at several different points during the game and had to look to the internet for help. Very annoying.
I also wasn’t infatuated with where certain parts of the storyline went. This became an issue for me when the team traveled to the Kingdom of Zeal. Maybe it is because we weren’t given a proper history of the world of Chrono Trigger, but I had a hard time telling what was going on, who was who, and where these characters fell in to the grand scheme of things.
The game is very short. I beat the whole thing in under 20 hours, and that is even with all the time I spent aimlessly wandering around when I’d get lost. Sure, the multiple endings add a tremendous amount of replay value to the game, but I’d rather have a longer game than one you have to play through multiple times to see all its content.
Expect to spend a lot of time grinding, too. This issue wasn’t particularly bad for me as I was playing through the story, but when I got to the end where I had to fight Lavos, I quickly discovered that I was woefully under leveled. I battled through about 10 or so variations of Lavos, only to have the last one kill my entire party in one hit. That meant that not only did I have to go back and seriously level up, but also that I would have to sit through those 10 fights again the next time I wanted to take on Lavos. No spank you! There was a lot that was good about this game, but a lot that was bad too.
So yeah. My feelings on the game are mixed. If you’d asked me at the eight or nine hour mark what I thought of the game I would have said it was an A+. Ask me a few hours after that and I would have said an A. Then I would have said an A-. Then it would have been in the B range. The longer I played the game, the more I began to dislike it. That shouldn’t be the case. You are supposed to like a game the more you play it, not the other way around.
All in all, I did enjoy this (slightly) more than Final Fantasy VI, so it gets a (slightly) better grade. But still, for a game as insanely hyped up as Chrono Trigger, I expected more. Not to say I hated the game, only that it did not meet or exceed the expectations I had for it. Good game. Really good game. But an all-time classic? Ehhhhhh……
Maybe if you grew up with the game, you’d see it different from me. But that’s my stance and I’m sticking to it.
Overall:
B
And here is my Final Fantasy VI review, since I reference that game so many times in this one!
Final Fantasy VI
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