Post by George Darling on Feb 14, 2009 18:11:11 GMT -8
• Warning: This review contains spoilers •
Being one of my favorite video games ever made, I’ve been meaning to do this review for a long time, and since an enhanced version of Chrono Trigger was ported to the Nintendo DS but a few months back I decided it was high time to get in gear and write this out.
Released in the early 1995 for the Super Famicon (Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, to us Westerners), Chrono Trigger was conceived and worked on by what was then the RPG ‘Dream Team.’ The game was a collaboration between the two largest RPG software titans at the time – Squaresoft (renowned for the Final Fantasy series) and Enix (renowned for the Dragon Quest series). Big names include Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), Yuuji Horii (know for his work throughout the Dragon Quest series) and Akira Toriyama (whose best known for his works in the Dragon Ball series). The game’s soundtrack was composed by Yasunori Mitsuda and later, when he fell ill late in production, Nobuo Uematsu (composer who composed the music for Final Fantasy I through XII) completed his work and finished the remaining scores.
While a collaboration like this may not seem like a big deal to today’s gamers (after all, Squaresoft and Enix have since merged into a single company – Square-Enix), at the time it was a huge deal. And, being as so much hype was backed behind such a respectable development team, it may be easy to fall into the category of being ‘overrated’. Thankfully, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The end result showed an amazing amount of innovation, ambitiousness and general love as a result of the developer’s blood and sweat. Chrono Trigger is not only tied as my favorite RPG of all time, only neck-and-neck with Final Fantasy VI, but it also one of my favorite games of all time, period.
The Story:
The world in which the protagonists inhabit is referred to as earth, but it’s quite obviously not our earth as historical events, timelines and historical figures are all fictitious. The story starts in the kingdom of Guardia in the year 1000 A.D., where our main protagonist, Crono, awakens and prepares to go to the Millennial Fair celebrating the kingdom’s 1,000th year anniversary. His invetress friend, Lucca, is to be unveiling some sort of contraption she and her father created during the fair, as well.
Many games end with a celebration, but Chrono Trigger begins with one
Once at the fair Crono bumps into (literally) a young woman who introduces herself as Marle. She loses her pendant, but once Crono finds and returns it to her she suggests they explore the fairgrounds together. After a while, the couple goes to witness the unveiling of Lucca’s invention: a telepod which can transport matter from one end to the other. Crono acts as a guinea pig and tests the machine, proving that it works and appearing on the other end unharmed. Marle then decides to give it a go. During her teleportation, her pendant begins to glimmer, opening a Time Gate which sucks her in, where she vanishes.
What should be a fun festival...
...soon turns into a disaster for our heroes.
Lucca can’t determine what went wrong, but theorizes that some outside power interfered with the teleportation. Taking the pendant, Crono repeats the process and goes into the Time Gate after Marle while Lucca remains behind to try and learn more about the anomaly before she meets up with him. Through the portal, Crono winds up in the year 600 A.D., where Guardia is at war with the Fiendlord, Magus, and his demihuman armies. Here, Marle has been discovered and taken to the castle, having been mistake for her own ancestor, Queen Leene, who had gone missing. As it turns out, Marle is actually Princess Nadia who snuck out of the castle to visit the fair, which explains the striking resemblance. The reunion is short lived when Marle disappears mysteriously once again. Lucca then arrives and explains to Crono that history had been changed – the true Queen Leene had been kidnapped by Magus’ fiends, and with the search party having been called off when Marle was mistaken for Leene, the true queen’s ultimate fate would sever the bloodline, and Marle would have never been born. Therefore, they decide that the only way to fix what had happened was to save the true Leene, which would restore Marle. They discover she’s being kept in a cathedral which is secretly a base of fiends in human guises. Joined by an anthropomorphic frog knight known, rather blandly, as just ‘Frog’ (no, that’s not his real name – don’t worry) whom is also searching for the true queen, the trio defeat the fiends and save the real Leene, restoring history and causing Marle to re-appear.
Bidding their farewells to Frog, Crono, Marle and Lucca decide to return to the year 1000 A.D. with the help of a Gate Key Lucca created before meeting up with Crono which would allow them to open the Time Gate and go back through. They return to their own time where Lucca returns home to continue her research and Crono escorts ‘Marle’ back to the castle. Upon entering the castle, Crono is imprisoned for allegedly kidnapping Princess Nadia. After his trial, the Chancellor decides to have Crono executed for high treason against the crown (whether he’s found not guilty in court or not). With the aid of Lucca, Crono escapes the prison but is pursued by the royal guard. Infuriated at her father for not listening to her pleas, Marle flees the castle along with her new friends.
The group is soon cornered and surrounded by the castle guards. With no chance at escape, they decide to jump into another Time Gate. Again diving into the space-time continuum, our heroes wind up in the year 2300 A.D. The earth has been reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland, the sun clouded out by a constant storm of ash and soot, all vegetation destroyed, all cities laid to ruin. Here, the party discovers that human beings are a dying breed, living in filthy colonies and slowly starving to death. After activating an old monitor with a satellite recording while they try and seek a Time Gate home, the party discovers the source of the world’s end: In the year 1999 A.D. a mysterious life form known as ‘Lavos’ emerges from the depths of the earth and annihilates the world with a rain of destruction from the heavens.
Overwhelmed by what they witnessed the heroes and suddenly struck with the realization that this was what their future held, and that 999 years after their present the world would be destroyed by the enigmatic creature in the recording. Not accepting such a cruel fate to befall future generations they make a stand to alter history by defeating Lavos and changing the future’s otherwise bleak outcome. And this is where the story truly begins.
Their journey through time takes them from 65,000,000 B.C. to the very End of Time itself as they unravel clues and determine the nature of Lavos. Every time they think they have it figured out new pieces of the puzzle are revealed to them, but with each dead-end new characters and plot twists urge them ever closer to the truth. In a nutshell, the story and plot are amazing. At the time, doing something like this in an RPG was unthinkable. The team not only thought outside the box, they took a mallet to that box. Fantasy settings and beautifully augmented by modern and futuristic settings, depending on the time period, and instead of your generic evil sorcerer threatening to conquer the world with some dark power we have an antagonist that, before I played this game, was something I’d have never pictured as being the final boss of an RPG.
Gameplay:
Like many RPGs at the time the game features an overhead perspective on the playing field and turn-based battles. The game also implements the ATB (Active Time Battle) system introduced in the Final Fantasy series. Unlike any RPGs, however, is the fact that battles occur on the same playing field as everything else. There are no random encounters and no screen transitions from the dungeon to a separate battle screen – when and where you run into an enemy is exactly when and where you’ll fight it. Not only was this simply not done before Chrono Trigger, but, sadly, it’s almost never been done since! For such a smooth and innovative battle system it’s puzzling to realize that even most modern RPGs have either random encounters or, at the most, overworld monsters you can see on the field, yet when you touch them you’re still taken to a separate battle screen. It just goes to show you how novel the concept was when over ten years later most programmers won’t even dare attempt it.
All battles commence on the same field as normal gameplay and movement
Another truly innovative and imaginative feature of the game are Dual Techs (DTs) and Triple Techs (TTs), which involve a combination attack with either two or three party members joining in for a team attack. When certain party members learn a particular Tech within the game that Tech can be combined with the known Tech of another party member (or even two) and allow them to use a Double Tech or Triple Tech. For example, if both Marle and Lucca are in your party and Marle has Ice II and Lucca has Fire II, they can both act on their next turn and use Antipode Bomb, where they combine their spells for major damage, but at the cost of taking both of their active turns for that round.
There are actually quite a lot of combinations, and all major party members have multiple combinations with all other major party members. There are 56 single Techs, 45 Dual Techs and 15 Triple Techs for a total of 116 unique special skills available to the party. And that is a LOT of skills for any game.
Crono and Marle join forces for a lethal combination attack
Like any RPG worth its salt, Chrono Trigger features a multitude of side quests. What makes the side quests in Chrono Trigger so interesting, however, is that they directly connect seamlessly with the actual story, rather than feeling tacked-on like most side quests in other games are known for. Almost every side quests wraps up a loose end in the actual story and adds to the overall plot, which is very refreshing and makes them feel worthwhile to the experience as adding something more than just obtaining new items and equipment.
Chrono Trigger also features one of the absolute best features any game, RPG or otherwise, could hope to have: New Game+. The ability to restart the game with all of the items, equipment, skills and levels you earned in the previous playthrough adds tremendous replay value. When you also consider that Chrono Trigger has over 12 different endings to unlock, many of which only possible on subsequent playthroughs, you really can tell the development team went above and beyond with this gem, and wanted players to experience it as many times as they could to squeeze every last drop of playability out of the game.
Characters:
The cast of Chrono Trigger are an interesting and diverse lot. Not only do the party member characters have depth and character, but even a good number of the NPC plot characters are very memorable and well developed. Touches such as explaining Frog’s sad and dark past which lead to him becoming what he was – both cursed outside and in his own heart – to a tragedy in Lucca’s past which encouraged her to become an inventor, each character has flaws and their own personal feelings and motivations which make them memorable and very well constructed. Out of all the characters, Crono is probably the least interesting, being the ‘silent protagonist’ many RPGs are known for, but even he has his moments, and bringing your often time bizarre new friends to meet his mother is always good for a laugh.
Frog is a deep and complex character, despite what his silly name and outward appearance may imply
The fact that the game tries in most respects to avoid stereotypes and stock characters is commendable. And though they fell short with some (Ayla, the cavewoman, speaks and acts pretty much exactly as you’d expect a cavewoman would) for the most part they did a fantastic job, and even the less inspiring characters, like Ayla, are still kept interesting and fun.
Even a seemingly black & white character like the Fiendlord, Magus, can turn around and surprise you in this game
Graphics & Presentation:
The large, detailed sprites used in Chrono Trigger allowed for more expression than your typical 16-bit game
The graphics won’t ‘wow’ any gamers who didn’t grow up with the game, and likely not many who did, but for the restrictions of the 16-bit hardware of the day they did a snazzy job. For one thing, the character sprites are actually larger than most other RPG sprites at the time, allowing for more detail and more defined poses and facial expressions – a nice touch which I noticed as early as my first playthrough of the game. There are other aesthetics, such as haze, fog and snow overlays, as well as the use of shadows, which are also very easily overlooked, but nice, touches to the overall atmosphere.
Many of the maps and backgrounds showcase the beauty of hand-drawn pixel art at its finest
Each of the 116 Techs in the game also has their own unique animations. I can’t even imagine how long that took the programmers to do, but I would love to give them a pat on the back for it.
Music
The game’s score was written and, for the most part, composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, an up-and-coming video game composer who may have been an unknown at the time, but has become a legend since, having gone on to compose the music for the game’s sequel, Chrono Cross, which is often hailed as being the best video game soundtrack ever made (a reputation it justly deserves). Chrono Trigger’s soundtrack is easily in my top 10 video game soundtracks of all time, with just about every tune in the game being memorable and well suited to the environment. If you don’t find yourself humming these tunes after playing the game, then chances are high you’re not into video game soundtracks as a whole, because they don’t get much better than this.
Choosing a Version:
Being a fan-favorite for years, Square has been gracious enough to port it from time to time so that newer generations of players can have the opportunity to experience it for themselves. In 1999 Chrono Trigger was ported to the Sony PlayStation 1 as a two-disk set which also included a remastered port of Final Fantasy IV. The PS1 version of Chrono Trigger featured animated cut scenes and a bonus menu which had a full Bestiary, ending index, sound test and other nice additions.
In late 2008 Square-Enix again re-released another upgraded version of Chrono Trigger for the Nintendo DS. This one had all of the features which the PS1 port had, but for the first time ever also features new content within the gameplay itself, including two new dungeons and one new ending created specifically for the DS version and a monster arena where you can raise and battle monsters either against the computer or a friend via wireless communication. It also expanded upon the bonus menu with an item index and concept art and added touch-screen menus and controls.
As for which of the three versions would be best is not an easy or direct answer, as each of them has pros and cons, though my personal recommendation would be either the original SNES or the DS version over the PS1 version. The SNES original lacks the animated cut scenes and bonus menu, and also has a lagged pause before each battle starts, but is the definitive, pure original. The PS1 version is flawed with having rather lengthy load times, which significantly detracts from the fun factor of the game and adds an unnecessary element of annoyance. On the plus side, they fixed up the pauses before battles. Sadly, the loading times take far longer than that pre-battle pause ever did. The DS version includes all of the bonus material from the PS1 release and also includes more extra content on of that, as well as touch screen controls. The only downside to the DS version is that it’s just not the same experience playing it on a tiny handheld as it is experiencing it on the big screen.
The DS version has some practical applications for the lower screen, such as maps and menu inputs to help clear clutter from the upper screen
In Closing:
Even over ten years since I first played it this game remains ranked in the top five games of all time in my world. It has everything you could hope for in an RPG, and offered to players and experience the likes of which hadn’t been done before it, though others have tried to follow in its footsteps to be as bold and innovative as this title since. At the sake of making a bad pun, Chrono Trigger truly is a game which transcends time and remains epic and worthy of respect by anyone who dares to call themselves an RPG gamer even so many years after its conception.
Story - 10
Gameplay - 10
Characters - 10
G&P - 10
Music - 10
Total Rating: 50/50
